“Okay,” she said. “But how can we be sure that whatever night we do this, nobody will be there? I mean, they’ve got kids, right?”
“Two boys. Both away at college. Anyhow, I have the house phone number. There’s a pay phone just three blocks away. All we have to do is call. If someone answers, we leave.”
He unfroze the picture. They were looking at a different place now, a narrow lane overhung with trees, like a tunnel. A concrete wall running along one side, with gates and Dumpsters.
“The front of the house is too exposed and there are movement-activated security lights. This is the alley at the rear. There may be lights on the back of the house too, but if they come on, nobody will see. The whole yard is surrounded with trees.”
The picture was shaky and dim but as the camera was lifted to peep over the top of the wall, Abbie got a vague impression of the rear of the house. A swimming pool with a little whitewashed summerhouse, a sloping lawn with flower beds, some glass doors.
“There must be some kind of alarm.”
“In the house? Of course.”
“So how do we set the fire? If you break a window, the alarm will go off.”
He smiled.
“They have a cat. Don’t worry, the woman takes it with her wherever she goes. Right now it’s probably sunbathing in Florida. But in the kitchen door there is a little flap. We strap a can of gasoline to Sox’s back and send him in.”
“We what?”
He grinned. Rolf didn’t often make jokes and when he did they weren’t ever that funny but she still felt dumb for not getting this one. Sox was on the couch, with his head on his front paws, watching them. Rolf ruffled the dog’s ears.
“The mutt has to start earning his keep sometime, right?”
“Oh, baby, who’s Poppa calling a mutt?”
She gathered Sox up and cradled him. He wriggled and tried to scramble up to lick her face.
“I’ll have to work something out when I see it,” he went on. “I’ve got some better ignition sorted out but maybe this time I’ll have to use gasoline. Cut a hole and feed in a pipe. Anyhow, that’s my problem.”
Abbie’s heart was already galloping. This was a bigger deal than anything they had done so far. And while SUV dealerships and empty condos were somehow anonymous, this was personal. They were looking at the home of J. T. McGuigan of McGuigan Gas & Oil, the man responsible for trashing Ty’s ranch and ruining his parents’ lives and livelihood. And now the bastard was going to pay for it. They would burn his house to the ground. Abbie only wished—well, almost wished—that McGuigan could burn with it.
But the ELF was strict about the use of violence. She knew the guidelines by heart. It was legitimate to inflict economic damage on those who profited from destroying the environment. But you had to take all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human or nonhuman, a definition that sadly seemed to cover even criminal pigs like J. T. McGuigan.
Until June, when Rolf had first disclosed to her his secret life—or, at least, a little of it—Abbie had never even heard of the ELF. What he told her made her suspect he was just doing his usual evasive man of mystery thing. But she gradually came to conclude that there probably wasn’t a lot more to tell. The group was modeled, so Rolf told her, on the Animal Liberation Front, which targeted fur farms and vivisection labs. ELF members were people who believed, as he did, that the environmental movement had lost its way, had been emasculated and taken over by lawyers and organizations that had become almost as big and bad and bureaucratic as the very corporations and government departments that they were supposed to be fighting.
The ELF had no centralized structure, Rolf said, no leadership or hierarchy. It was just people following their own consciences, acting individually or in cells, as the two of them were doing. And as long as they kept within the guidelines, they could strike wherever and whenever they chose.
Torching McGuigan’s house had been Abbie’s idea and she was pleased and proud that Rolf had so readily embraced it. She was doing it for Ty and his parents, taking revenge on their behalf, sending a signal to McGuigan and all the other greedy, bullying, destructive bastards that what they were doing was not acceptable and would not be tolerated. There was, of course, another motive which Abbie would never dream of mentioning to anyone and only barely acknowledged to herself. It was that, by doing this for Ty, she might in time feel a little less guilty about rejecting him.
When she had gotten back from seeing him in May, he had called her almost every day, asking her to come again or saying he could come to Missoula. But she kept making excuses and now he hardly ever called. She hadn’t told him about Rolf or even hinted that there was somebody else in her life now. Maybe it would have been kinder if she had. But she didn’t want to hurt him and was too much of a coward. In any case, she had the impression that he had guessed. But, really, what the hell did it matter? That was then. He belonged to her old life. He was a sweet guy but she couldn’t be doing all that I love you shit.
Rolf switched off the camera and clicked the screen shut.
“So,” Abbie said, “when do we do it?”
NINETEEN
It was just how he had said it would be. They had driven by three times now in Abbie’s Toyota and seen the lights come on and go off at exactly the times he said they would. The car was parked in the driveway just as it had been in the video. Around midnight they drove back out along the highway a couple of miles to a gas station and bought some sandwiches and fruit and a bottle of water, then found a little park and took Sox for a walk and let him do his business.
Rolf always moaned about her bringing the dog along but Abbie refused to go without him. He was their lucky mascot, she said. And good cover too, because he made them look kind of homey, like a little family. And so far, on all three of their outings, the little guy had been good as gold, just curled up in the car and waited. The only concession Abbie made was to remove the collar tag with her phone number on it in case he got lost.
