Chapter 38 SEAL
THIRTY-EIGHT
SEAL
Mabel
Hannibal’s ferocious bark woke me up with a start.
Tonks added her frantic barking while Hutch slipped from my arms in his bed.
It had been weeks, but it wasn’t only that Enstrom and Burress hadn’t yet been caught that was the reason why I spent every night at Hutch’s.
I knew this was my home.
Forever.
Hutch knew it too.
So I used my workshop, paid my rent and made sure everything was hunky-dory.
But when my lease came up, I wouldn’t be renewing.
I talked to Hutch about this (because, as you know, good relationships were built on healthy communication), and he agreed.
Our relationship was young.
We were both independent and did our own thing.
But he was going to build a workshop for me on his land and, “I’m not gonna wanna wait for over a year for us to make this decision we both know is already made. So fuck it, let’s do it.”
Hutch’s words.
Not romantic.
But they meant everything.
Now, I pushed up to an arm in the bed and mumbled, “Wha—?”
“Quiet,” Hutch said in a low tone I’d never heard from him, not even when he spoke to the dogs.
But it was a serious tone.
Very serious.
I could hear the puppies howling now.
It was only then I knew something wasn’t right.
“Out of bed,” Hutch ordered.
“What?” I still wasn’t with the program.
“Now,” he whispered, again in that tone, except it was more urgent, thus, I got with the program quickly and got out of bed.
It was way too cold to sleep in the nude, even if we’d had all kinds of fun after trick-or-treating (and Hutch even ate a Snickers bar, but our fun wasn’t about Snickers bars) so I had on his pajama pants and a cami, he had on some PJ pants too, but his chest was bare, therefore he was pulling on a Henley.
He slipped out of the room.
I heard him issue orders to the dogs as I wandered after him, feeling my skin tingle and my stomach sinking.
“Quiet, Tonks. Sit. Stay. Stay. Good girl. Hannibal. Quiet. Guard.”
I was in the hall when he showed there.
He grabbed my hand and pulled me into his office.
He went to a big, tall, locked cabinet, and my breath left me.
It was his gun cabinet.
I heard the beeps as he punched in the code, then threw it open.
He pulled out a magazine and handed it to me.
“And this,” he said, giving me Moxie’s laser pointer.
Then he hung something around his neck…
And yanked out a rifle.
Oh God.
“Hutch, is—?”
“Shh,” he shushed me. “Follow.”
Beginning to tremble, I shushed and followed.
He went to a spot in the hall, jumped, caught a string hanging down from the ceiling, and pulled down the steps to the attic, shuffling me back as the stairs unfolded in front of us.
“Up,” he ordered.
I scrambled up.
The area up there had a ceiling so low, you couldn’t stand, so I shuffled to the side to get out of his way, doing this stooped, as he came up and then pulled up the steps.
He squatted and produced his phone from thin air.
He hit buttons and put it to his ear.
“Yeah. Hutchison. Four four eight one CR Ten. I got intruders. Send units,” he said into his cell.
Intruders?
I knew it had to be something like that, but having him say it out loud…
I started shivering.
He beeped off his phone and ordered, “Keep down, baby, and follow me.”
He walked in a crouch to a dormer window.
When he stopped, he offered me what was around his neck.
I passed off the magazine and took the…whatever they were.
“Night vision,” he explained. “Strap them on, get low, on your belly. Stay low, angled away from the window, but get in a position you can see out,” he said.
I nodded, fumbling with the night vision goggles.
I mean…
Night vision goggles!
“Get a look outside,” he instructed as I kept fumbling. “Lock on one of them. When you do, tell me. Aim the laser pointer at him but don’t turn it on. Only do that when I say go. With me?”
I nodded.
“Words,” he grunted.
“Lock on. Aim pointer. Tell you. Turn on at go. With you.”
He took the goggles from me (I was hopeless), put them on me and said, “It’s gonna be weird. You’ll get used to it.”
Then he clicked them on.
He was right.
It was weird.
But I was too freaked to give a shit at that juncture.
“Belly. Position,” he whispered.
I got down to my belly on the dusty attic floor (Hutch had so little stuff, he didn’t have even that first box up here), angled to the side so I could see out.
Oh God.
Shit.
Shit.
There were five men creeping up to the house, and they were close.
They also had guns. I couldn’t tell if they were rifles or shotguns.
But they were guns.
Big ones.
“Hutch—” his name was shaky.
I looked to him, and he was like me, on his belly angled away from the window on the north side of the house (whereas mine was on the east).
But he had the butt of his rifle to his shoulder aimed out, and his eye was squinted to the sight.
“You’re good. You’re good,” he soothed me. “Lock on.”
Oh God!
I turned back to my window and locked on.
One seemed to break away in the direction of the dog pens.
Another broke away to head up to the front door.
“Please stay quiet, Tonks,” I muttered then, “I’m a go,” I said a little louder to Hutch.
“Good baby, stay locked,” Hutch said. Then I jumped when he boomed, “You’re trespassing! Leave immediately!”
One of the guys holding back aimed his gun at the attic, and it exploded.
It felt like the whole house shook. Debris flew from where the projectile hit the roof. I nearly screamed.
Tonks started barking.
“Go,” Hutch ordered.
I switched on my laser light, and it hit the chest of the guy beside the one who shot at us.
Another one shone through the night on the chest of the guy who shot.
That laser was the serious one.
They froze.
The man closer to the house started running toward it. The outside motion-sensor light came on, blinding me. I tore off my goggles in time to see the one going toward the pens begin to race around to the back of the house.
Hannibal started barking fiercely.
The tone of Tonks’s bark shifted, joining him.
The third guy seemed to be poising to run away.
A blast was heard from downstairs, and along with it the agonized howl of a dog.
