Chapter 25
Curiosity Killed the Cat Burglar
FIONA
“I thought we were going to meet tomorrow night,” Tre says as he ducks under the door to the storage unit and helps me push it back down. Like last time, he’s too close when he stands up. But unlike last time, I have to stop myself from moving toward him rather than stepping away.
Aside from the thirty minutes we spent walking along the trails near White Rock Lake, I’ve been keeping my distance and trying to be smart.
Special Agent Connor Smith is still skulking about.
I’ve seen him in the diner more than once when I’ve stopped to grab coffee before work, so my interactions with Tre have been limited to those brief exchanges coupled with stolen glances when I’ve gone into Betty’s on Sundays for brunch. All three of them.
Ewan had the day off on the last one. I guess the river was too low to run rafts, so he came with me. Amazingly, he didn’t make a single remark even though he definitely noticed me staring at Tre.
Exactly like I’m doing right now.
Shit, I chide myself as I retreat toward the workbench near the wall.
“Um, yeah. Tomorrow,” I say, swallowing and averting my eyes. “We actually need to get into the houses tomorrow night to get everything set up, so I wanted to go over the plan tonight.”
“Tomorrow night?” Tre’s voice is sharp.
“When else would we do it? We have to set everything up before the town hall, so we can both be there like normal, and we can’t do it during the day. Someone would be bound to see us.”
“So we’re going to… break in? While they’re home?”
I nod. “Yeah. Unless you’ve got some way to get them out of their houses in the middle of the night?
” I really tried to come up with something, because I’m also not thrilled about the idea of breaking into occupied houses—even if they’ll never know we were there, it feels wrong in a way the stuff we’ve done up until this point hasn’t.
“I…” Tre begins, then pauses, eyes downcast. “We… No. That won’t work,” he mutters.
“If it makes you feel better, I couldn’t come up with anything either. If you think of something in the next twenty-four hours, though, let me know.”
“How? We’re supposed to be keeping our distance, right?” He doesn’t sound any happier about it than I am.
“Call my office. Ask to speak to me. If Carol says I’m busy, leave a message saying that I left my wallet at the diner, and I’ll call you back.”
“You just came up with that now?” he asks, eyebrows raised, a skeptical look in his grey eyes.
I shrug.
A grin spreads across his face. “You’ve been thinking about me,” he says, sitting down on the stool closest to the storage unit’s door, leaving me with the one between him and the wall, same as last time.
Unlike last time, the bombs we’ll be using are different because I had to build them myself.
I tried more than once to get my dad to change his mind.
But his answer was the same every time: not as long as Tre’s involved.
I’m lucky he never bothered asking for the key to the storage unit back, so I at least had a place to work.
“Anyway,” I state, trying to force the conversation back on track.
“I’d like to go in around two in the morning.
People have usually been asleep for a couple of hours by that point, and it’ll give us plenty of time to get away.
Once we’re inside, it’ll take me about fifteen minutes to get everything wired up. ”
“How are we getting in?”
“I’ve got a lock-picking gun.”
“You’ve…” Tre shakes his head. “MacGyver would’ve picked the locks the old-fashioned way.”
My laughter bounces off the storage unit’s steel walls. “Yeah. You’re right,” I agree after a moment.
Tre sits beside me in silence as I explain the rest of the plan. “Okay,” he finally says when I’m done. “Want to spend the night tomorrow?”
“What?” I ask, the question taking me by surprise.
“You should spend the night. We’re already going to be together for most of it. Come to my place when we’re done.”
“I… Yeah. Okay.”
I squeeze the handle of the lock-picking gun, and a sharp snap echoes through the night.
“Jesus,” Tre murmurs as I flinch. “You didn’t mention how loud that thing is.”
I squeeze the handle two more times as I continue applying torque to the lock. I turn up the tension gauge on the gun and squeeze the handle another couple of times before the lock rotates, the bolt softly clicking over.
I turn the knob, waiting to see if an alarm goes off. Waiting to see if we need to make a break for the trees. I was careful when I built the bombs, and we’re both wearing gloves and masks now. If we need to leave it all and run, they won’t be able to get fingerprints off anything.
But the night is quiet, and the lights in the house stay off.
“We’re in.” I bend to pick up the container on the ground next to me. It’s a sealed paint bucket with wires coming out of it. It’s small enough that if I stash it in a closet, behind some coats or boxes, it should go unnoticed.
We step through the door, and I gently close it behind us.
In unspoken agreement, we pause again to listen, but the house is silent.
I take slow, sliding steps, trying to avoid bumping into anything as I move further inside, heading for the hallway where Tre’s drawing indicated there should be a small interior closet.
When I open the first door on the left, it’s pitch black. I can’t tell if it’s the closet I’m looking for or something else entirely. I hit the button on my headlamp, turning it on to the red light mode. Muted crimson floods the space. Tre’s drawings were right.
Hopefully the same will be true for the second house, I think as I set the container down and move some boxes out of the way, clearing space to slide it under the shelves once I’ve got everything wired up.
“How does that work, anyway?” Tre whispers.
“Can we discuss bomb-making later?” I reply at the same volume.
“Yeah, sure,” he agrees, fidgeting.
