Off the Grid (21 page)

46

G
race and John were standing on the front porch, both nearly unrecognizable in heavy jackets borrowed from the cabin’s closet of outdoor wear.

“We shouldn’t be out here, you in particular.”

“We haven’t had a moment,” John said without looking at her. His eyes were trying to penetrate the thick woods, searching for the Indians the Chief said were surrounding the cabin.

“I know,” Grace replied. “I miss the boat.”

“I’m sorry, Gracie. I can’t tell you how much.”

“Not your fault. Isn’t that what you kept telling me? Some things are beyond our control. Let it go.”

He looked down at the thin ridge of ice on the railing. “You were always good at throwing my own words back at me. I can’t see anyone out there, can you?”

Grace ran her fingers through her hair, still damp from the shower. The short cut had been great in the Caribbean, but not in Minnesota.

John turned his head to look at her. Her lips always moved when she was counting. He wondered if anyone else in the world knew that.

“Twelve,” she said.

John chuckled. “Unreal. I couldn’t see a one.”

Grace turned and placed her hand on his cheek. “I’m not used to the beard.”

“Me either. How did it go with Magozzi?”

“He thought we slept together.”

John looked like a cat who’d just swallowed the world’s biggest canary. “You’ve got to be kidding. That’s awesome.”

• • •

The cool thing
about the cabin were those spiffy windows that blocked out heat in the summer and cold in the winter. They also gave you a clear view outside, while making it difficult for anyone to see inside. Magozzi had learned that early this morning when a twelve-point buck had paused at the living room window and looked directly at him when he was standing behind the sofa.

“Look at that,” he whispered when Chief had come up behind him, making about as much noise as dandelion fluff falling on soft grass. “He’s looking right at me.”

“He doesn’t see you,” Chief said. “As long as you don’t move, all he sees is his own reflection.”

Magozzi was standing in the same place now, watching Grace and John on the porch. He couldn’t hear what they were saying but he saw Grace put her hand on John’s cheek and felt something inside contract a little.

Later, Magozzi found John Smith alone in the den, working the computer, printing out pages.

“These are for you and Gino,” he said. “Copies of every list I sent out, and where they went. There are hundreds of names and addresses. I’m trusting you to follow through in case something happens to me.”

Magozzi took a deep breath. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. You’re going to be inside the cabin with your skirt over your head like the rest of the girls.”

John looked up at him, his gaze steady. “Get it off your chest, Leo.”

“Don’t call me Leo.”

John didn’t say anything, which made Magozzi feel a little foolish. Not foolish enough to dampen his rage, though. “What I want to know is how the hell you could do this to her. To any of them. You took them away from a safe place and dragged them out on the road with you when you knew goddamn well terrorists were targeting
you
, and that anyone with you was going to pay the same goddamned price Kardon paid. You set them up so you’d have company.”

John shook his head. “It happened too fast. At that point, all I knew was that the people who were after me were in Minneapolis and that they knew where Monkeewrench was. They could have been at the front door in minutes. I was trying to save them.”

“Well, nice fucking work, Smith. You’ve just put a lot of really decent people in the crosshairs.”

John put his head in his hands and talked through his fingers. “You think I don’t know that?”

If the FBI tried to wring all the emotion out of the agents they employed, they’d missed the mark on this one. The man’s voice was tortured, and Magozzi got his first inkling of what it might be like to carry the weight of so many lives on your shoulders just because you’d tried to do something good for your country. Kardon dead. Joe Hardy dead, and now all the people up here at risk.

Magozzi found a chair and sank into it. “Look at it this way, Smith. If it hadn’t been for you and your little extracurricular computer hacking, we never would have uncovered the attacks they have in the works. You probably saved a lot of lives.”

John looked up with a miserable expression, reached into his pocket, and handed Magozzi a tiny key. “D.C. First National Bank, K Street. You and Grace are on the list to access my safe-deposit box. She gets everything I have. The condo, the boat, my bank accounts. Can you handle that?”

Magozzi hesitated, then took the key. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ll be safe here. Just stay in the cabin.”

John smiled. “That’s not going to happen, Leo.”

• • •

Magozzi knew
where to find Grace. While everyone else was trying to get some rest in the many separate bedrooms of the cabin, she was in the kitchen, washing dishes, putting away food, as if they all would be here tomorrow to eat it.

He paused at the doorway and nodded to Charlie, as if the dog would understand the gesture. He hadn’t left Grace’s side since they’d arrived, and if Magozzi had to count on anyone to protect her, it would have been that sorry mongrel dog, who understood more than anyone gave him credit for.

Charlie was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs, watching every move she made. He looked at Magozzi when he appeared in the doorway and woofed a soft greeting.

Grace turned around, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Hello, Magozzi.”

