Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (38 page)

“I haven’t seen two. I got three here, but can’t say if they’re ladies or not.” He pointed to one of the twenty four screens banked in front of his desk.

“Zoom in.”

He did as instructed. Dorthea studied three figures jogging between a row of cars parked on the front lawn. She’d seen Veronica and
Sarah with her own eyes just minutes before, but not a third person. Still, it had to be them.

“I think they’re
guests leaving early,” he said.

“Running like thieves, in jeans and winter
coats, one of them wearing a servant’s jacket?” she asked sarcastically. He sank into his seat.

The security team had been hired fast, too fast, and this one, a southerner named Biff,
worked in the office for no other reason than a lack of body odor and a knack for electronics. His brother, who had the personality of a ramrod, fared better at the front gate where he harassed undesirables and greeted everyone else with a suspicious glare.

The three figures on the
monitor slowed to a fast walk. When they moved closer to the camera, Dorthea clearly recognized Veronica and Sarah and…Mack—yet another who’d been locked up in the dungeon. As much as this fact troubled Dorthea, she continued to concentrate on the monitor where she saw Mack walk to a dark colored car. He opened the back door for the cousins before hopping behind the wheel himself.

Dorthea bent close to the monitor and then stood up straight. She knew that car. It belonged to
a spineless man named Sonny Osborne. She’d kept him propped up in the mayor’s office for years, the big man in town who slurped oysters, burped Dom Perignon, and occasionally pulled strings for her at city hall. She had enough on him to send him away for a hundred years. As a matter of caution, though, she had Horrick pay him occasional visits, to keep him on the straight and narrow, but he never seemed to need it. As long as his name stayed on the mayor’s door, and he had the place of honor at half a dozen banquets a year, he behaved better than a lobotomy patient.

But now, out of the
dozens of cars, how did these three end up in Sonny Osborne’s Rolls Royce? From what she’d seen on the monitor, it hadn’t been a random selection; they went straight to his car. “Give me the microphone,” she said. “I want the gatehouse. Who’s down there?”

“My brother.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bear.”

“Biff and Bear. How could I forget? I hope you don’t have a sister.” Dorthea put the microphone to her mouth and said, “Wake up Bear. Do you hear me?”

“This is Bear. Go ahead.”

“I want you to block the gate.”

“Roger…
uh…ten-four…yeah. What do I block it with?”

“A car!”

“Ten-four…wilco.”

Bear ran out the back door of the gatehouse and out of view. After a few seconds a sorry-looking white four door backed up to block the gate.

“That’s our car,” said Biff.

Dorthea ignored him and his five hundred dollar tuna boat
and instead watched the other monitors that showed Mack drive through a row of cars to the driveway, where he turned left toward the front gate.

“Get more security down there,” said Dorthea, handing him the microphone.

Biff called for reinforcements, and Dorthea watched Mack drive slowly down the hill. He passed from one security monitor to another, moving closer to the barricaded gate. When the car passed between camera zones, it disappeared from the monitors altogether but eventually popped up again. At one point, no more than fifty yards from the gate, the car stopped, in the middle of the driveway, and Mack stuck his head out the window. He looked straight into the camera then ducked back in and put the car in reverse. Back the car went, falling off one monitor, popping up on another, still backing up, falling off another monitor, and…and…. Dorthea stared at the screen. It didn’t pop back up. “Where are they?” she yelled.

“Maybe it stopped again…between cameras….”

“Then move the cameras!”

“…I can’t…they don’t move
. I can send security.”

“Then do it!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No! Wait!” she said. The Rolls
had reappeared and now moved forward again, going fast, too fast really; it flew from one monitor to another.

Biff stood up and watched
it barrel down the driveway.

Dorthea grabbed the microphone and yelled, “He’s trying to crash through the gate!”

“Roger, roger.”

Biff put his hands on his head and said, “No, no, not my car.”

The sturdy Rolls Royce broadsided the rust-worn hand-me-down, threw it up, onto its side, into the gate, and back down, where it smashed onto the hood of the Rolls. Dorthea heard the crash, felt it in the shaking walls, and then heard it again, delayed, over the open radio, because big bad Bear had been too transfixed to take his finger off the microphone button.

And then she saw nothing except the grainy image of a dissipating cloud of dust and smoke. Nothing
moved inside the Rolls Royce. Semiconscious heads didn’t bob, bodies didn’t writhe, and hands didn’t grope for an exit. It looked like a graveyard, and Dorthea immediately wondered if she could ever be that lucky. Two guards came into view, approaching the car, when a flash of light reduced the monitor to a storm of gray and white particles. It flickered and focused, flickered and focused again, before it came back to reveal the Rolls Royce covered in flames.

“Uh…I think we have a
situation down here,” said Bear.

At first the fire seemed to be on the outside of the car
, where it probably leapt up from a pool of gasoline spilled out on the ground. One of the guards tried to move in close. He leaned back, turned his head away from the heat, and grabbed the handle to the back door. It didn’t budge. He pulled again, it still didn’t open. Smoke poured from the deformed seams and crumpled hood of the Rolls. The flames, no longer young and tentative, climbed higher, up into the bowels of the junker. Another guard came into view. He buried his face into the back of the first guard and reached in through the broken window to try the door from the inside. Their bodies pulled in unison, once, twice, three times, but the door held. And then the flames gorged themselves on greasy rubber hoses, melted fuel lines, and the hundreds of components that are fireproof at eight hundred degrees but combustible at sixteen hundred. The guards backed away.

“Uh…should we call the fire department or something?” asked Bear over the radio.

Dorthea wanted to laugh, to laugh hard and loud, to catch up the burnt remains of her burdens in a wheezy, sadistic whirlwind of laughter. Instead, she put the microphone to her mouth and said, “Yes, Bear, call the fire department.” She put the gun, still clutched in her right hand, onto the desk, and turned to leave. She had damage control to do. Then she could laugh.