I connect the wires coming out of the paint can—which contains discretely packaged gasoline and ammonium nitrate—to the small microcontroller, my hands casting eerie shadows in the bloody light.
Having spent my entire childhood watching my dad fiddle with different breadboards and circuit implementations, plus reading at least fifty different DIY articles, made designing my own MOSFET-controlled switch on a timer easy.
I just hope I got the proportions of fuel to oxidizer right, and I hope the explosion and resulting fire will be as controlled as I intend them to be.
I checked my calculations multiple times, but I’d feel better about all of this if I’d been able to get my dad to agree to validate them since I’ve never designed an IED before.
As soon as I’ve got the paint can wired to the microcontroller, I connect the series of twelve AA batteries to the controller, and the timer starts.
It doesn’t look like anything—there are no flashing lights, nothing counting down—but in seventeen and a half hours, the circuit will open and energy will flow through the wires into the paint can, where they’ll spark against the steel plate inside, and the gasoline will ignite.
Exothermic decomposition of the ammonium nitrate will do the rest. The paint can will explode, sending what remains of the gasoline flying onto the house’s walls and floor. Then the whole thing will go up.
The houses at Highland Estates are spaced far enough apart that as long as the explosion isn’t any bigger than I intend, no other houses are likely to catch fire.
And all the lawns are so well watered that there’s next to no risk of starting a forest fire despite the droughts the entire state always seems to experience this time of year.
It should work exactly like I intend.
Should.
“That’s it. I’m done,” I whisper as I push the device closer to the wall and move the boxes in front of it, effectively hiding it from view.
“Okay. Let’s go,” Tre replies, leading the way back to the door we came in.
As soon as we’re outside and the door is shut, I insert the tension rod and lock-picking gun back into the lock.
“Again?” he asks.
“Do you want them to wake up and think, ‘Huh, wasn’t the door locked last night?’”
Tre shakes his head.
“Then yes, again.”
“Okay,” he agrees, his eyes scanning the area around us as a series of loud snaps reverberate across the neighborhood.
The lock slides into place after a few seconds. “Good?”
Tre nods. “Seems like it.”
“Okay. One down, one to go.”
We go to the second house and repeat the process, using a utility room instead of a closet this time to set up the bomb. As I’m wiring the battery series to the microcontroller, something brushes across my lower back.
“Shit!” I hiss, jerking away.
“What?” Tre whispers as I twist around. “Oh. Shit,” he mutters, his voice gone flat in shock.
We both stare silently at the black cat that’s rubbing its face against my thigh, purring.
“You didn’t say anything about a cat!” I accuse.
“I didn’t know there was a cat! Obviously!”
“Did you ask?”
“About cats? Why would I ask about cats?” Tre shoots back. “Who brings a cat on a work trip? I checked to make sure there were no other people living in these houses, not pets.”
“What about the other house?”
“What about it? I didn’t see any animals. No food or water bowls. Did you?”
“No, but until this cat showed up, I didn’t know there were any here either,” I tell him as I scratch its ears.
“Well, we can double-check before we leave,” Tre says, sounding annoyed. “What are we going to do with this one?”
“I don’t know. Take it with us?”
A crease forms between his eyebrows. “You want to steal their cat?”
“Well, we can’t leave it here!”
“What if we just put it outside when we leave?”
“So it can get eaten by a coyote?”
Tre sighs. “Fine. We’ll take it with us.”
“Go check the rest of the house. Make sure there’s not another one,” I order.
“You want me to—” Tre shakes his head and then turns and walks away.
“That’s right,” I say to the cat as it rolls onto its back. “You’re going on an adventure.”
We’ve been silently trudging through the state forest along a series of interconnected logging roads and hiking trails when Tre finally says, “What are we going to do with it?” as he stares at the cat in my arms.
“Batman.”
“What?”
“His name is Batman,” I clarify. “It says so on his collar.”
And Batman is starting to feel really heavy.
I’ve been carrying him for over an hour and a half.
Based on the amount of squirming he’s doing, he’d prefer if I put him down.
I don’t know what he’d do if I did though, and we’re not that far from my truck now.
This time, it actually made sense to drive and then cut across the state forest land on foot.
If we’d tried to bike this route, it would’ve been more than forty miles on the back roads.
If we’d taken the more direct route up the highway, we would’ve been seen.
There’s no way they’ll connect my truck to the houses catching fire with so many hours between the events and so much distance between the locations.
“Of course it is,” Tre grumbles. “So what are we going to do with Batman?”
“I don’t know. Want a cat?”
“Yeah, I’m sure it’ll work out really well for me if the sheriff shows up at my apartment to ask me some questions and sees Batman lurking inside.”
I sigh. He’s got a point. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll drive over to the nearest Walmart so I can get a litter box, and I’ll take him home with me. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can get Ewan to take him for a couple of days until I can figure something out. Rain check on spending the night?”
Tre glares at Batman, muttering something under his breath, and Batman purrs in my arms.
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” I say.
“Are you free this weekend?”
“Why?”
“Well, if I’m taking a rain check because Batman had to come slinking out of the shadows, I want to reschedule now.”
“Saturday night?” I ask after considering it for a moment.
“Alright,” Tre agrees.