I did the same with the backdoor and then I went around the house, trying to look in the windows and checking to see if they’d slide up. I couldn’t see much and every single window was either painted shut or locked.
“Fuck!” I hissed, under my breath, standing next to a window at the east side of the house.
Then something settled on my shoulder.
I gave a little screech and whirled, not knowing who I’d see. It could be Lee, Wilcox’s goons, the shooters, a police officer or Dracula.
Instead, it was Tex standing there with the goggles no longer on the top of his head, but over his eyes.
He put his finger to his lips, then, a scant second later, put his fist through the window.
I stared at the window, then back at Tex, then back at the window.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“B and E, darlin’,” he answered casually. He was wearing a flannel shirt and work gloves and pushing all the glass away from the window pane.
“You can’t break someone’s window! We should have tried to jimmy one open.”
“Quit your squawkin’ and get in there.” Then he grabbed me by the waist, picked me up and threw me through the window like I weighed no more than a bag of flour.
“Careful of the glass,” he called.
Too late, I’d landed on the glass and rolled away, hoping nothing cut me but I was too wired to feel a thing. I got to my feet and looked around in the darkness a little hysterically. Something smelled seriously funky and not in a good way.
Tex heaved himself in behind me and I spun around to glare at his hulking shadow.
“Are you crazy?” I asked a crazy man. “You just threw me through a window.”
“You looked like you were gettin’ second thoughts.”
“It’s dark, you can’t see me.”
He tapped his goggles. “Night vision.”
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Don’t like that smell,” Tex remarked, and I could hear him sniffing the air because I couldn’t see a thing. “That’s not a good smell.”
He was right, it was a terrible smell.
“You stay here, I’ll have a look around.” Then I saw his shadow move off.
“Don’t leave me here!”
“Don’t be such a girl,” he returned, already somewhere else in the house and I found it odd such a big man could walk on such quiet feet. He barely made a sound.
I stood in the dark, thinking we’d probably made an awful lot of noise breaking the window and I listened for the sirens that would mean my doom. Dad would be seriously hacked off and Malcolm would make sure Kitty Sue didn’t invite me to the Fourth of July barbeque. I didn’t even want to think what Hank would say.
Then I wondered if one of the other teams in the Rosie Hunt would have the same and come, say tonight, say at that exact time. Say that team was the shooters, say it was the shooters with guns drawn.
“Tex, where are you?” I whispered. Loudly.
I started to make my way through the shadowy rooms and the further I got into the house, the funkier the smell was.
“You don’t wanna come in here.” I heard Tex say when it seemed I’d hit ground zero on the smell.