56
Sitting in the musty living room of the empty house, in a shabby plastic chair he had brought in from the porch, Lansing was disgusted and fed up. He wondered if it wouldn’t be better to use a bullet to end the annoying wife’s sobbing and begging for them to call an ambulance for her husband, her pleading for them to leave her son alone. To make things worse, she had vomited in the car on the way over and was a total mess. They were going to have to kill her anyway. But they might need her for leverage when they finally caught the boy. It was crazy that the boy had run off with the robot. It made him furious.
“Damn it,” Lansing said to Moro, “hurry up and tape her mouth.”
Moro tried, ineptly, to use duct tape to cover her mouth, but his hands were shaking and the piece was wet from her tears. Moro was falling apart. This whole business was coming undone. Lansing watched as Moro struggled to get the piece of tape over her mouth, the simplest of actions, and couldn’t do it. The computer programmer had gone stupid from panic and fear, unable to think for himself, having to be told every last thing. Yelling at him would only make things worse.
Moro finally succeeded, and wiped off his hands. The wife had fallen into a muffled whimpering, but at least she had stopped struggling. She was dazed, defeated, becoming catatonic.
Despite the screwups, Lansing thought, they could still pull this off. The Kyrgyz brothers would, of course, run the boy down in the woods and bring back the robot. He had no doubt of that. His only fear came from the faint sound of gunshots he had heard from beyond the ridge. He had told the brothers to spare the robot at all costs, to make sure it was retrieved undamaged. But they were trigger-happy morons, and Lansing had little confidence that they would take care not to shoot up the robot in their attempt to bring down the boy.
“I’m going out there,” said Lansing. “Those Kyrgyz brothers are going to need some direction.”
“Hallelujah,” said Moro. “Those bastards are out of control. This whole thing is ass-over-balls messed up.”
Lansing swallowed his irritation at this comment and only said, evenly, “Actually, we’re about to achieve our objective. Eric, you need to calm down, stay focused, and watch the wife. As soon as we bring back the robot, you have to be ready to pull out the robot’s Wi-Fi card so Dorothy can’t escape over any stray Wi-Fi field. Do you understand?”
Moro nodded.
“Sit down and watch the wife.”
He watched as Moro took a chair near the fire, fidgeting and nervous. Lansing then checked his revolver, put a flashlight into his pocket, put his raincoat back on, and went to the back door. He breathed in. The air was fresh, and the rain had slackened to a drizzle. It looked like it might clear. He was close, very close, to getting his hands on Dorothy. While the night hadn’t gone as planned, it was still on track for success. He was damn lucky this was an isolated area—and that the storm was providing them with lots of sound cover.
He could see tracks in the wet grass leading up to the top of the ridge, and he followed them. From the top, he looked down the other side. The grassy ridge sloped down to an area of trees along a creek bottom. Down there, in the forest, perhaps a quarter mile away, he could just see two flashlights bobbing and winking in the darkness. That would be the Kyrgyz brothers in pursuit of the boy. He glanced up. The storm was rapidly clearing, with the clouds moving inland, exposing a few stars in the west. The drizzle finally stopped.
With a long, athletic stride, he descended the ridge and headed toward the lights in the valley.