Before
she’d walked twenty paces down the side hallway, towards the main hallway, Dorthea heard the security office door click behind her. She turned and saw Biff stick his head out of the open doorway.

“Well?” she asked.

“I think there’s a problem. I just saw three people running along the side of the driveway.”

Back in the office he pointed at a monitor
but it didn’t show anything suspicious. She grabbed the microphone. “Bear, Bear, come in.”

“This is Bear. Go ahead.”

“Who did you see in the car?”

“Uh…I didn’t see anyone…and neither did the other guys, so we can’t say—”

She ignored the rest of the transmission and studied the monitors. After a few seconds, three figures popped up. “Where are they?” asked Dorthea.

“That’s the camera down by the stable,” said Biff.

Dorthea watched them huddle by a tree for a few seconds and then scurry over to a bush where they knelt down. Then they dashed across the driveway and fell off the monitor—yet again. Before she had time to properly curse the idiot who’d sold her the security system, they popped back up, running through the stable parking area. They ran up to a giant horse trailer, opened the side door, and piled in. Gone. Out of view. But she knew where to find them.

Dorthea studied the trailer and the truck attached to it. Especially the truck.

“Do you want me to send security?” asked Biff.

She turned to the wall next to the door and plucked a hand held radio from its rack and picked up the gun from the desk.

“No. Just tell me if they move,” she said. And then she left, dressed for combat, with radio, gun, and matching ball gown.

~~~

Sarah didn’t know exactly what Dorthea had seen from the top of the stairway. Had she seen Veronica? Mack? Old people complain about their eyesight. Maybe from that distance she’d only seen human bodies with hazy features, and maybe Nanny had covered for them with one of her sing-songy lies that sounds like an Irish bedtime story, and maybe Perkins’ guilty look hadn’t given it all away. Then Sarah saw the barricaded front gate and the guards with drawn guns, and that pretty much answered the question about Dorthea’s eyesight.

It also
had meant they needed to buy some time, so Mack put a rock on the gas pedal and sent the mayor’s empty Rolls crashing into the front gate. The fiery diversion worked better than they had expected.

Now, shoulder to shoulder in the dark storage compartment of the
manor’s big horse trailer, they gulped cold winter air.

“Is the door locked?” whispered
Sarah breathlessly.

“Yes,” said
Mack. And then, between breaths, he continued, “There are two ways out. Over the front wall. Or out back. Down the Canyon.”

“
They’re waiting for us in the front,” said Sarah.

“Cliffs and sharp rocks wait for us in the canyon,” said Veronica. “Even if we make it down, it’s twenty miles to town—I’d never make it.”

“We can do it on horseback,” said Mack.

“Horseback? In the dark?” said Veronica.

“Dark for us, not for the horses,” said Mack.

“That’s right
. They see better at night than we do in the day. And they’ve been down that trail a hundred times,” said Sarah.

“I’ve got halters right here and long lead ropes we can use for reins,” said
Mack.

“How
about seatbelts?” asked Veronica.

“No, but I’ve got
an old gelding named Eddy that’s too lazy to do anything except follow the horse in front of him.”

After a pause Veronica said, “Ok, lazy Eddy, the follower, I’ll take him…just don’t put him behind a horse named Lightning…or Nitro…or anything like that.”

“Nice and easy the whole way. I promise. Now I need to turn on the light for a second,” said Mack.

Two twelve volt lights flickered overhead and lit up a windowless storage compartment about the size of a small bathroom, but longer, with a rectangular metal storage bin built against the far wall from where they stood by the door. In front of the bin, built into both the left steel wall panel and the right, jutted the empty arms of three tier saddle racks. On the left, in front of the saddle racks, close to the door, were waist high stainless steel cabinets with a stainless counter top. From hooks on the wall opposite the cabinets,
Mack grabbed three halters with attached lead ropes. He studied the length of the lead ropes before going to the storage bin on the far wall. While Mack rummaged, Sarah looked at Veronica. She looked alive, not exactly healthy, but finally alive.

Mack
’s head jerked upright. Sarah held her breath and immediately heard the whining sound of an electric cart. She flipped off the light switch. The whining grew louder. The cart came closer. With the sound of crunching gravel, she knew it had turned into their parking area. Should they run? Or wait? Pheasants that stay in the bush don’t get shot. But, then again, sitting ducks do. The cart stopped and silence returned. They waited, afraid to breathe or move. They heard their own beating hearts more loudly than seemed possible. This uneasy silence lasted for what seemed like an eternity. After a while the sound came back on, but in the harmless form of a midnight chorus that had returned to claim its territory: crickets, groaning boughs, bushes rustled by the breeze. Maybe playing the smart pheasant had been the right call. Maybe Dorthea had had nothing but a vague report of a sighting and had sent one of her hoodlums to take a look. Maybe they just needed to wait it out.

The sound of footsteps
on gravel, faint at first, quickly destroyed this wishful thinking. Veronica took hold of Sarah’s hand. The footsteps grew louder, closer, then they stopped, replaced by a clicking, scratching noise…against the side of the trailer…no, against the door! Click, click, scratch, scratch. Not a knock, not the sound of someone turning the knob, just a prolonged clicking, scratching noise.

Mack
stirred and Sarah felt him brush against her arm as he went to the door. She heard him unlock the door and, in the dim light, saw his body push forward, but the door didn’t open. He grunted and pushed harder. It still didn’t open.

“Just so you know,” said the voice, Dorthea’s voice, on the other side of the door, “Even though your stunt
at the front gate didn’t work, it wasn’t a complete waste. It inspired me to take you for a little ride.”