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“Ready, Hoppy? I hope so. I hope we both are.”
11
Billy Freeman was slouched behind the wheel of his truck, but sat up in a hurry when Abra came out
of the Deane house. Her friend—Emma—stood in the doorway. The two girls said goodbye, slapping
palms first in an overhead high five, then down low. Abra started for her own house, across the street
and four doors down. That wasn’t in the plan, and when she glanced at him, he raised both hands in a
what gives gesture.
She smiled and shot him another quick thumbs-up. She thought everything was okay, he got that
loud and clear, but seeing her outside and on her own made Billy uneasy, even if the freaks were
twenty miles south of here. She was a powerhouse, and maybe she knew what she was doing, but she
was also only thirteen.
As he watched her go up the walk to her house, pack on her back and rummaging in her pocket for
her key, Billy leaned over and thumbed the button on his glove compartment. His own Glock .22 was
inside. The pistols were rented firepower from a guy who was an emeritus member of the Road Saints,
New Hampshire chapter. In his younger years, Billy had sometimes ridden with them but had never
joined. On the whole he was glad, but he understood the pull. The camaraderie. He supposed it was
the way Dan and John felt about the drinking.
Abra slipped into her house and closed the door. Billy didn’t take either the Glock or his cell phone
out of the glove compartment—not yet—but he didn’t close the compartment, either. He didn’t
know if it was what Dan called the shining, but he had a bad feeling about this. Abra should have
stayed with her friend.
She should have stuck to the plan.
12
They ride in campers and Winnebagos, Abra had said, and it was a Winnebago that pulled into the
parking lot where the Cloud Gap access road dead-ended. Dan sat watching with his hand in the
picnic basket. Now that the time had come, he felt calm enough. He turned the basket so one end
faced the newly arrived RV and flicked off the Glock’s safety with his thumb. The ’Bago’s door opened
and Abra’s would-be kidnappers spilled out, one after the other.
She had also said they had funny names—pirate names—but these looked like ordinary people to
Dan. The men were the going-on-elderly kind you always saw pooting around in campers and RVs; the
woman was young and good-looking in an all-American way that made him think of cheerleaders who
still had their figures ten years after high school, and maybe after a kid or two. She could have been
the daughter of one of the men. He felt a moment’s doubt. This was, after all, a tourist spot, and it
was the beginning of leaf-peeping season in New England. He hoped John and David would hold their
fire; it would be horrible if they were just innocent by—
Then he saw the rattlesnake baring its fangs on the woman’s left arm, and the syringe in her right
hand. The man crowding in close beside her had another syringe. And the man in the lead had what
looked very much like a pistol in his belt. They stopped just inside the birch poles marking the
entrance to the picnic area. The one in the lead disabused Dan of any lingering doubts he might have
had by drawing the pistol. It didn’t look like a regular gun. It was too thin to be a regular gun.
“Where’s the girl?”
With the hand not in the picnic basket, Dan pointed to Hoppy the stuffed rabbit. “That’s as close