The weather all week had been sunny and warm but it was late September and the nights were getting crisp. The forecast had predicted clouds rolling in from the west and now they were, slowly blotting out the stars. They had left the van on a quiet street near some derelict land close to the freeway and at a quarter before two they went to collect it and parked the Toyota there instead. They put on their dark-colored jackets and checked that they had all they would need, then drove back and made a final pass of the house in time to see the upstairs lights go off at precisely nine minutes past the hour, just as Rolf had said they would. They parked near the phone booth three blocks away and Abbie waited in the van, humming a random little tune to calm herself while she watched him dial the number. He stood there, listening for a while, then hung up and walked casually back and got into the car again.
“Just an answering machine,” he said.
“Hope you left a message.”
She was trying to pretend she wasn’t nervous. He didn’t answer, just gave her one of his looks and started the engine. It occurred to her that some people left their answering machines on the whole time, even when they were at home. But she didn’t say anything. He’d already told her she was too neurotic about it and that he knew for sure that nobody was there. He’d checked. The wife and kids were away and McGuigan had flown down to Houston for some gas industry conference.
They took a different route back, through streets that looked much the same, and when they reached McGuigan’s street they drove on past and turned instead into the alley behind. Rolf shut off the headlights and they cruised slowly down the tunnel of overhanging trees, peering into the backyards of the houses and seeing not a single sign of life.
They stopped short of McGuigan’s back gate and turned off the engine and sat in the darkness and lowered the windows and listened. Somewhere, back along the alley in one of the houses they had passed, a dog was barking. But soon it seemed to grow bored and stopped and all Abbie could hear was the urgent pulsing of
her own blood. Sox was curled up watching them with wide eyes from his little bed in the back, wedged in beside the plastic containers of diesel and gasoline and the black backpack with all Rolf’s tools and ignition stuff in it.
They put on their gloves and their black beanies and Abbie checked her pockets again for the two aerosol cans of black paint. She had already figured out what she was going to spray on the walls of the summerhouse, to which, Rolf assured her, the fire wouldn’t spread.
“Ready?” he said.
She nodded.
“Cell phone off?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
The back gate was locked but the wall wasn’t hard to climb. Rolf jumped up and swung himself over and she handed him his bag and the fuel containers. Then he hoisted himself again and helped her up and over the wall and down into the yard. They crouched there for a few moments while their eyes got used to the darkness, their breath misting in the cool air. Abbie looked up. The clouds were thickening, a few stars glinting in the gaps. Rolf put the backpack on and picked up the two fuel containers.
“Keep close,” he whispered.
He moved quickly away to his right, keeping low, with his knees bent and his head and shoulders hunched forward. There was a path that led directly to the pool and the lawn but he led her instead over to the side of the yard and they headed up toward the house under the cover of the trees that grew along the fence, weaving among the bushes and the flower beds.
If there were any security lights they hadn’t yet come on. And soon Rolf was leading her past the pool and the summerhouse and over a low concrete wall and then along the edge of the lawn until finally they reached a paved terrace and the house itself and still no lights came on. Rolf put down the containers and swung the pack off and lowered it gently between his feet. They stood awhile, panting now, their backs flattened to the cold brick wall, listening. There was a distant drone of traffic but nothing more.
The door with the little flap in it was just four or five yards from where they now stood. Beyond it, jutting from the rear of the house, was some sort of sunroom or conservatory, with half-closed blinds and glass double doors. Rolf was about to move forward when, peering through the darkness, Abbie saw something. Inside the sunroom. In the shadows. The head and shoulders of someone standing there, looking out. She put a hand on Rolf’s shoulder.
“There’s somebody in there.”
He turned to look at her and she motioned with her eyes and he followed her gaze and for a long moment they both froze.
“It’s just a plant, for Christ’s sake,” he whispered.
He was right. She could see it now. It was just a rubber plant or some sort of palm. The room was full of them. She felt foolish.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” he said. “They’re away. Come on now, you bring the cans.”
He picked up the backpack and moved toward the door and squatted down beside it. Abbie followed with the fuel containers. She stood watching over his shoulder while he gently put a finger on the flap. It moved. Rolf looked up at her and grinned.
“See? He wanted to make things easy for us. Go, quick, do your stuff, this won’t take long. Stay down there, I’ll come find you.”
He began to unfasten the backpack. Abbie turned and headed back the way they had come, toward the summerhouse, still feeling like a complete idiot and so busy chastising herself that she forgot about the little concrete wall and tripped and fell headlong into a bush. One of the branches poked her in the face, narrowly missing her left eye, and she nearly cried out but somehow managed not to. She scrambled to her feet and made her way, more carefully now, to the summerhouse.
One of the walls was covered with ivy but there was another, facing the back of the house, that was perfect. It even looked as if someone had cleared and whitewashed it specially for the occasion. She pulled the black aerosol can from her jacket pocket and got to work.
