The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [64]
She reached out and squeezed his thigh, quickly returning her hand to the wheel. He made no overt movement, but she noticed the hint of a smile and was happy to count it as progress. This might turn out to be the labor of a lifetime, but however subtle the signs, she was content to think she wasn’t working alone.
Mel Martin left his pickup and looked around cautiously, watching for anything out of the ordinary. He was on the edge of town, parked off the road behind an abandoned tumbledown barn, the likes of which decorated the Vermont roadsides like billboards did farther south, in the urban flatlands.
Except that up here they weren’t advertising anything besides the slow disintegration of a culture.
Satisfied, Mel approached the back wall of the barn and removed a few carefully piled-up boards barring the door, noting by the tiny indicators he’d left behind that they hadn’t been disturbed since his last visit.
He stepped inside, glancing up at the small flurry of birds taking flight as they did every time he entered, their tiny outlines flickering against the sky as they streaked out through the shattered roof high overhead.
In the resumed quiet, he crossed the debris-strewn floor to another pile of boards, which he methodically shifted to reveal a small trapdoor. This he hefted to one side before removing a flashlight from his back pocket and shining it into the hole at his feet. He smiled at what he saw—an undisturbed and innocuous sprinkling of twigs and dry leaves that only he knew disguised the rusty jaws of an open bear trap.
No one had been here.
Gingerly, he lowered himself into the hole, with difficulty avoiding the trap and, bent over double, worked his way for about ten feet toward the cellar’s earthen wall.
There he unhooked an ancient Coleman lamp from an overhead beam, took his time lighting it and then, by its hissing glare, addressed his final obstacle, a beaten-up piece of plywood that looked as if it had all but become one with the dirt.
Behind it, in a small hand-dug cavern, lay the box that he and Ellis had removed from the armory.
He pulled it out, sat back on his haunches, and flipped back the lid to reveal the two M–16s.
“Hey there, my babies,” he murmured, running his fingertips across one of them as he might have stroked the head of a child. He’d been here several times after he’d hidden them away, unbeknownst to Ellis or Nancy. He visited them as a collector might, handling them, admiring them in the harsh gleam of the light, and working the actions with practiced ease. But whereas a collector often conjures up the culture that yielded his prize, Mel saw only the future—when he’d use them to secure something better.
Along these very lines, he didn’t replace the weapons in their box for the next time. Instead, he fitted them awkwardly under his arm and began retracing his steps, careless of the open box and its gaping hiding place.
Time was getting near, and he wanted these close at hand.
Chapter 13
Lester Spinney had been to Fall River only once before, to take his family to see the U.S. Navy vessels moored there as a floating museum. Wandering happily for hours around the harbor, touring a battleship, a submarine, and assorted other artifacts, including an unexpectedly large PT boat—Lester’s favorite—he’d been perpetually aware of the gritty, rough-and-tumble industrial city looming just over their shoulders, poised as if threatening to spill across the nearby docks and bridges and take them all down into the opaque dark-colored water.
The feeling must have been catching—much as he and the family had enjoyed the outing, none of them had suggested afterward extending it into the town itself.
Now, wrapped in heavy traffic, Lester was far from the bulkily elegant vessels caressed by the ocean’s breeze, immersed instead in a tangle of crowded, stifling back streets, a map clutched in one sweaty hand as he negotiated looming obstacles with the other.
Spinney’s idea of a city was his hometown of Springfield, Vermont, where a traffic