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“Does he have weapons here?”
“You’re kidding, right? He has a gun safe in the house full of them.”
“You know the combination to that safe?”
“Oh yeah, I’ve got it right here in my pocket.”
Shaw jerked hard on the man’s arm and stopped, nearly throwing Rice to the ground. “We can just leave your ass back there for Kuchin to chew on first. You want that? Or do you want to stop with the wiseass cracks and try to help us here?”
“I don’t know anything that can help you. I’ve been here before lots of times, but I just fly in and out. I almost never leave the house. Waller, Kuchin, whatever the hell his real name is, he knows this area better than anyone.”
“That’s reassuring,” said Reggie grimly.
“If he has dogs,” Shaw said, “we have to address that.”
They started jogging again.
“How?” asked Reggie.
“Change our scent.”
“How do we do that?” asked Rice as he puffed along beside them. “I thought dogs couldn’t be fooled.”
“Anything can be fooled, even scent dogs. And we have an advantage.”
“What?” asked Reggie.
“Take a whiff.”
“What?”
“Take a deep breath.”
Both she and Rice drew in heavy breaths. Rice almost gagged while Reggie wrinkled her nose. “Rotten eggs,” she said.
“Sulfur dioxide,” amended Shaw. “There’s probably a lot of metamorphic rock around here. That means a lot of sulfur. Probably some
sulfur pools too.”
“So you mean?” Reggie began slowly.
“We cover ourselves in the smell. That way we smell like everything around here. It’s not perfect, but we may confuse the dogs just enough. And we don’t have a lot of options. And we need to turn our jumpsuits inside out. The lining color stands out a lot less than the neon yellow.”
He ran ahead to tell Whit this. They reversed their jumpsuits and twenty minutes later, following a stronger odor, they found a shallow pool of water that reeked of the naturally occurring mineral.
“We have to go in that?” exclaimed Rice.
“If you want to live a little longer, yeah,” said Shaw. “Just don’t drink it.”
Drenched, chilled, and smelling horribly, they continued on west for a bit longer before Shaw brought them to a stop, looking frustrated. “This is all wrong.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Whit, his wet hair down in his eyes. “We’re trying to stay ahead of the guy. He’s back there coming this way. So we have to go that way.” He pointed straight ahead.
“And that’s exactly what he wants. He told us to go this way, Whit. Why do you think that is?”
Reggie answered, “Ambush? Driving us to a perimeter?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. I didn’t actually believe the guy when he said it was just him against us.”
