Useless Bay(12)

Beyond the guard shack was what I thought of as the “Shepherd compound.” It wasn’t just a McMansion—it was the main house, a guest house they called “The Breakers,” a garage where they kept their car and rowboat, and a sports court.

It was a lot of space for Grant to find a place to hide, but I didn’t think he was anywhere inside. Especially not after what had happened between us earlier. And I did not want to carry Grant home.

Especially not to Henry, who was a good guy, one with a cleft in his chin and sprightly eyes and curly hair I always wanted to run my fingers through—even though he may have been acting like a butthead earlier. But hey, if my face was bruised and swollen like that, I might act like a butthead, too.

At least now he seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation.

Me? I understood it hours ago, when Grant had pleaded with me to ferry him across the great waters.

As we approached the Shepherd property, I heard something on the wind. Stay . . . Good girl . . . and the gnashing of teeth. Even though so far he’d visited me only in my nightmares and I was now wide awake, it sounded like the troll was abroad, creeping his way up from the depths.

I really hoped Grant hadn’t tried to cross the sound in the rowboat on his own. Not only because some cruise ship might smash him to smithereens in the shipping lanes but also because something might chew him up before he even got that far.

While I was listening to voices on the wind, Henry noticed that something on the Shepherd property was wrong.

“The gate wasn’t up when we left a few minutes ago,” he said.

It was getting dark out. Henry waved the flashlight at the gate, and sure enough, he was right.

The Shepherds had a red-and-white gate arm that separated their manicured land from the lagoon behind them. The gate arm was useless since, if you wanted to trespass, all you needed to do was climb over or under or go around. The family relied mostly on CCTV for security and, when they weren’t here, some rent-a-cop to patrol the main house and outbuildings, including the garage and the Breakers, and make sure no one was squatting in one of them.

We checked on things, too, but we had other things to do, like homework and basketball practice. People as wealthy as the Shepherds needed more protection than the five of us could provide.

And we didn’t really understand the gate. It may have been useless, but it was almost always down.

Not now.

Patience was sitting in front of the shack, which meant Yuri hadn’t given her three tasks yet.

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.