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Another bark, and then nothing for five long minutes.
“Like a cat, now,” Fender whispered through a jawbone microphone, and he began to pad down the dirt driveway.
Fender wore fleece-bottomed booties over his sneakers. They all wore them and barely made a sound moving deeper and deeper into the property. The dog stayed quiet.
That wouldn’t last long with a trained canine listening and scent-checking the wind. For the moment, however, they had it made from a scent perspective. A sturdy breeze blew right in their faces. The dog’s superior nose was disabled.
But sooner or later, one of the German shepherds would hear something or perhaps see them moving into position. If the noise was blatant or the dog got a solid look at them, it would certainly bark and sound an alarm. Things would get difficult then, but not untenable.
If the movements and noises they made were soft and irregular, however, the dogs would be uncertain and would come to investigate. And that would make things easier all around.
They crossed a clearing without alerting the dogs and crept closer. Slats of light from the house were visible through the trees when Hobbes toed a rock. It rolled and tumbled into the ditch.
The dog barked once. Brown and his men froze, listening, and heard a low growl and then a heavy dog’s nails clicking and scraping on porch floorboards. They’d anticipated something like this scenario and stayed with their plan. Hobbes stepped off the right side of the driveway into the ditch. He leaned against the bank there, both hands gripping a pistol with tritium night sights.
Brown and Fender did the same on the left side of the drive, back to back, with Brown facing the house with his pistol, Fender covering their trail with an ultralight, suppressed backpacking rifle.
Rather than circling to catch their scent in the wind, the dog came directly at them, trotting confidently down the driveway and into the dense pines where they waited.
When the dog was fifteen yards away, Hobbes pulled the trigger, causing a burst of pressurized air to drive a tranquilizer dart into the animal’s shoulder.
It made a soft yipping sound, staggered to its left, panted, and went down.
No one budged for another five long minutes, during which Brown caught the faint sound of—cheering? And where was the second dog? Inside?
Hobbes moved first; he stalked forward to the edge of the yard, Brown right behind him. Fender passed them and stuck to the shadows, moving to the right and up onto a dirt mound where he could get a better look at the front of the house.
Brown paused next to Hobbes, hearing the voices of announcers and seeing the flicker of a television through the partially open blinds of the room to the right of the front door.
“See anything in there?” he murmured.
Chapter
65
A few moments later, Fender said, “College football highlights playing on the big-screen, but I’m not seeing anyone in there watching. Dark, though. Lot of shadows. Hard to tell.”
“I’m going,” Brown said, and he moved slowly across the yard, heading past a Grady-White fishing boat toward a motorcycle. He crouched by the side of the bike and worked at a leather saddlebag strap with leather gloves.
When Brown had it open, he drew out from his jacket a plastic ziplock bag that held a kit wrapped in dark cloth. He got the kit free of the plastic and
placed it behind a tool kit in the saddlebag.
Then he reached into a top pocket and fished out a film canister. He opened it and spilled the contents onto the gas tank.
“I’ve got him,” Fender whispered in Brown’s earbud. “He’s leaning forward in a chair. Just changed the channel.”
“Kill him if you can,” Brown said, buckling the saddlebag.
Fender’s ultralight rifle produced a sound similar to the air pistol’s. The bullet made a small tinkling noise as it passed through the screen, the blinds, and the window, and then there was the sound of lead hitting flesh and bone.
“Done,” Fender said.
“Done,” Brown said; he spun away from the Harley and took off in a low crouch across the yard.
Inside the house, a woman began to scream.
“Shit,” Hobbes said. “He wasn’t alone.”
