That was his M.O. Three jobs, then a treat.
As Henry and I got closer and opened the door, Patience let up with the “I’m such a good girl” routine, nudged the already-open door, and started sniffing inside Yuri’s shack. I heard a crash, then a whuffle.
We glanced around. Yuri was nowhere to be seen. But there was an upturned bucket of Liver Snax on the floor, the contents of which Patience was eating so fast I was pretty sure we’d see it in her barf later.
Henry yanked Patience out of the shack and examined the interior.
There was a bank of twelve monitors that displayed different rooms in Henry’s family compound—the main house, the garage, and the Breakers.
The monitors were all still. There was no movement in any of them.
“Where’s Yuri?” I said.
“He’s probably looking for my brother, too.”
“Would he just leave like that? I mean, shouldn’t someone at least be here to take over for him?”
There was almost always someone sitting here—even if they were just eating Doritos and watching a Seahawks game on TV.
“Weird,” Henry admitted, but he wasn’t really paying attention to me. He was looking at the bank of monitors. What he’d seen must have impressed him, because he got into one of his hyperattentive states, where the rest of the world fell away.
Which was good for me, because while the monitors occupied Henry, I found Yuri’s dirty little secret.
And I swiped it.
Yuri usually carried a standard-issue .44, plus a Taser and a club. But stashed in his narrow uniform closet was a Kalashnikov. He had even showed it to us once or twice. The thing always freaked me out, reminding me that the Shepherds were more than rich—that they were so rich they needed protecting. The bay windows in their estate? Bulletproof glass. And Kevlar under the carpets.
That I could handle. But I hated to think of the kind of situation where Yuri might need to fire an automatic weapon. Especially here, on the bay, where the water was so shallow and people flew kites and rode horses. Not that we didn’t have our share of the darker side of things, but by the time they reached our shore, the damage was already done. The ships had come un-moored and drifted, the harbor seal was half eaten, the boots belonged to suicides who had died months before, washed down from that bridge in Vancouver.
Lawford had once loaded and unloaded the magazine in Yuri’s Kalashnikov and later pronounced it “a piece of crap.” He said it was so inaccurate you could be standing two feet away from your target and not hit it.
Sammy, on the other hand, said it was “wicked sick”—so easy to fire that even a child could use it, and many around the world did.
I swiped the wicked sick weapon from Yuri’s hiding place, just because I couldn’t stand thinking of it there, hiding in a place that he’d shown at least five other people.
When Henry wasn’t looking, I winged it into some Scotch broom.
Something was coming. I could taste it in the air, hear it on the wind. All I could think to do was hide things for later, when I needed them.
So I camouflaged the Kalashnikov in such a way that you’d know it was there only if you looked for it. It must’ve been a bitch to shoulder, although I had no intention of doing that unless someone threatened Grant.
I didn’t know where he’d gone, but he was the son of a wealthy man. Easy prey. I imagined him chained to a radiator, force-fed Froot Loops every other day, wallowing in his own pee, forced to poop in a bucket.
Even worse, I could practically feel his weight in my arms as I carried him home and knew that, skinny as he was, he would break me.
Firing a Kalashnikov would be nothing compared with that.
When I went back to the guard shack, Henry was still staring at Yuri’s monitors. I doubted he even knew I’d been gone. He was like his dad that way—put a puzzle in front of him and the rest of the world melted away.
He was studying the monitor that pointed at the garage.
I didn’t see what was so exciting that it held his attention, but Henry was Henry.
“Where is everyone?” I said. “Is Lyudmila around?”
As far as I knew, Mr. Shepherd was still searching my house for Grant, which was the logical thing to do, even though Grant wasn’t there. But that left several people unaccounted for. Not just the Shepherd family, but its entourage as well: Yuri; Joyce, the super-admin; Hannah, the cook (because apparently the family couldn’t even boil hot dogs on their own); and Edgar, who ran errands with a “Yes, sir” and made a hell of a spirulina smoothie.
“Wait,” Henry said. He pointed to the monitor displaying the garage. “Do you see that?”
I looked to the monitor where he was pointing. There was the Lexus taking up most of the space, the rowboat in the opposite corner, the walls hung with kayaks and life preservers. I didn’t understand what he was seeing.
“What’s happening?”
Henry didn’t look away from the bank of monitors. “The CCTV has been set on a loop.”