Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

parked a few streets down from the decoy house. Wheeler was huddled somewhere near there, waiting to give me the go-ahead.

“I hear something,” she murmured. “A car.”

It was silent for a few seconds.

“It’s them!” she yell-whispered. “It worked!”

“Settle down,” I said. “Let me know when they both get out.”

“Okay…right now they’re parking, right in front of the house where we did…one of them got out. Shit, he’s huge.”

“That’s Dolf.”

“Who?”

“I’ll explain later. Was he driving?”

“No, he was in the passenger seat…Okay, Dolf is going into the house…he’s looking under boards and stuff.”

That’s what I’d hoped. I wanted them to think that I hid something in the house. Maybe something either Kim Barnes or Darcy Felding had given me.

“Okay, now the driver got out. He’s a little smaller. But he looks mean. Let’s call him Snake.”

I laughed. “Okay.”

“Now Dolf and Snake are both in the house.”

That was my cue.

I put the car in drive and slowly idled my way up the two streets, then parked. I grabbed the red canister out of the back and crept my way around the four houses to Dolf and Snake’s black SUV.

Wheeler was hiding behind a low wall across the street and I signaled for her to go to the car. I might need a quick getaway.

She darted toward the car and I uncapped the red gas can and began pouring the liquid on the hood of the SUV, then all over the roof, the tires, the back bumper, emptying all three gallons.

“Hey!”

I turned.

Dolf stood in the doorway of the house.

He pulled his gun from his hip and pointed it at me. He barked, “Don’t you do it.”

I think he was talking about the match in my hand.

Snake came up behind him. He was half a head shorter than Dolf. His head was shaved and he had a scar running down the side of his right cheek. I watched as his eyes took in the situation: Dolf pointing his gun at a handsome man holding a box of matches next to their SUV dripping in gasoline.

I could sense Dolf giving serious thought to pulling the trigger, putting three in my chest, but at the sound of Wheeler screeching up in the Range Rover, he slowly lowered the gun.

I flicked the match against the box and tossed it on the car. It erupted in an inferno of flames.

Both Dolf and Snake stood with their hands at their sides, seemingly dumbfounded. I guessed they hadn’t been bested too many times in their lives. Then again, they’d never crossed the likes of me.

I pulled open the door to the Range Rover. I turned and thought about yelling, “Now we’re even.”

But we weren’t.

Not by a long shot.

The gun Dolf was pointing at me.

He was holding it in his left hand.

The Blackwater goons knew where we stayed the first night so we switched hotels. And we upgraded from a Holiday Inn to the Crowne Plaza downtown.

At the front desk, I asked for two rooms.

Wheeler glanced up at me, then told the clerk, “Actually, we’ll just need the one.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The investigation was on hold while Randall and I busied ourselves fixing the irrigation and planting seed. Lady Justice would just have to wait. But I wasn’t worried, she’d waited four long years; she could wait another couple of weeks.

Just as I had the previous ten mornings, I woke up to the rooster’s crow, then made my way out to greet him. “I hate your guts,” I told him with a smile.

He replied with a couple clucks.

Besties.

I then made my way into the chicken coop and snagged a half-dozen fresh eggs. I scrambled them up, then divided the eggs equally among myself and the piglets.

Then I went for a quick jog. When I returned, Randall’s Ford Bronco was parked in front of the house. He was heaving a large bag from the trunk.

He turned as I approached and said, “This is the last of it.”

After fixing the irrigation over the course of the previous week, we’d spent the last few days seeding 150 acres of corn, which with the many eco-fuel companies out there, would fetch the highest price per acre. After much deliberation—at least on Randall’s behalf—we decided to seed the remaining 100 acres with sorghum, a grain that had increased in popularity over the past decade as a gluten-free substitute to wheat.

Needless to say, all the seeds were non-GMO.

The tractor and the attached ten-row seeder were parked twenty feet away, and Randall and I spent the next twenty minutes emptying the bags of seed into the ten separate bins.

“How long will this stuff take to grow?” I asked.

“I’ve never grown it before, but a buddy of mine said he usually does his harvest right around day ninety. It all depends on how hot it gets over the next month.”

This was a bit longer than the sixty to eighty days it took for corn to mature. According to Randall, the range accounted for temperature, precipitation, and several other variables.

Today was July 18th, which meant the corn would be ready for harvest sometime in September and the sorghum sometime in October.

Most people planted their crops in early June and we were definitely behind schedule. I asked, “Is it risky to wait until October to harvest?”

“Can be,” Randall said, his lips pursed. “We’ve hit freezing a few times in October, but it’s rare. We should be good, and really, if the weather stays the way it has been, we should harvest the last week of September.”

Randall and I spent the rest of the day trading off driving the tractor and refilling the seed.

At 7:00 p.m., after seeding half the remaining acreage, we called it quits. Randall and I had somewhere to be.

Wheeler and Randall’s wife had set up a date night.

We were going bowling.

Tarrin Lanes was fifteen bowling lanes plus an attached bar. The lighting was drab and the place smelled faintly of shoe polish. A baseball game was finishing up on the big screen in the bar, and