An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) (10 page)

     But he was still pretty good at finding things in the dark.

     And that was good for this particular job. He couldn’t wait in this particular house for the sun to come up.

     Because he knew the owner of this house would be back before then.

     Meanwhile, Dave continued to snooze downstairs in his safe room, blissfully unaware that his house was being ransacked.

-19-

     Mikey’s take in the master bedroom was only average. Besides the stuff from the jewelry box, he found another diamond studded necklace in a drawer. He could barely make out the words “Jared Jewelers” on the box, and knew it was the good stuff.

     Sarah had hidden it in the back of her lingerie drawer, mixed in with her “toys.” She naively thought that would be the last place a burglar would look. She didn’t know that was always a burglar’s second target, after the jewelry box.

     He found a purple velvet Crown Royal bag in the night stand full of Morgan silver dollars from the late 1800s. Dave had planned to use them to barter for goods in a pinch.

     Now they were in Mikey’s backpack as he descended the stairs and went into the kitchen.

     Dave had been dreaming of an island paradise. He and Sarah were walking hand in hand down a white sand beach. Her nose was sunburned, and he teased her about it. She giggled and told him to shut up or she was gonna kick his butt.

     Then, inexplicably, his dream shifted direction. He and Sarah were in their vacation hideaway, listening as an intruder went through their drawers.

     “Shhhh…,” Sarah told him. “They’ll go away in a minute. Make love to me.”

     Then Dave’s eyes were wide open. It wasn’t a dream. There really was someone in his kitchen.

     He shook the cobwebs out of his head. His heart raced, as did his mind. How many of them were in the kitchen? Were there others, somewhere else in the house? Did they know he was here?

     He reached for the handgun he kept on the floor next to the bed and made sure the safety was off. Then he peeked through the open door of the safe room and into the den.

     The den was still pitch black, because he always kept the heavy drapes closed. But he could see the sliding glass door in the dining room, and the moonlight coming in to bathe the dining room and kitchen in a minimal light.

     He heard a drawer open, and things being moved around.

     He heard someone mutter, “jackpot.” Mikey had just found the antique set of silverware that Sarah  had inherited from her grandmother.

     Dave was at the foot of the stairs now. He peeked upstairs and saw no one. Heard nothing. He proceeded on to the kitchen.

     The box of silverware was in Mikey’s backpack now, and he’d moved onto the other drawers in search of more.

     He didn’t hear Dave, in socked feet, sneaking up from behind.

     “Freeze, you son of a bitch.”

     In Dave’s mind, just like witnesses always said at crime scenes, things seemed to move in slow motion.

     Despite Dave’s warning to freeze, the man in the kitchen did the exact opposite. He turned to face Dave. In the dim moonlight coming through the sliding doors, Dave could see the look of fear – or maybe just surprise, on the man’s face.

     And something in his hand caught a glint of light.

     Something shiny.

     In Dave’s mind, that meant a gun, or a knife.

     Dave’s survival training kicked in. He was back in Fallujah again. Back in those days when one didn’t have the luxury to think about the situation he’d found himself in. To act quickly was to survive. Those who stopped to think wound up in body bags, coming home in flag-draped coffins.

     He already had his weapon aimed at the intruder’s chest. Now he pulled the trigger. Once, twice, three times.

     The man dropped to the floor in a seated position, leaning against the cabinets behind him. His head slumped a bit to the side, his mouth slightly open.

     He was dead.

     Dave had no time to relax. There were probably others. He knelt down, back against the kitchen cupboards, expecting the man’s accomplices to come running to his aid.

     Not a sound, other than Dave’s own rapid breathing.

    He waited five full minutes before he moved again. Then when a bank of clouds went in front of the moon and obscured the light, he eased back into his safe room.

     And retrieved the night vision goggles from underneath the bed.

     He crept back out into the den and pulled aside one of the drapes. A large and very thick cloud bank was covering the moon in its entirety, and probably would for several minutes.

     For now, the advantage was his.

     He slowly crept up the stairs. One step at a time, crouched low, waiting for fifteen to twenty seconds between steps.

     As he neared the top of the stairs, he could see into Lindsey’s room through her open door. His eyes were level with the bottom of her bed now. He’d taken the sheets off the bed some time before, and there was nothing beneath it. He could see all the way to the far wall, and knew that no one was hiding behind the bed.

     He carefully made his way into the room.

     His luck was holding. It was still pitch black upstairs. Assuming that his adversaries didn’t also have night vision capabilities, then he could see them, but they couldn’t see him.

     If they had the same type of goggles, he was screwed.

     Dave peeked around the doorway of Lindsey’s room to survey the hallway. But not where they’d expect his head to pop out. He crouched down low first.

     And he saw nothing.

     One room at a time he cleared the upstairs. When he was confident there was no one on the second floor, he made his way back down.

     If there was anyone hiding downstairs, they almost certainly heard him opening and closing the doors above them, and had ample time to escape.