My stomach twisted and the pain was insane.
Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod!
More ferocious barking, so ferocious, now I couldn’t tell which dog it was.
Zzsst!
The guy who shot first flew back.
Zzsst!
He went down.
The guy hesitating stopped hesitating and started running.
Zzsst!
He went down.
Another blast from downstairs.
My laser light started shaking.
Zzsst! Zzsst!
The guy I had my light pointed at went down.
I could hear barks, snarls, commotion downstairs.
Then I heard glass shattering from beside me.
I looked that way to see Hutch shoving shards of it away from the window frame with the butt of his gun.
He changed magazines and looked at me.
“Stay here until I tell you to come down,” he ordered.
I opened my mouth, but he slid out the upper story window in his pajama pants and a Henley and nothing else.
But his rifle.
I watched out my window, seeing him on the move, at first relieved the fall didn’t break his legs.
Then I did it stunned as Hutch made short work of running from one to the other to the other of the men on the ground, aiming his rifle at them at the same time grabbing their guns and tossing them out of reach.
After he did that, he quickly moved to the front of the house, rifle up, and he didn’t fuck around being stealthy.
He disappeared under the roof of the porch.
Within a couple of seconds, the barks and snarls stopped, and all I heard was puppies howling.
“Please let my man be okay. Please let our babies be okay. Please. Please,” I chanted, looking this way and that to see if I could find Hutch.
Nothing.
I kept watching, hyperventilating, shivering uncontrollably.
My body jerked violently when I heard a shotgun blast from the other side of the house.
Then another one.
My head whipped that way. “Oh my God, no.”
I was about to scramble to that side of the house to ascertain if I could see anything out of one of those windows when I noticed movement out of Hutch’s window.
I squat-walked over there quickly and looked out.
Hutch was dragging a body across the ground.
He dumped it next to another guy who was writhing.
He tossed the extra gun he held aside, again well out of arm’s reach, and calmly walked to one of the men who was trying to crawl away.
He grabbed him by the ankle, dragged him across the ground and dumped him next to his buddies.
I heard him say something, though I didn’t hear the words, before he went to the fourth guy and dragged him to the others.
Then he walked to the house, and not long later, the fifth guy was being dragged down the steps by my man.
“Mabel!” Hutch boomed after he dumped him with the rest.
I scurried to the attic door, pushed it down, the ladder unfolded, I scrambled down, and I ran to the living room.
Hannibal was on his belly, but he had his head up, nose pointed attentively to the door. He was bleeding from too many places. Tonks was whimpering, fussing around him and licking him.
I bent to them and put my hands on Hannibal.
When he felt my touch, he kept staring out the door, but he whimpered too.
My heart cracked.
“We’ll get you help, baby,” I promised, stroking his glossy fur. “Hang tight.”
I surged up and ran out the door.
“Put your boots on!” Hutch thundered the instant he saw me.
I skittered to halt, raced back, went into the kitchen, shoved my feet in my Uggs, grabbed Hutch’s brown and black insulated flannel and shrugged it on, then grabbed his sheepskin coat.
I turned around and raced right back out the front door.
Hutch was pointing his rifle at the five men.
I’d seen the pictures on the news.
One was Enstrom.
One was Burress.
What the fuck?
I went to him and handed him his jacket.
He handed me his rifle.
“Keep it on them.”
I hated guns.
I put the butt to my shoulder and aimed.
“Steady, May,” he said then, BOOM! I jumped because a shotgun blast pierced my ears.
I glanced at him and watched as he shook it, heard the ratchet, then, BOOM! he shot it into the sky.
He tossed it aside and grabbed another one.
I turned back to the line of wounded men.
BOOM! Shake. Cock. BOOM!
Headlights could be seen on Hutch’s lane.
He promptly picked up a shotgun, put it to his shoulder and aimed at the old blue truck trundling up the drive.
It stopped, the door opened, and a man shouted, “It’s me! Me! Hutch! It’s Paddy!”
“Get over here!” Hutch ordered.
The man ducked into his truck, came out with his own shotgun, and then he jumped out.
He was an older man, wearing what I was wearing, except with jeans, and obviously his boots weren’t Uggs. He jogged to the opposite side of the men from where we were standing and aimed his shotgun at them.
Hutch went through the last of the shotguns, unloading them this time without shooting, and it was only then I knew he shot them to get attention from his neighbors.
“Rifle, May,” he said.
“Which one shot Hannibal?” I asked, not giving him his rifle, nor taking it from the men on the ground.
“Rifle, May,” Hutch bit.
“Which one?” I screamed.
“Fuck you,” Enstrom spat, his voice angry, but tight with pain.
It was then I noticed his leg was a raw, bloody mess.
In the moonlight, I even thought I saw bone.
I turned the rifle around, strode to him and slammed the butt into his forehead.
He went down, out cold.
Hutch grabbed me around my belly and yanked me away, pulling the gun from my hands.
“Looks like you boys made the mistake of bringing shotguns to a rifle fight,” Paddy remarked.
Was I going to lose it and start hysterically laughing?
“Go, have a look at Hannibal,” he commanded. “Here’s my phone.” He put it in my hand. (Seriously, where did he keep that thing?) “Call Doc Simmons on her home cell. Tell her what happened and to meet us at her clinic.”
I nodded.
“Uh, Hutch, son,” the man with us, Paddy, called. “She needs to look at your feet. You’re bleedin’.”
My eyes darted down to his feet.
They were covered in blood.
They darted to his face.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Hutch—”
“Cut by the glass,” he explained. “Go look after our dog.”
“Baby—”
“Go,” he whispered. “I need you to check Hannibal.”
I stared in his eyes.
He needed me to check Hannibal.
And that was where I went.