It was six days before we spotted it—our in. Six miserably endless days. Hope, determined but no fool, had taken to lying low, leaving me with nothing but a frozen and empty calm. I still did my job, more or less, on the days I absolutely couldn’t weasel my way out of it. It wasn’t as if I had personal days coming to me in my line of work. Fortunately, nothing too annoying reared its head. With my level of distraction, it was doubtful I could’ve foiled a hit man any more clever than your average third grade delinquent. But now it was suddenly over. The walls hadn’t tumbled, but they had opened up. It was a tiny hole, the fleetest windows of opportunity, but it was there—one minute chink in the armor.
It was all we needed. Ever dug a pit before dawn, covered yourself with the sandy soil, and lain in it until dusk? Ever had sand mites set up camp in places a scrub brush couldn’t touch? Ever burrowed down in your homemade grave while large men with even larger guns prowled less than a hundred feet away? I wouldn’t recommend it. Using stiff and knotted muscles, I kept watch through miniature binoculars, and hoped my bladder wouldn’t swell to exploding over the long hours. I’d done it three days in a row while Saul had pulled the previous watches. He hadn’t enjoyed it any more than I did. From the bitching and moaning, he seemed to doubt he’d ever be able to satisfy any woman again, much less his flavor of the week. Apparently the stallion wasn’t so much running now as limping pathetically.
It was nearly seven p.m. on the sixth day that I received some genuine joy. And it was just that, a heat that unfurled at the base of my brain and traveled as tiny jolts of electricity throughout my body. I could all but feel the warm fingers that squeezed my heart into a heavy, racing thump. This is it, it whispered. This is what you’ve been waiting for. Watch and see.
A food delivery truck usually wouldn’t make such late stops, but this one did. And it was expected. Four men were waiting at the gate nearly fifteen minutes before it pulled up. Big men with short haircuts in identical khaki pants and black T-shirts that labeled them guards in all but the name tags. They were duly efficient and strictly professional with no laughing or unnecessary talking among them. One of them opened the back. It was a small truck, panel sized. The amount of food it could haul wouldn’t hold the personnel required to run a setup like this for any more than seven days. That indicated a pattern, a delivery once a week and hopefully on the same day.
After checking out the inside of the truck, the guards waved it on through and closed the gate behind it. Twenty minutes later it returned. This time in addition to checking the back, the guards ran metal poles topped with mirrors along the undercarriage. That was odd, damn odd. They seemed concerned someone might get in, but a helluva lot more so that someone might get out. The place was shaping up more and more like a prison the longer the surveillance dragged on. The kids inside might be the toughest little monkeys outside Lord of the Flies, but this place was less like juvie and more like Alcatraz—hard to get into and impossible to get out of. I could feel the smile that curled my lips. It was savagely triumphant even if it tasted of grit and the blood of an abraded lip.
Difficult to get into maybe. Impossible to get out of? Not anymore.
Chapter 7
“Where you going, Stef?”