     Hopefully they were long gone.

     But he couldn’t count on it.

     He went carefully from room to room, saving the garage for last.

     The garage was a special kind of problem.

     Because of the way it was situated, coming off the pantry, there was nothing for Dave to hide behind. Nowhere for him to jump to if someone was in the garage waiting for him to walk through the door.

     Hopefully, there was no one in there. And if there was, hopefully they were smart enough to reach up and pull the cord to disconnect the garage door opener, and then manually open the door to escape.

    
If
there was someone in there, and if they weren’t smart enough to escape when they heard Dave’s gunshots…

     Well, that created a special kind of problem.

     The term “Mexican standoff” popped into Dave’s mind.

     Dave sat for several minutes on the kitchen floor, just a few feet from the man he’d killed, looking through the pantry, his eyes fixed on the door to the garage.

     He knew this could go on for hours.

     If there was someone in the garage, he might be waiting to ambush Dave as he went through the door. Or, he might be waiting for Dave to leave, or let his guard down, so he could come out and attend to his buddy.

     Or, there might not be anybody in the garage at all.

     In all three of the scenarios, it might take several hours to resolve itself. Dave knew for damn sure he wasn’t going to go busting into the garage, only to be shot dead by an intruder laying in wait.

     And if the intruder was a patient man, it could be a considerable amount of time before he decided to make his own move.

     He sat on his kitchen floor, his weapon trained on the door leading into the garage, and had an idea.

     He slowly opened the cabinet door beneath the kitchen sink. That’s where Sarah always kept things like dishwashing liquid, cleaners and sponges.

     All that stuff was worthless to Dave.

     However, she kept other things down there as well. Including insecticides, wasp and hornet spray and bug bombs.

     The bug bombs, specifically, was what Dave was after.

     The previous summer, long before the EMP struck the earth and put everybody back into the stone age, they’d had an infestation of carpenter ants.

    Their kitchen and pantry were overrun by thousands of the critters, marching in little columns from here to there looking for something to eat.

     Sarah almost called an exterminator, but Dave had a better plan.

     Dave considered himself thrifty. Sarah called him a cheapskate. But it boiled down to the same thing.

     Dave said, “Why hire an exterminator? They cost a fortune, and they always pressure you to sign a service contract. I can do it for a fraction of the cost.”

     And he did.

     He bought several bug bombs and set them off in the kitchen. Then the family evacuated the house for several hours, came home, and swept up the little ant corpses.

     They never had ants again.

     But they did have four left over bug bombs, in the cabinet under the sink, right next to the can of Raid.

     Dave took one out. He crept slowly into the pantry, placed his handgun on the floor, and said a silent prayer.

     Then, in one quick motion, he depressed the button on top of the bug bomb to activate it, opened the door to the garage, and tossed the bomb inside. Then he locked the doorknob, grabbed his weapon, and scrambled back to the kitchen.

     He didn’t know whether the single bomb had enough poison to kill a man.

     He knew it killed the hell out of the ants. But he’d set off five or six of them to do it.

     He also knew at the very least it would cause anybody in the garage to cough furiously, and to try to escape the noxious fumes.

     He watched the locked doorknob.

     It never moved.

     He also never heard a cough.

     There was no one in the garage. He was all alone, with the man he’d shot dead, just four feet away from him.

     Dave sat looking at the dead man, through the night vision goggles, for what had to be half an hour. He suddenly became cold, and started shivering.

     He knew the temperatures had dropped. He’d watched his breath as he was creeping up the stairs, hoping it didn’t rise and give him away. But he never actually felt the cold until now.

     He supposed it was adrenaline that kept him warm. Now that the threat was over, and he was starting to relax, his heartbeat was returning to normal. His adrenaline was no longer pumping.

     He was no longer afraid.

     He went to the safe room and put on his parka and his slippers. He thought about starting a fire, but looked at the clock and saw it was only three hours before sunrise.

     Still, he desperately needed some coffee.

     He took his campfire coffee pot and added a tablespoon of Folgers dark roast, added water, and took it onto the back deck.

     His single burner propane stove was still out there, although he hadn’t used it since the end of the summer.

     He cranked it up, put the coffee on to boil, and noticed for the first time that there weren’t two dozen rabbits at his feet.

     Then he looked over at the fence his back yard shared with the Castro’s house next door, and saw that his secret gate had been left open.

     “Oh, crap!”

-20-

   
 
  Hi, honey. I wish I knew for sure that you’d find this some day. In a way, I feel ridiculous for writing. It seems strangely akin to a man sitting in solitary confinement talking to himself simply because there’s nobody else around to talk to.

     But it helps. I guess whether you ever read these words or not, it probably keeps me from going insane.

     I killed a man a couple of nights ago. And now I’m going to hell.

     I mean, I didn’t intentionally murder him. I thought he was armed. It was dark, and he was in our kitchen going through the drawers.