Rolf had warned her not to write anything that might connect them in any way with Ty’s parents’ ranch or even with the area, so she sprayed two large black ELFs, one in each top corner, and along the bottom wrote Nature Destroyer and Oil Greed, No Need. Then, right across the middle of the wall she started to write Gas Gluttons Shall Be Punished but when she got to Be the paint ran out. As she was fishing the other can out of her pocket, she heard a rustle and a click behind her.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She almost lifted off the ground in fright. A flashlight was shining straight into her eyes and for a moment she couldn’t see a thing. Then she saw the muzzle of the shotgun. He had it pointed right at her chest.
“Don’t move. Don’t you fucking move! Okay? Just stay right where you are. I already called nine-one-one, okay? The cops are on their way, but if you move I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
Dazzled in the glare she could only get a dim impression of his face. But he was young, in his early twenties, maybe. She noticed he wasn’t wearing any shoes.
“Jesus, are you a girl?”
She nodded. And in that same moment she caught a glimpse of something moving behind him. If there was anybody with him, he surely would have called out. Maybe it was Rolf. It had to be. She tried not to let her eyes so much as flicker.
“What’s this?”
He was trying to read the wall behind her.
“ELF? Who the hell are you?”
And then she saw for sure that it was Rolf. He was creeping up behind the guy, getting close now. Just the slightest sound, the snap of a twig, and the guy would swivel and shoot. Maybe she should say something, try to distract him, make sure he didn’t hear.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry . . .”
“You’re sorry? Hey, that’s good.”
“Would you mind not shining that in my face?”
“Don’t fucking move, I said!”
“I’ll pay.”
“What?”
“I’ll pay. For the damage. Really. It’s just a joke, you know. . . .”
Rolf was right behind him now. He had something in his hand, a club of some kind, a piece of wood or a wrench maybe. But as he lifted it, there was a flash and a great thud up at the house and the guy turned to look and saw Rolf standing there about to hit him. He ducked to one side so that the blow missed his head and hit him instead on the shoulder. Rolf lunged for the shotgun and grabbed hold of the barrel. The guy dropped the flashlight and Abbie leapt forward and jumped onto his back and tried to get her hands around his neck.
The back of the house was all lit up now, flames leaping and darting from the kitchen door and the window beside it and then there was a second, much bigger, explosion and the sunroom windows blew out and now the fire was raging there too. Rolf and the guy were struggling for the gun, grunting and yelling and cussing, and Abbie was still on the guy’s back, yanking his head with all her might and pulling his hair. He hollered and screamed and tried to throw her off but still didn’t loosen his grip on the shotgun.
Then the gun went off. Abbie felt as if she had been kicked in the chest by a horse. The blast seemed to shred her eardrums. For a moment everything went still. Wide-eyed, she watched Rolf stumble backward, the house blazing behind him, and she was sure it was he who had been hit. Her arms were still locked around the guy’s neck but he wasn’t struggling anymore and so she slowly loosened her grip and through her ringing ears heard him groan and felt him start to crumple beneath her. He sank to his knees and she stepped back and by the light of the fallen flashlight saw the dark stain spreading on the back of his sweatshirt.
Then he began to make this terrible gurgling noise and she walked fearfully around him to stand with Rolf and saw the blood come rushing from the singed and smoking hole in the young man’s chest.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God.”
He was staring down at himself in disbelief and then he slowly lifted his eyes and stared at Abbie and opened his mouth as if he wanted to tell her somethi
ng.
Rolf grabbed her arm and began pulling her away. “Come on.”
“We can’t just—”
“There’s no time!”
He dragged her after him, down the path, toward the gate. Abbie tried to run but kept looking back at the man and at the flaming house beyond and twice she stumbled and Rolf had to stop and haul her from her knees. They reached the gate and it wasn’t locked, just bolted, and he slid the bolts and swung it open and then they were out in the alley and running toward the van. They hadn’t locked it for this very reason, so they might make a quicker escape. He opened the passenger door and pushed her inside and slammed it shut again then ran around to the driver’s side and got in and dug for the keys in his pocket.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
He couldn’t find them. There was a yell outside, someone shouting “Hey! Hey!” and they both looked back and through the rear window of the van saw a man running up the alley toward them. Rolf had found the keys now and was putting them into the ignition. The engine started first time but whoever was chasing them had reached them now and as the van started to pull away he wrenched open the back doors.
“Stop! Stop, you motherfuckers!”
He was no youngster, in his forties maybe, but big and athletic-looking. He was trying to climb into the back of the van which by now was moving away fast. Sox, about whom until that moment Abbie had completely forgotten, was standing in his bed barking. She reached out for him but he was too far away and too terrified to come. The guy had a knee on the sill of the van now and was trying to get the other one in. But they were at the end of the alley and Rolf yanked the wheel hard to the right and as they swerved out into the street, the van skidding and squealing and tilting on two wheels, the guy lost his grip and went tumbling like a rag doll away across the street. And with him went everything else in the back of the van, including Sox.