Magozzi exhaled softly. “Are you okay?”

“As okay as anybody can be in these circumstances. Claude gave us all a little lecture about how to handle firearms and hide behind chairs.”

Magozzi chuckled a little and tried to remember the last time he’d done that. “Did you tell him you all used gnats for target practice?”

“He’s a sweet old guy. We didn’t want to scare him.”

Magozzi walked over to Charlie and ran his hand from the wet nose down to the wiry ruff of his neck, remembering his history with Grace that was really a short period of time, but seemed like the sum of his life. The dog had warmed up to him faster than Grace, hiding under chairs at first, then finally jumping up and laying fuzzy paws on Magozzi’s shoulders while he licked his face, making Magozzi feel like he belonged somewhere. And like he’d earned it.

God, he loved this dog like he loved this woman and he didn’t know what to do with emotions that strong. He looked at her briefly because that’s all he could stand, then he turned around and left the room.

47

C
hief and Claude returned from the lodge in midafternoon and called everyone into the dining room.

Chief stood at the head of the table, his face emotionless. “One of my deputies found two abandoned sedans on a hunting trail. He went a little farther into the woods and found two SUVs parked out of sight, in a clearing. They ran the plates—they’re rentals.”

“Hunters?” Gino asked hopefully.

“Better not be. All the vehicles had empty ammo boxes—NATO rounds, sweet shot favorite of terrorists.” He looked at John. “Guess whose credit card and personal info they used to rent the cars? John Smith, Washington, D.C.”

John jerked back in his chair. “How the hell would they get that?”

“You said yourself they were in your computer. Now they’re here.” He let that sink in for a minute while he took note of their reactions. Most of the Minneapolis lot were working hard at keeping a game face on, but Roadrunner showed his nerves, rocking a little in his chair, lips compressed and white.

“This is the way things will happen,” Chief said. “We need a fallback contingent here. It will be the last line of defense if things go south. Monkeewrench and Agent Smith”—he looked at each of them in turn—“this is you. You will stay inside the cabin.”

Grace and John immediately started to shake their heads, mouths open to protest, but before they could speak, Chief silenced them with a glance. “You have no voice here. This is my land, these are my people, and now this is my war. Is that understood?”

Gino was looking down at his lap like a schoolkid who didn’t want to be called on.

“Detectives,” the Chief said, “you two will man the tree stand closest to the cabin. You will stay down. You will not talk, and you will not move no matter what you hear. Your job is only to cover the cabin if anyone gets through.”

Harley stood up and tried to look imposing. “You’ve got John, Grace, Annie, and Roadrunner in here, crack shots every one of them. You need another man in the woods.”

Claude glanced up at him from his chair. “Sorry, son, we’re running a little low on guns.”

“I brought my own.”

“Yeah? More peashooters?”

Harley smiled, crooked his finger, and led Claude and Chief out to the garage. He opened the back hatch of Grace’s Rover and lifted a green tarp to reveal the weapons Roadrunner had hurriedly stashed there before their sudden flight out of the city.

Claude looked at him in disbelief, and perhaps with a little apprehension—it was hard to tell in the dimly lit garage. “AKs? What do you do with this kind of firepower back in the city?”

Good question,
Harley thought, suddenly doubting what may have been an unwise display of bravado. He’d spent over half his life training with every kind of firearm under the sun, had spent countless thousands of dollars collecting them and hundreds of hours on the shooting range. He’d never once used a gun against an animal, and certainly not another human being. To him, they were instruments of recreation and skill, not of death. “It’s always been a passion,” he finally said. “A hobby.”

Chief folded his arms across his expansive chest, which rivaled Harley’s in girth. “I’m guessing that out in these woods, it isn’t going to be fun and games. Are you sure you want to do this?”

Harley suddenly felt nasty tendrils of fear strangle his knees, making them wobbly. Maybe this was what he was supposed to be feeling, or maybe he was just a chickenshit dilettante who wanted to play war with real soldiers in theory, but was finally realizing that any targets out there wouldn’t be paper, they’d be blood and bone. This
wasn’t
a game—the Chief had been dead right about that. “I want to do this,” he finally said firmly. “But to be totally honest, I’m kind of scared shitless.”

Claude gave him a sympathetic smile and a pat on the shoulder. “Join the club. Anybody who picks up a gun and knows he might have to use it to defend himself is scared shitless every single time. The only thing worse than looking down the barrel of a gun with a mind to use it is looking at the business end of somebody else’s.”

Harley felt all the blood in his body drain to his feet. He’d been in plenty of bar fights in his day, had even deflected a couple knives and had the scars to prove it, but the business end of somebody else’s gun was thankfully nothing he’d ever seen before. Although that could change in a hurry. “You still get scared, even after a couple tours in Vietnam?”

