“Me too,” I said.
Before I could react, she wrapped her arms around my waist and pulled me to her, hugging me tight. I hugged her back, and tried to understand how she could so easily express herself and so casually show affection. If this was what having friends was like, I wanted a lot more of it.
“Okay,” she said, letting me go. She looked in my suitcase and gasped. “That’s a lot of guns.”
“Yes,” I said.
I heard Curt pulling the Challenger up out front, rubber tires crushing gravel. I shut the lid of my suitcase, and with a jolt I saw it wasn’t the Challenger. It was a blue--and--white. State police.
“They’re here,” Dekker said from his room. “They’re here.” He ran into the room. “The cops just pulled up. We gotta hide!”
“If they’ve got a warrant, there’s nowhere to hide,” I said. “We have to get out the back door. Now.” I reached for my suitcase.
“You won’t get very far dragging a fucking suitcase full of guns,” Roxanne said.
“I need them,” I said, unzipping it.
She looked out the window. “Go, Dekker,” she said. “Out the back door. Go.”
He ran for the stairs and I heard him racing down them.
“Leave the suitcase,” Roxanne said.
“How are you going to explain this?” I said. “You’ll get in all kinds of—-”
“Listen to me,” Roxanne said, taking me by the shoulders. Though she was much smaller than me, she shook me and I stopped fighting. She was right; I had to leave the suitcase. But I was taking the laptop.
“There’s a little door to the attic in the back of my closet,” she said. “I’ll put the suitcase and guns in there. When you come back—-and you will—-they’ll be waiting here for you. Now go.”
She hugged me briefly, the laptop squeezed between us, spun me around and pushed me toward the door. I ran. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I caught a glimpse of Curt standing on the front porch talking and gesturing, his back to the door, the cops advancing.
I crouched and ran toward the back door where Dekker waited for me.
“The letters!” I hissed.
“Leave them,” Dekker said.
“But—-”
“Let’s go!”
I saw them sitting on the coffee table and darted for them, but I couldn’t get to them before I heard the front doorknob turning and Curt’s voice. I ran for the open back door. Dekker was already outside. I slipped through the sliding glass door sideways as he closed it behind me. We ran for the copse of trees near the road and stopped there. The dark clouds boiled above us, and Dekker breathed noisily beside me.
“Quiet,” I said.
“I can’t help it.”
“Try.”
“I am trying!”
“That’s what you get for smoking, you know,” I said.
He gave me a furious look. “Nobody can hear anything we do over this wind. Should we wait here, you think?” Dekker said. “Wait until they’ve gone?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “They’ll search around the property once they’re done with the house.”
“How are we supposed to get out of here?”
I peeked around the tree.
Roxanne came out the back door and said over her shoulder, “Dad, I’m going to wait out here while they search. Come get me when they’re done, okay?” She closed the door behind her. Nonchalantly, she made an away motion with her hands.
I spied a tractor out near the road. “Can you drive that?”
“If it has keys,” Dekker said. “But those things only go about twenty miles an hour.”
“We just need to get a few miles away and then we can hitchhike.”
I looked around the tree again, and Roxanne threw a glance over her shoulder and repeated the shooing motion with her hands.
“Let’s go,” I said, clutching the laptop to my chest. I ran for the tractor, which was about a quarter of a mile away. Multiple forks of lightning sliced the sky into silver ribbons, followed by quick bursts of thunder. The dark clouds were moving fast, and I saw a vast column of heavy rain headed our way.
When I got to the tractor, I went around the far side of it, crouched low and waited for Dekker as the first drops of rain began to fall. It took him another thirty seconds to get there, and I watched, praying no one would come out the back door and see this tall gangly guy running like a scarecrow. He got to the tractor and stopped in front of it, doubled over, his hands on his knees.
The sliding glass door opened. I dove beneath the tractor and yanked Dekker’s feet from under him, knocking him to the ground.
“Don’t move,” I said.
He froze, as much as he could, gasping for air the way he was.
“Okay, now slowly crawl underneath to the other side of the tractor,” I whispered.
He shoved my hands off him and army crawled. We sat up against the large tire, Dekker getting his wind back.
Forked arrows of lightning trisected the sky in every direction almost continuously. Each clout of thunder burst sooner than the one before and tapered off with a threatening growl that crescendoed into the following explosion.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he said.