Engine running, headlights burning, and I’m puzzled why Fran doesn’t climb out. I know she couldn’t have been shot, the thugs Neva dispatched not firing a round. They didn’t have a chance, thanks to Mr. Owl.
“Is everybody okay?” Mom hands me the vest, and I put it on.
“Not everybody,” I reply, alluding to our uninvited guests as she moves close to Lex, looking him in the eye.
“What happened?” gently, kindly, she puts her arm around a boy she’s never liked or given the time of day. “What frightened you enough that you would take the bus here in the middle of the night?”
“She wants to hurt Nonna and me. And I got scared,” Lex digs out his phone.
He goes to recordings, selecting one, and Neva Rong appears in the display. Her voice sounds in the blue-glowing darkness as if there’s nowhere we can go to get away from her.
“. . . This is Dr. Rong. Neva Rong,” and she must have used a videophone app, the same thing she did to me earlier in the week. “I know it’s late for a 10-year-old to be up but I thought it very important we get acquainted. Vera would want us to be friends.”
“Why are you calling me?” Lex in the recording, his face surprised and wary, and I recognize the mathematically inspired art printed off the internet, his bedroom in the background.
“I realize we don’t know each other yet, but I wanted you and your grandmother to be reassured that most of all I admire your talents, Lex. Or should I call you Lexell? I understand your astronomer parents named you for a lost comet. I’m very sorry about what happened to them. I believe there’s a place for you at Pandora someday . . . ,” she says, and the implication is obvious.
33
BOLDLY, outrageously, Neva’s intention was to harass and intimidate as only she can, and to curry Lex Anderson’s favor for the future. She has to headhunt the best talent on the planet like everybody else, and a 10-year-old prodigy she could control and manipulate has to be extremely appealing.
There’s no better way to keep him under her thumb than to cause him real trouble, and then rescue him from it. She probably got his phone number from Vera, and when Neva called, he was smart enough to record the conversation.
“. . . Vera thought the world of you,” Neva goes on in her seductive tone. “But I’m afraid there’s the untidy matter of the burner phone in your backpack at the failed rocket launch. After you hacked into NASA. Or that’s the accusation.”
“I didn’t do it! Someone else did! Maybe it was you!” and Lex is a firecracker, I’ll give him that.
“Well, even if you did it . . .”
“I didn’t!”
“Either way, all can be forgiven. But you’re going to need a lawyer, and I’m happy to help because they can be awfully pricy. As can college.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to be talking to you . . . !” Lex says in the recording, and I pause it, emailing the file to myself so I can listen to it more carefully later.
He and my parents return to the house as I walk toward the Tahoe parked on the driveway. There’s no sign of Fran because it isn’t her SUV, and it’s as if my Chase Car drove itself from the barn. But what I’m seeing is its twin, the windows down, Carme climbing out with her Bullpup pistol now that the coast is clear.
“It’s a good thing I decided to drop by,” she heads toward me, dressed similarly in a warmup suit, a down vest, shearling-lined boots.
“What are you doing here?” I couldn’t be happier to see her.
“I had a feeling you could use some company,” she says as I begin looking around for my ejected cartridge cases.
Finding them where they melted divots in the snow, I collect them as if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever known.
“Four rounds,” I let her know, tucking the spent cartridge cases in a pocket.
“Ditto. Two per a-hole,” Carme replies, and we begin walking to the river, our matching pistols with their long-barreled silencers pointed down.
We cross the sloping snowy grass to the dock, and the bodies are completely still, eerily visible in the soft glow of Mom’s miniblues.
“Just so you know, I’m pretty sure I took out both of them,” Carme can’t resist needling me like she always does.
“Nope. I don’t think so.”
We trudge past the stump wrapped in lights, all that’s left of our favorite tree. Images flash in my mind of sunny days and better times when we’d swing out over the river, landing like cannonballs before a lightning strike put an end to it.
“I saw what was happening before you did,” Carme adds.
“Nope. Not possible since we have the same equipment and see the same things,” and I’d better not find out ART gave her a heads-up that he didn’t give me.
“What I mean is, I visually saw the boat as I was zooming up the driveway.”
“Did you expect this might happen?”
“I’m not surprised,” my sister says cryptically. “But as you know from your own cyber sleuthing, they were smart enough to go dark, no signals transmitted, and I’m betting they don’t even have phones with them.”
Nearing the dock, we’re detected by motion sensors, and the lights blink back on, illuminating the would-be assassins. Crumpled in a spreading puddle of blood, they have 4 holes each, head shots but not snake eyes or even close.
The deadly pair was a moving target as they frantically tried to ward off their winged attacker. Their faces are shredded as if a pterodactyl got them or someone with a pitchfork.
“Told you it was me who nailed them,” Carme starts going through the dead man’s pockets.
“I know I did,” and I’m reminded of my plaque from the Protective Services Academy for shooting a perfect score repeatedly.
But I’ve never been one to brag the way my sister does, and there’s no point in nagging her about not wearing protective anything including gloves. She just doesn’t care, and it occurs to me that I’m not hearing sirens. Looking back at the house, I see Mom watching through the dining room window, and she hasn’t called anyone, not the police, at any rate. And neither has Dad.