Some Like It Hawk(107)

Spike was fine. Lieutenant Wilt was not. He was sprawled on his stomach with Tinkerbell standing on his back, growling in a deep rumble whenever he twitched a muscle. Spike was dancing around the pair of them, barking in triumph.

“Good dog!” I said. “Stay! Guard him!”

I considered stopping to tie Wilt up. But that would take time. And I had no idea how much or little time I had. He was safe with the dogs for now. If Spike took a few chunks out of him, I didn’t think anyone would complain.

I patted down Wilt’s pockets. I couldn’t find anything that looked like a detonator device. Only his wallet and his cell phone. Of course, I had no idea what a detonator device looked like. Maybe he could do it with his cell phone. I put the wallet back and pocketed the phone.

Or maybe he had it on a timer.

“How are you detonating the courthouse?” I asked.

His answer was singularly uninformative, and if he’d uttered it on network television it would have come out as one long bleep.

I whirled to see if there was anyone else in the tent to help. No, apparently they’d gone off to watch the fireworks, leaving the dogs to mind the trapdoor. They hadn’t even tidied up—the whole tent was littered with stuff from the history pageant. A British redcoat’s uniform. Several oversized quill pens. Assorted reproduction guns.

Guns. I should go and retrieve Hamish’s gun. Maybe that would make Wilt more cooperative. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to brave the tunnel again.

An idea struck me. I grabbed one of the stage guns—a sleek musket with a bayonet attached to the muzzle. I ran to stand where Wilt could see me.

“Let’s try again. How were you planning to detonate the device?” I asked. I shoved the bayonet right next to his eyes, so he could see it, but I hoped a little too close for him to see that it wasn’t sharpened.

He looked up at me and grinned.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Given time, I could probably have extracted the information from him, with Tinkerbell’s and Spike’s help. But time might be the one thing we didn’t have. There could be a timer. Or some third confederate with a detonator.

I raced out of the tent.

Rose Noire was standing about ten feet away.

“Call the chief!” I shouted to her. “They’re planning to blow up the courthouse!”

“Who?” She looked at me strangely, and I realized I was still holding the musket.

“Just tell him!” I said. “It could go up any minute!”

She pulled out her cell phone and began punching buttons.

I ran toward the courthouse. The wide marble steps were packed with people. People were standing on the plaza at the top of the steps, and the street below was also crowded with people.

“Everybody out!” I shouted. “Evacuate! Evacuate!” I repeated it a couple of times, and I wasn’t even sure anyone heard me.

I spotted Aida at the top of the steps. I raced up to her, earning quite a few harsh words from the people I bumped into or stepped on.

“The Evil Lender has wired the courthouse to blow,” I shouted in her ear. “We need to get these people off the steps. And Stanley Denton’s inside.”

Aida sent another deputy inside to look for Denton and began trying to help me. But we didn’t make much headway until Seth Early figured out what we were trying to do and deployed Lad, his Border collie. Lad’s efforts tipped the scales in our favor. Within minutes, he had several hundred tourists on their feet and moving. And when Aida took out her service revolver and fired several warning shots into the air, the tourists really took off.

Then two police cars pulled up, sirens shrieking and lights flashing, and Sammy and Vern Shiffley leaped out and helped guide the flocks of tourists into a more orderly evacuation. We had the steps clear and were working on the road when suddenly the music reached a huge crescendo and an enormous “boom!” shook the air.

I dropped to the ground and covered my head, hoping a huge chunk of courthouse wasn’t going to fall on me.

Then I felt someone shake my arm.

“It’s okay, Meg.” Aida. “It’s only the cannons and the fireworks.”

I lifted my head and looked around. Dozens of people, like me, had dropped to the pavement to shelter in place.

I rolled over onto my back and watched the firework show. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I normally would have. But when it was all over and the courthouse was still in one piece, I got up, still a little shaky on my feet, and nodded my agreement when I overheard several townspeople say that this had been the most exciting Fourth in years.





Chapter 44




“At least you did get to see the fireworks,” Michael said, for about the seventeenth time. I didn’t mind. I’d figured out right away that what he would have said, if little ears were not around to hear, was “Thank God you weren’t shot, buried alive, or blown up.”