The guard rounded the corner, looking up toward the eave, straining to follow the thin black TV cable.
Larson, both hands gripping the broken stick like a Louisville Slugger, stepped into the swing and put the man’s unsuspecting forehead into the nosebleeds. The guard fell on his back with a whomph of released air, clearly unconscious before he landed.
Larson considered tying him up, gagging him, but feared he had no time. If he could bag all three guards, then he’d return to this one. He rolled the man onto his side, so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit, and left him.
With no choice but to risk it, he entered the glare and hurried up the wobbly front steps. He thumped an elbow onto the door and said in a gruff, intentionally muffled voice, “Hey, help me out here…”
As the door came open, he thrust the broken limb like a battering ram into the gut of the guard, connecting just below the V of the rib cage. He stepped inside, past the one staggering back, and clipped the skull of the next, who, at that moment, had been kneeling in front of the TV, his back to the door. The one behind him went for a gun.
Larson broke the man’s wrist with the stick and, as he cried out, dimmed his lights by breaking his jaw. The guard’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped. Out cold.
Sweating profusely now, Larson surveyed the fallen. He kicked the door shut, and breathed for what felt like the first time. He rounded up weapons and pocketed their magazines.
He’d bought himself a few minutes at most.
The guard with the broken wrist moaned himself awake, grabbing at his flapping hand. Larson raised the club above his head and lowered it like a camper going after a snake.
The shabby interior reeked of years of cigarettes and beer. It reminded Larson of a crappy college dorm lounge. A Formica galley kitchen offered a two-burner stovetop, a microwave, and a fridge under tube lighting. The building’s modular design left the kitchen and living room at one end, a bath, and two other doors off a narrow hallway lit by an overhead fixture missing at least one bulb. Larson’s heart remained in his throat as he carried the bloodied club with him down the hall. The doors seemed to stretch farther away the more he walked.
He threw the first open, club hoisted and ready.
Two sets of bunk beds, complete with sheets and wool Pendletons. Signs of bachelor life: Ashtrays that needed emptying. Copies of men’s magazines with cover shots of bare-breasted starlets. Soiled laundry in a far corner, looking like an animal’s nest.
Clear.
He hurried to the second room, threw this door open, expecting either the fourth guard or the expectant eyes of the two kids. Another bunk room, not dissimilar to the first.
No kids.
He tried to wrap his mind around all this. The speed with which the two guards had fled the main lodge had convinced him they’d taken the bait of Hope’s phone coming online.
The most pressing thing now was to buy himself time to find the children. He could bind and gag all three guards, leave the one out back, perhaps behind the trash bins, the other two here in the bunkhouse.
He felt a rumble in his legs and knew it to be a vehicle. He switched off all the interior lights and cracked open the front door in time to see only the back of a panel truck up at the top of the hill, rounding the north corner of the lodge. He couldn’t make out its writing on the back from here.
He shut the door, set down the club, and grabbed for Hope’s mobile.
caterer? @ gate
Party time or a Trojan horse, courtesy of Rotem? Something was wrong: Hope should have been supplying him with more information than this.
Where to go from here?
He spotted two rolls of silver duct tape-further evidence of the kids, or wishful thinking?
No matter, he would put them to good use.