“Pix, what are you doing in my underwear drawer?”
The lights came on. Two pairs of eyes looked at me. Lawford and Frank were here, and they were awake. “Where are Dean and Sammy?” I asked.
“Still working the grid,” Lawford said. “Most of the other volunteers have bagged out because of the weather. Frank and I thought we’d try to grab some sleep before we go out again. It’s been a long day. So I repeat: What are you doing?”
“Looking for your Taser. I need to see Henry about something.”
They stared at me, unblinking as barn owls.
“Have you asked Mom if you can go?” Lawford said.
“No.”
They stared more, waves of disapproval rolling off them.
“Pix, you’ve had a rough day. You kinda died last night,” Frank said. “Can’t you just sit this one out?”
“And just where do you suggest I sit? In my bedroom? Oh wait. I almost got shot there, and I don’t want to sleep in what’s left of someone’s brains.”
Frank and Lawford studiously looked at the floor.
Neither of them called me a wuss, which surprised me. It had been a long day for all of us.
“You’re closer to this than the rest of us, Pix. You can’t blame us for being worried,” Lawford said.
“I know,” I said. “There’s just something nagging at me that I can’t let go of.”
Frank pulled back the curtains. “The storm is rising,” he said.
“The last time we had weather like this, the next morning all those boots washed ashore with the feet still in ’em,” I said. “Do you remember that, Frank?”
I was playing them, and they knew it. But you can’t have gone through all that training, all those endless rounds of junior lifesaving, senior lifesaving, open-water lifesaving, gory-car-wreck lifesaving, not to mention those endless nights of volunteer search-and-rescue, not to know that sitting on our asses while there was still a possibility that Grant was out there, alive and lost, or alive and trapped, was evil. As long as we were warm and dry, we were wicked, wicked people.
“We can’t let Grant wash up like the boots,” I said.
Frank sighed. “Is Mom asleep?”
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“Let’s go.”
Frank hopped down noiselessly from his bunk and started pulling on his pants.
“Listen,” Lawford said as he got dressed, “no matter what you say, you’re closer to this than the rest of us. You should be armed. You can have my second-best Taser.” He rummaged through his underwear drawer and pulled out a more cumbersome, pistol-shaped version of what he kept on his belt. “Do you remember this? It’s older. You don’t need to get quite so close. It sends out the two electrodes. It’s all in the spread. If you need to drop somebody, this’ll drop ’em. Do you hear me?”
I took it from him and shoved it into the pocket of my rain jacket. The pockets there were big enough.
Something was going to happen this night, I could taste it in the salty air that whistled through the trees and crept through the cracks in the windows and doors.
I sent Lawford and Frank ahead of me because I didn’t want them to see me idling around looking for my dead dog out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t know how to explain my visions of Patience.
I chased after Patience, moving from spot to spot. I looked away from where I’d last seen her, and I saw her outline again, farther along the trail, standing calmly while the wind whipped us all into a froth. She was getting closer to the Shepherds’ house, then closer and closer. Soon I was at the guard shack again.
There was a new guy with a badge there standing watch. I didn’t know what flavor of law enforcement he was, but he had an extreme glower. My guess was expensive rent-a-cop. Not the tragic Russian kind with a bottle of vodka stashed away somewhere, waxing philosophical about the status of young people and love. I hoped the Taser in my jacket pocket wasn’t bulging, because I was pretty sure he’d confiscate it.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m here to see Henry. I’m . . .”
“I know who you are,” the new guy said. He spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Pixie Gray’s here. Can she come up? . . . Thought so. You just missed your boyfriend.”
“Did I?”
“Yup. He wanted to know if there was a way to retrieve the tape of what happened in the garage while it was set on a loop. We’ve sent it off to a clean room to see if there’s anything at all we can pick up. Even at a rush, it’ll be a few days before we can get any kind of data back.”
A few days seemed like a long time. Even a few hours did. I tried not to think that whatever evidence they found by that time would be postmortem.
“A few days?” I said. “You think they’ll find something?”
“No guarantees, but it’s probable.”
This couldn’t be good for Grant. Maybe if whoever had killed Lyudmila knew that and had Grant stashed somewhere alive, they might start to act desperate.