stared at it for another few seconds. It started to dip its head, and then its torn ears flattened against its head and it crouched with a whine.
“Oh, poor thing,” Pilar said. “It probably never sees anyone who isn’t scared to death of it. Do you, champ?” She lowered her gun, stepped forward, and reached out to scratch the dog behind its ears.
It twitched and whined again, but didn’t snap at her hand. Almost as if it didn’t dare.
“No, you’re not keeping him,” I said.
We ran into two more of the animals on the way to the main house. They reacted in much the same way, starting with a growl and then slinking back into the trees and bushes when we didn’t seem afraid.
“We could start a TV show,” Pilar said. “A new kind of dog whispering.”
I was sure Simon would love that idea.
The mansion was large enough to have balconies and wings. It expanded above us like a ship at full sail, pale and stately against the sky. We climbed onto a bleached wooden deck and approached a side door, where I found and cut the wire for the alarm and then found and cut the wire for the booby trap.
We went inside.
The rooms were large, empty, and slovenly in the manner of someone who wasn’t living in her own space. Greasy pizza boxes and old Chinese food cartons tipped against one another on the first coffee table we passed, with past food spills staining the carpet uncleaned. Clothes and electronics paraphernalia draped the wide-open spaces haphazardly or collected in corners. Fifer must be a fan of cheap beer—cans showed up crumpled on every surface, old half-full ones leaving rings on mahogany tables or the grand piano.
One small, empty room that didn’t seem to have much defined purpose now had blood-crusted ropes thrown against the wall and dark stains soaking the hardwood. Someone had tried to clean them, but not very well. Real quiet. Wooden floors, smelled like bleach, Arthur had said.
I shut the door and didn’t share my suspicions with Pilar.
The other oddity was a solarium—it looked like it was about to become a full-on operating theater, with an operating table, equipment, and tools all sort of stacked and jumbled together in a way that probably wasn’t sanitary. None of it seemed to have been put to use here yet, though.
Pilar and I finished canvassing the front half of the ground floor and stepped up a shallow flight of stairs toward the back. My phone vibrated in my pocket.
It was Checker. I picked up one-handed, still stepping forward cautiously gun-first and keeping my voice low. “Hello?”
“She’s there! Fifer’s there, where you are, I mean she probably is—she’s not here at least—Cas, we got it wrong. D.J. was wrong about what she would do—” I could tell he was typing as he talked; his voice had the distracted quality it did when he was at a computer, and the clack of keys was audible in the background. “She hit us already. She wasn’t casing the station, she set it and left, she’s done here. And we found her device but—but that’s not important. What’s important is that if she’s not here, there’s a good chance she went back to the house; she could be waiting for you—”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Right. Okay.” A moment of dead air as Checker waited for me to hang up and I didn’t. “Cas? I called you in time, right? Is everything okay?”
“So far,” I said. He thought he’d catch us early enough to deliver a warning. Oh, well. I stepped through the next doorway, more of my attention on my front sight than the conversation. “Stop panicking. We’re fine. And it sounds like you found the bomb where you are, so you’re good too. Just get D.J. on it.”
“We did! We snuck him in and—he’s working on it now and he says not to alert the bomb squad because they’ll blow it, but he says she did a good job for once and he’s not sure if he can do it in time, and Elisa and I, we have to get Diego out of here, everyone out if we can, because we don’t know if he’ll even be able to—and Elisa won’t leave either—”
“You have a plan?” I said.
“Break him out,” Checker said.
“Okay. Good.”
He sucked in a breath. “Diego’s going to kill me. He … but better that than dead. Cas. If you have a sec … this got complicated, and what I’m about