“Yes, but you’re saving a little boy’s Christmas,” Trudy said. “That’s very heroic.”
“I’m still gonna get shot,” Nolan said. “So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to take your Mace—”
“I dropped it,” Trudy said.
“Great,” Nolan said.
“Well, I never Maced anybody before. He scared the hell out of me when he screamed. But I’ll be better now. And I don’t need the Mace. I’ve seen Miss Congeniality twenty times, it’s Courtney’s favorite movie.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That SING thing. Solar plexus, Instep, Nose, Groin.”
“No.” Nolan’s whisper was flat in the darkness. “Do not think you’re Rambo. Just run for the damn door.”
“Okay.” Trudy shifted the Mac to her other arm as she tried to remember what other weapons she might have in her purse. No Mace. No knife. No gun. She clearly hadn’t come out prepared for Christmas Eve. Not even a nail file.… “Wait a minute.” She reached in one of the bags, pulled out Courtney’s Twinkletoes box, and pried the top open.
“What are you doing?” Nolan whispered.
“Arming myself.” Trudy opened the manicure set wired next to Twink’s feet. There was a nail file in there, just as she’d remembered. “Got it.”
“Do not fight with anybody,” Nolan whispered, the order clear. “Just run for the damn door.”
“Okay.” Trudy put the nail file in her coat pocket.
“We need something to create a disturbance. Too bad that grenade in the Mac doesn’t work. I could use a grenade.”
“There’s a gun,” Trudy brought up the Mac’s hand so she could look down the barrel of the Mac’s revolver. “What’s this thing stuck on the end?”
“A silencer,” Nolan whispered. “If only I had one for you.”
“So is the gun louder with it off?”
“Don’t fire that thing, we don’t know what it’ll do.” Nolan peered over the edge of the stairs.
Trudy leaned back against the staircase and looked at the gun. It was a horrible thing to give a kid. What were people thinking? Evil Nemesis Brandon’s mother must have had a politically correct meltdown when she realized what was in the box, but she got it for him anyway. Well, good for ENB’s mom. Trudy resisted the urge to pull the trigger and pulled on the silencer instead, which popped right off. “Whoops.”
“Shhhh.”
The silencer felt a little heavy for something that was basically a plastic cap. Trudy stuck her hand in her purse and found her miniflash. Hunching over to shield the light from the warehouse, she looked inside the cylinder. There was something rectangular stuck in there, about half an inch wide, with a slice of something white in it.
“Oh, hell,” Trudy said out loud.
“Shhhh.” Nolan turned on her. “You—”
“It’s a thumb drive,” Trudy whispered.
“What?”
“The silencer. It’s a USB key, a thumb drive, you know, a mini hard drive. It wasn’t just the code in the instructions—”
Nolan leaned in to look, and Trudy felt him press warm against her as he took the silencer, his weight a comfort, especially since she knew she was holding something that Reese probably would shoot her for.
“This is not good,” she whispered.
“Oh, honey, this is great,” Nolan said in her ear. “Oh, babe, do you have any idea what you just found?”
“The thing Reese is going to kill me for?” Trudy said.
“He’s not going to kill you,” Nolan said, but he didn’t sound as though he were giving the thought his full attention. “Give me that doll.”
“No,” Trudy said. “You can have the silencer, but you can’t have—”
She heard something and shut up as Nolan froze.
Then he leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “I need your tape.”
She frowned at him, and he began to go silently through her bags until he held up the Scotch tape she’d bought to wrap Leroy’s Mac a million years ago. Then he put the gray plastic silencer on the underside of the gray railing along the wall and began to wrap tape around it.
Good thing I got the invisible kind, she thought, and wondered if she was ever going to get home.
“Okay,” Nolan whispered when he was done. “We’re going out there again. And I will distract them and this time you will run for the door even if your phone rings.”
“How are you going to distract them?”
“Give me that cow.”
“The cow?” Trudy handed over the bag with the cow and hugged the Mac to her.
“You pull the string and it talks, right?”
“It says, ‘Eat chicken.’”
“Right. Come on.”
“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye again?”
“No. I’m going with you this time.”
“That’s good, I like that better,” Trudy said, and followed him down the stairs again, clutching the Mac and the Twinkletoes bag.
When they were back at the end of the row by the door, Nolan pulled the string and wrapped it around the cow’s body. “Door’s there,” he whispered, nodding toward it.