“Of course we do,” said the Chief, hefting one of the AKs. “Being scared is what keeps you sharp.”

Claude nodded. “And what keeps you alive. War sucks. The only reason we do it is because we believe in what we’re fighting for.”

Harley let out a shaky breath. “I’m fighting for my friends.”

“Best reason of all,” Claude said. “Don’t worry, we’ve got your back, son. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“Are the AKs fully auto?” Chief wanted to know.

“Yeah. Help yourselves. I’ve got three of them. You guys know AKs?”

“Better than any woman,” Claude said. “We used to poach these off enemy corpses in ’Nam and throw out our M-16s because you could drag these fuckers through a rice paddy filled with mud and water buffalo shit and they’d never jam. Most reliable combat weapon ever made, in my opinion.”

Chief pulled out the AKs, then regarded the other guns in the Rover’s cargo hold. “You mind if we bring all these weapons into the cabin for backup, Harley?”

“That’s why I brought them. I’ll give you a hand.”

Claude watched the two men off-loading guns and thought it was uncanny how they damn near matched each other pound for pound and inch for inch, except Harley had the benefit of fewer years and more muscle. They also both had black hair, swarthy complexions, and the high cheekbones prevalent in the Native folk of these parts. They could have passed as brothers. Hell, maybe they were even related. Blood quorums were hard to trace in any race, more so with Native Americans because of their long history with the white man, where a lot of pairings, both voluntary and involuntary, had gone undocumented for centuries.

“You just going to stand there and watch us do all the heavy lifting, Claude?”

“That was my plan. You two big boys get the guns. I’ll bring in the extra ammo.” Claude looked at Harley, still curious about his resemblance to Chief. “You got some Native blood in you, son?”

Harley was a little surprised by the query. “You’re not the first person to ask me that. But the truth is, I never knew my family.”

“Of course you’ve got Native in you,” Chief said. “No Chimook in his right mind would hang with riffraff like those Bad River yahoos unless there was some common DNA.”

The quip was a welcome release valve for all the anxiety, giving the three of them a reason to chuckle in spite of their imminent future in the woods with guns, fighting very bad men who wanted nothing more than to see their brains splattered across the forest floor. But the uneasy, distracted laughter died quickly, and they refocused on their task, silent now.

Chief dressed Magozzi and Gino in camouflage outerwear poached from the front cupboard, then led them to a tree less than fifty yards from the cabin’s front door. Gino was freezing to death three steps off the porch. By the time Chief stopped in front of a trunk Gino later learned supported a fifty-year-old oak, he couldn’t feel his face. The ice had turned to snow not so long ago, but there was a slight breeze that dropped the windchill way below Gino’s comfort zone.

He’d had a vague image of what a tree stand would look like, and as far as he could see, this tree didn’t have one. Just a faux ladder of spindly two-by-fours climbing up the trunk. His eyes followed the tiny slices of wood that would never, ever support a man, up, up, until the hood of his parka fell back, exposing his head to the falling snow.

Oh, shit, he thought, looking up to what looked like half a tree house constructed by demented Boy Scouts with absolutely no conception of weight load and gravity. Damn thing had to be at least twenty feet off the ground and there was no frigging railing. Magozzi was already scrambling up the makeshift ladder like a monkey, guns slung over his back. Gino just stood at the bottom, feet frozen to Mother Earth, strongly shaking his head. He felt Chief’s bulk pushing him closer to the tree’s trunk, and then a pair of big hands grabbing his buttocks, pushing him upward.

“There you go, Detective. Wow. I haven’t seen a backside like that since I accidentally caught a glimpse of myself in a three-way mirror.”

Gino scowled over his shoulder at the Chief. “We’re not allowed to talk, but you can make wisecracks about my finer parts?”

Chief grinned up at him. “Man, sometimes you just can’t hold back. It’s a ladder, Rolseth. Hands and feet up to the top.”

Magozzi was on his belly, peeking over the side of the ice-slick floor of the tree stand, watching Gino’s perilous ascent. The man just wasn’t good with heights. Hell, he hired kids to clean out his gutters in the fall, and when he and Angela had moved into the house, he’d only painted halfway up the walls because he wouldn’t go near a ladder. Angela, seven months pregnant with The Accident at the time, had finished the job. “Almost there, buddy,” he whispered over the edge, reaching out to grab the neck of Gino’s parka and pull him up the rest of the way.

Gino collapsed on his belly, then rolled over onto his back. “Give me a gun so I can shoot you, you bastard. First the plane and now this? You’ve been trying to kill me since we left City Hall.”

“Stay on your belly, or you’re going to slide off the edge like a giant hockey puck.”

Chief hissed up at them from the base of the old tree, admonishing them to shut up, then disappeared into the trees.