For example, on a moonless night it would be impossible to detect someone crossing the yard, so the next day Jack went to a gun store and purchased some night vision goggles. Every morning well before sunrise, he took his bike and bought his supplies for the day, mostly water and sandwiches, and sneaked back before the sun came up.
Contrary to his drunken statement to the police, Jack planned on catching Felton and turning him in. In the event that that plan didn’t work, he hoped he could shoot the Sig Sauer straight.
Sam Jeffries didn’t tell anybody at the police department that he thought Tom Felton was going to try and kill Danni Jansen. He didn’t get a SWAT team member to hide out in the woods either as Danni had suggested. He wanted Felton all to himself.
In Sam’s mind, he was going to park the car somewhere by the entrance to the woods behind Danni’s house during the day and just sit and watch. In the evening he was going to drive around. He’d put the arm on a few friends who had second cars and had access to four different cars to drive.
Things didn’t work out the way Sam envisioned, however. He’d always been a large man with huge arms and a powerful build, but in recent years he had been inactive and had gained too much weight. Consequently, his knees and his back ached with a minimum amount of stress. He could make the tour of Danni’s neighborhood every half hour at night, but sitting in the car all day lasted less than a day. The pain was just too much. His backup plan consisted of driving up to the woods every hour or so and taking a very slow walk through the brush and the bramble up to Danni’s backyard.
Jack heard Sam coming on his very first trip long before he saw him. Sam was huffing and puffing and making a racket trying to wade through the thicket. Felton would have been long gone at the first sound. Still, Sam was not going to give up.
With all of the activity going on around here, Jack thought, Felton’s going to have to be awfully committed. Three people were absolutely counting on that commitment.
Chapter Forty-Five
By the third day, Jack had settled into his routine somewhat. It was difficult to catnap during the day and even harder to stay awake all night, although the crickets chirping incessantly with the occasional accompaniment of a hoot owl did their part to keep him awake. The creatures of the night helped as well. He saw a slew of raccoons and possums, even a few armadillos. The animal that caused him the most concern, however, was a coyote. Jack saw him the first night, silently slinking by, his body close to the ground. Jack put his right hand on the Sig Sauer, hoping again that he would shoot it straight if the necessity should arise, but the coyote just kept going. He actually turned and looked right into Jack’s eyes as he passed—a kind of “welcome to the neighborhood” look. By the third night, Jack’s nerves had calmed. He was getting used to the place and, as a result, he constantly found himself waking up.
I’ve got to do better than this, he told himself each time.
There were other problems as well. The sandwiches were making him sick and constipated, and his body ached constantly. He was in excellent shape, but he wasn’t a young man anymore. Lying on the cold hard ground combined with inactivity was taking its toll. On the fourth day, he took some time before he went shopping and went for a short run and stretched for about a half hour. It made him feel so much better. Then he bought a big bunch of fruit along with his sandwiches. He just hoped the fruit didn’t give him the runs. Having the runs in the woods did not fall under the category of a good thing. In an abundance of caution, he put toilet paper on his list of things to buy the next morning.
The fourth night brought even a bigger problem. Jack was standing up just outside his pup tent looking at Danni’s backyard over the tree trunk that covered the entrance, wearing his night vision goggles. He didn’t remember falling asleep. All he knew was that at some point late in the evening he woke up to the feeling of cold hard steel pressed against his left temple.