I had only gone a few feet when I found a dead Doberman. It lay just inside the shadow of the trees, right before they broke and there was that space between them and the house.
I bent down and touched it. It was warm, and it was bloody. Bending over, I clicked on my headlight and took a look. A bullet most likely. Right through the front right chest. From the way the ground looked, the snow creased and bloody, I knew the dog had dragged itself here and died.
I clicked off the light, sat there thinking.
A thought crossed my mind. One I couldn’t hold on to with any conviction, but it was there. I decided to let it go, and to move on. I hadn’t come this far to turn around and go back over the wall.
I moved to the end of the trees, stopped, and bent down and studied the gap between where I was and the veranda. As Vanilla had said, it was well lit, except right at the corner closest to me. Presumably, if what Vanilla knew about the place was the same, there wasn’t an angle there that accommodated a camera. All I had to do was make a straight run into the shadows, and then, if she was right, pull myself into an indention in the wall and gather my wits, which might take a lot more time than I had available. After that, I had to move quickly, and then it was assholes, elbows, and hot ammunition.
I was about to lunge forward, and then I saw him.
He was just to the front of the veranda. A big man. A very big man. Lying on the snow-covered lawn. A rifle of some sort lay on the snow beside him. I had an idea he hadn’t stopped to put his ear to the ground to hear the sweet vibrations of the earth. He was one of the bodyguards, and I was more than certain he was as dead as Abraham Lincoln; and if not, he was close enough to being dead to see Lincoln’s ghost. Like with the Doberman, the snow around him was coated red.
I went across the stretch and made the edge of the veranda, and slid up against the wall. The dark indention was there, as Vanilla said. I slipped into it and caught my breath. I didn’t know for a fact that the trees and that space between them to the veranda was in a camera blind, or even that I was in one now, but I had to play it that way.
I took the wire snips out of my coat pocket, and turned to where I was supposed to be able to reach through a gap and cut a wire that hooked to the camera, and another that hooked to the alarms. Snapping on my headlight, I saw there was indeed a gap, and that it was some sort of flaw in design. The concrete should have come together in that spot, but it didn’t. I could get my hand in there, inside a large storage room, and flip open the little metal door that held the alarm system without any trouble, but when I flicked it open with the tip of the wire snips, the wires were already cut. I snapped off the headlight. I pulled out Brett’s little revolver and moved along the veranda wall as far away from the lights as possible.
I came to the door lock Vanilla said I’d have to pick, and as I figured, the door was already cracked open.
I slipped in, held the revolver at the ready with two hands. I didn’t always shoot with two hands. I had learned to shoot the Wild West way when I was a kid, and I never dropped it completely. It’s not as accurate, but I can hit pretty much what I shoot at, provided it’s in range and not moving too damn fast.
It was dark inside the house and I couldn’t tell where I was going at first, so I just squatted down and let my eyes adjust to the shadows. I didn’t turn on the little head-beam light, knowing if I did, all I was doing was giving them a little spot target on my forehead. I squatted there with my back against a wall trying not to breathe too loud. After a few minutes I could see better in the dark, make out shapes. It was all furniture as far as I could tell. Rising up, I moved across the floor with the revolver at the ready.
I stopped when a voice said, “Don’t move.”