NOS4A2(170)

“Is it possible they’re whispering?” Hutter asked. “And your equipment isn’t sensitive enough to pick them up?”

“When this is working, it’s about sensitive enough to pick up loud thoughts,” said the man with the earpiece. “The problem is that it’s too sensitive. It caught a blast of something it couldn’t handle and maybe blew a capacitor.”

Chitra rooted in a gym bag and came up with a can of Deep Woods OFF.

“Thank you,” Hutter said, taking it from her. She glanced at Daltry. “You want?”

They rose together so she could spray him down.

Standing, she could see a bit of the slope behind the house rising toward the tree line. Two squares of warm, amber-hued light spread out across the grass, light from the windows at the rear of the house.

She squeezed the button, sprayed white mist over Daltry. He shut his eyes.

“You know what I think that big slamming sound was?” he said. “That fat bastard keeling over. Thanks, that’s enough.” She stopped spraying. He opened his eyes. “You going to be okay if he drops dead?”

“He didn’t have to run,” she said.

“You didn’t have to let him.” Daltry grinned when he said it. “You enabled the poor boy.”

Hutter felt an urge, clear and simple, to spray OFF into Daltry’s eyes.

And there it was, the source of her discomfort, her restlessness. Louis Carmody seemed too trusting, too good-humored, too worried about his boy, too kind to his ex to have had anything to do with Wayne’s disappearance. He was, Hutter thought, an innocent, but she had hung him out there anyway, to see where he’d lead her, and never mind he could drop from a stroke at any time. If the big man stroked out, was that on her head? She supposed it was.

“We needed to see what he’d do. Remember. This isn’t about his well-being. It’s about the boy’s.”

Daltry said, “You know why I like you, Hutter? Really like you? You’re a bigger son of a bitch than I am.”

Hutter thought, not for the first time, that she hated a lot of cops. Ugly, mean drunks who believed the worst of everyone.

She shut her eyes and misted OFF over her head and face and neck. When she opened her eyes and exhaled, to blow away the poison, she saw that the lights in the back of the house had gone out, had vanished from the lawn. She wouldn’t have noticed it if she were crouching down.

Hutter shifted her gaze to the front room. She could see the hall leading to the back of the house, but no one came down it. She glanced at the front bedroom, waited for someone to turn a light on there. No one did.

Daltry hunkered down with the others, but she remained standing. After a minute he craned his head back to look at her.

“Are you pretending to be a tree?”

“Who do we have watching the rear of the house?” she asked.

The second state trooper, a guy who had until now not spoken, looked back at her. His face was pale and freckled, and with his ginger hair he somewhat resembled Conan O’Brien.

“No one. But there’s nothing back there. Miles of woods, no trail. Even if they made us, they wouldn’t run that—”

Hutter was already stalking away, hands stretched out in front of her to protect her face from branches.

Chitra caught up to her in four steps. She had to hustle to keep up, her handcuffs jangling on her belt.

“You are concerned?” she asked.

Behind her she heard a branch snap, heard shoes crunching in the deadfall. That would be Daltry, following in no particular hurry. He was as bad as the mosquitoes; she needed a spray to repel him.

“No,” Hutter said. “You had a position. There was no reason not to hold it. If they leave, they’ll go out the front door. That’s completely reasonable.”

“So . . . ?”

“I’m puzzled.”

“About . . . ?”

“Why they’re sitting in the dark. They shut the lights off back here, but they didn’t come into the front of the house. So that means they’re sitting in the back of the house with the lights off. Doesn’t that seem peculiar?”

On her next step, her foot sank into cold, brackish water, three inches deep. She grabbed the slender trunk of a birch sapling to steady herself. In another yard Hutter was in up to her knees. The water didn’t look any different from the ground, a black surface carpeted in leaves and branches.

As Daltry came up along beside them, he plunged into the water up to his thighs, staggered, nearly fell.

“We could use a light,” Chitra said.

“Or a snorkel,” Daltry said.

“No light,” Hutter said. “And you can go back if you don’t like getting wet.”

“What? And miss all the fun? I’d rather drown.”

“Don’t get our hopes up,” Hutter told him.





Inside


MCQUEEN SAT AT THE TABLE WITH THEM IN THE DARK. HE HAD the bag of detonators in his lap and had removed one and held it in his hand. Lou was not reassured to see that the detonator in no way resembled the high-tech devices used to ignite explosives on 24 or in a Mission: Impossible film. They were instead little black timers from Home Depot, with curiously familiar-looking brass-ended wires dangling from them.

“Uh, Mr. McQueen? Dude?” Lou asked. “That looks like the kind of timer I use to switch on the Christmas lights when it’s getting dark.”