The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [92]
“Did he handle the key?” Joe asked, a little confused.
“No, but he saw where I kept it.” She waved her arm around. “You see how deserted this place is. He could’ve come in later and swiped it anytime. That’s why I didn’t connect the two events. They happened days and days apart.”
Joe smiled. “Do you remember the son’s name?”
She held up a finger. “Hang on.”
She moved to a computer console and quickly typed in a few commands. “I remember he was listed as next of kin. The mom’s name was Doris Doyle—or still is, I should say. She’s upstairs, hanging on by a thread. But the son had a different last name.” She straightened suddenly. “Here we are—Ellis Robbinson.”
It meant nothing to Joe.
“Too bad,” Ann Coleman added.
“What is?”
“I liked him,” she said sadly. “He was really nice to his mother.”
Ellis stood morosely beside Nancy in the dark shadows by one of the smaller metal outbuildings of Bennington’s municipal airport. Just ahead of them, Mel was pointing out the layout and talking in a hushed but excited voice. Both Ellis and Nancy had been here before, metaphorically speaking, more times than they could count—they’d even come to dub it “Mel’s pep rally,” where he briefed them on the next great adventure.
But whereas they’d once been as adrenalized as he, not to mention as careless of any consequences, now they felt only dread. Like hapless kids led by a dominant bully, they were reduced to finding solace solely in holding hands whenever Mel turned his back.
“Pay attention,” he was telling them, “I don’t want you fucking this one up.”
With a last squeeze of Nancy’s fingers, Ellis moved up alongside his erstwhile friend. So far, neither he nor Nancy had the slightest idea what he had cooked up, although Ellis was gloomily confident that it tied into the death of High Top the other night.
Mel pointed into the darkness north of them. “The runway’s out there. Anything that lands has to take one of the taxiways over to this side, where they park the planes. See there?”
They shifted their attention to the large rectangular apron boxed in by the parallel taxiways, the landing strip, and the buildings. As if to prove Mel’s point, several planes, including an old, hulking DC–3, were sitting there like oversize toys abandoned by a giant child after bedtime. Other planes were scattered elsewhere as well. The night was clear and warm, sparkling with stars. On the far side of the strip, the floodlit Bennington Monument shone eerily in the distance, a misplaced museum piece from an Egyptian exhibition, surrounded by the soft glow of the town’s lights behind and slightly below it. The utter peacefulness of the scene, as much as his yearning to be elsewhere, distracted Ellis from focusing on what Mel was telling him.
“It won’t matter what road they use to get off the runway, since they’re not all that far apart. My guess is, it’ll be the eastern one, ’cause it’s closer to the parking lot. Anyhow, the key isn’t the place; it’s the time—we have to hit ’em just as they’re unloading. That’s when they’ll be the most distracted.”
“Won’t it be when they’re most on the lookout?” Ellis asked, his attention suddenly drawn.
“You watch too much TV,” Mel countered. “This isn’t Miami Vice, for Chrissake. We’re going to be the ones with the machine guns, not those losers. They probably won’t even be armed.”
Ellis frowned in the darkness. Everybody had guns in Vermont. It was the only state in the Union with virtually no gun laws of its own. And a bunch of drug dealers weren’t going to be packing?
“We’re talking about drugs, right?”
Mel sighed. “No, stupid. We’re talking about illegal squirrels. No shit.”
Ellis ignored him in favor of more pressing concerns. “Why don’t we wait till they’re in the car, halfway down Airport Road?” he countered. “That way, they’ll be contained. The road is dark and isolated. We could ram them, maybe, and be on them before they knew what hit them.”
Ellis could just make out Mel’s scowl in the ambient light.