He heard Jeannie’s voice, through the doorway and down the hall. “Is ‘Go to hell’ too subtle for you people to grasp?”
A man replied, his tone coming from a deep, broad chest cavity. “Where are they?”
“Probably bullshitting the shop owner next door. They’re your people, why don’t you call them?”
No reply. Just boots thudding around on the ancient wood floor.
Travis leaned back inside and looked around for something with which to brace the window.
There was nothing.
He’d have to shut it, and not quickly—he couldn’t trust it to stay quiet at any real speed. There were long vertical abrasions where it’d rubbed against its frame over the decades, probably on humid days when the wood had expanded. Days like this one.
He began to ease it downward, making about an inch per second.
“You saw which way they went?” the deep voice said, still somewhere up front by the bar.
There was no audible reply. Travis pictured Jeannie just pointing, too pissed to speak. She would send them along Main Street back in the direction of their Humvee, to keep them from walking past this alley.
He had the window half shut now. Twelve inches left.
Paige and Bethany were right beside him, watching the progress with gritted teeth.
Nine inches. Eight.
“Sorry to bother you when you’re this busy,” the deep voice said. The boots clumped away toward the front door.
Six inches.
Then a bird started screaming, somewhere above Travis. He looked up sharply at the sound.
A blue jay. Right on the cornice ten feet overhead. It scolded in loud, double squawks. It probably had a nest up there. The cries went on for four seconds and then the bird flitted out of sight onto the roof.
Silence followed, outside and inside. The boot steps toward the front door had halted.
Then they began again—thumping quickly over the hardwood toward the back room.
“Shit,” Travis whispered.
He lowered the window the last six inches in the next second, risking the sound. It made none.
Paige and Bethany had already covered the distance to the back corner of the building across the alley—ten or twelve diagonal feet. Travis followed, got past the edge and stopped alongside them, his back against the old cedar siding. They listened.
At first there was only silence.
Then came the scrape and whine of the window going up. The sill creaked as heavy weight leaned onto it. Travis waited for the clamber of a body coming through, and the scuff of soles on pavement, but all he heard was a fingertip drumming idly on wood. After a moment it stopped. There was a click and a wash of static, and then silence again.
“Anyone copy at the Raines house?”
Static as the man waited.
Then a tinny voice: “Go ahead.”
“Leave three men up there, send the rest down here for a coordinated search. Bring every Humvee.”
“Got it.”
“Put the three that stay behind on lookout. Eyes on the slopes below the treeline. These people didn’t come in a vehicle.”
“You want to take Holt up on his offer? Grab law enforcement from nearby jurisdictions? We could have an army in here pretty soon, taking orders from us.”
The fingertip drummed again. Less than a second.
“Make the call.”
A click ended the static and then the window came down hard, and muffled steps faded away behind it.
The three of them ran along the row of back lots until they’d passed four more alleys. They stopped behind a building that nestled against a side street, and listened.
Far away, across and above town, the Humvees at Raines’s house fired up one by one and began to move. Then their sound was lost to the roar of the one near the Third Notch.
Travis nodded quickly and they sprinted across the street to the next block. They continued into it past the first building, then turned down an alley and moved farther away from Main Street, at last coming out between a little art gallery and the town’s post office. The street they now faced ran parallel to Main. Across it were small homes tucked close to one another, and beyond lay three more blocks of the same, the whole spread rising toward the exposed hills. Those hills could be easily climbed—the three of them had come down them fifteen minutes ago—but it would take a good sixty seconds to reach the redwoods from the concealment of the highest backyards. That hadn’t been a problem when nobody was watching. Now that at least three sets of eyes would be, an undetected crossing was pointless to even think about.
Travis thought about it anyway. If they could get up into the trees and hide, they could circle around to the mine, probably a mile away through unbroken forest.
Paige gazed up at the woods too, and the open ground beneath, clearly running all the same calculations.