Chapter Three
Joey, sitting at the piano, began to tap out the keys for the beginning of the 5th Symphony of Beethoven, deciding to sing along. “Dun dun dun dun; dun dun dun dun…”
“Joey,” Mike growled warningly.
Sighing, Joey quit playing the dramatic 5th Symphony and moved onto Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. When Lance threw a couch pillow at him, he shrugged and started playing Fur Elise instead.
“JOEY!” the guys and the bodyguards all shouted at once.
Rolling his eyes, Joey laid off the keys.
It was deathly silent without the distraction of Joey on the piano. Everyone glanced around at each other uneasily. What were they supposed to do now, hang around like sitting ducks?
“So, what now?” Lance asked, looking at his sleeping child. He would easily give up his life for this little kid, but everything was out of his control. For someone who was always IN control, it was the worst sort of anxiety, the worst feeling of helplessness.
“Why aren’t there more agents up here to begin with? I thought there were like ten agents on this case,” Devon wondered aloud. She remembered reading from the files that there were six of the Vegas agents set up in Carson City, and had been joined by two of the Reno agents.
“We were taking shifts; Mendoza and I have been staying here, with other agents coming in every once in awhile to check out security, and give us a break. They’re all down in the City right now; the last two left right before the storm, and the replacements don’t come until morning.”
Devon gave Callaway a disdainful look. “And this is how the FBI protects against a known kidnapper?”
“It’s not like WE have anything in common with the Cougar…WE don’t have the same calendar as him. Sorry we didn’t know he was going to strike.”
Mendoza, as usual, stepped in before they could really get going in their argument, telling them both to shove it. Still, it hurt Devon to realize that these people thought her the same kind of person as the Cougar, following the same schedule. She got up from her spot by the fire, walking towards the window, wondering where the Cougar was, having no doubt that he was out there somewhere. Waiting for just the right moment. She tried to brush the goose bumps off her arms.
“Callaway, call Carson and let them know what’s going on,” Mendoza ordered as he pulled Devon away from the window. “And until we know that he’s gone for sure, stay away from the windows. We don’t know what kind of weapons he might have. Or what his plan is. So until we know for sure, take every precaution. Stay here in the living room, and in sight of each other at all times.”
“Mendoza, the phone’s down,” Callaway said quietly as he put the phone back into its handset. As he said it, the lights in the cabin went out.
The girl on the couch finally noticed that something was wrong, as she lost her reading light. The glow of the fire lit the room, giving it a glow that would have been warm if the circumstances had been different. As it was, the fireplace glow gave the room a creepy light.
Devon watched everyone sit up straight or rise from their seats in much the same way they had when she had first come into the room. They looked at each other uneasily. The phone down, the lights out…
“Hey, I’ve seen this movie,” Joey complained. “The next thing that happens is we lose our food and water and start turning on each other…”
“Joey, shut it!” Mendoza commanded. Joey rolled his eyes, but sat back down and stayed quiet.
“Do you…” Justin asked, clearing his throat. “Do you think this is the storm or the Cougar?”
Mendoza and Callaway looked at everyone looking at them. It was Mendoza who answered. “The storm has been going strong for awhile, and though it might have finally caused the power outage, it’s safer to assume that this is the Cougar and be prepared. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Great. We’re isolated out in the middle-of-freaking-nowhere with a madman on the loose outside,” Lance said, sitting on the couch with his son again. It didn’t look like he was ready to leave the boy’s side anytime soon.
“Hey, wait, I really HAVE seen”” Joey started. Objects from around the room flew in his direction again, but at the same time, Joey’s comic relief lightened the despairing mood in the room.
Mendoza sat down to think as everyone began to relax again. There wasn’t much they could do, and panicking certainly wasn’t going to help anyone. Devon leaned against one of the round staircases and watched everyone getting back to where they had been before Callaway’s announcement and the subsequent black out. She was just glad that they had a fire; not that she would admit it to anyone, but she was scared like nothing else of the dark, which she supposed had something to do with her grandmother always telling her scary stories at night instead of comforting fairytales.
Justin sat next to the girl, whom Devon assumed was here with him and NOT one of the guy’s sister out to spend Christmas with them. And she assumed right, she decided, as they began to make out on the loveseat. Joey tried to go back to eating his sub sandwich, but it had already disappeared. Lance pulled his book back out, but realized pretty quick that it was a dumb idea since he couldn’t see anything. And since Chris couldn’t play his videogames anymore, he sat down on the floor in front of Lance and Greg, leaning back against the couch. Joey soon sat next to him. Devon supposed that they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves without electricity to entertain them. They stared into the fire instead. The bodyguards went back to talking among themselves as they tried to set the tree up to the left of the fireplace, sending a shower of pine needles down onto the lovebirds on the sofa every once in a while. Devon could see that neither party noticed.
She was shivering a few minutes later as JC joined her in her vantage point. Her clothes were soaked from the inside out from all the melted snow, and without the adrenalin rush to keep her warm, even JC’s sweater wasn’t helping anymore.
“You okay?” JC asked, leaning against the railing and crossing his arms in front of him as he looked at everyone in the room. Lance, Joey, and Chris had found a Monopoly game in the corner of the room and had pulled it out and were setting it up on the coffee table in front of the fireplace.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she lied, still shivering. She glanced at Justin and the girl. “Do they ever come up for air?”
“Who?” JC asked, then followed her line of vision. “Oh, Justin and Marissa. Sure, eventually. But he just met her at the Victoria’s Secrets Fashion Show, so they’re still going at it all the time.”
“Victoria’s Secrets Fashion Show?” Devon asked, her eyebrows raised.
“Yeah. I think Justin finds a girl there every year.”
“Wait…I thought he was with””
JC snorted. “Don’t ask.”
They were silent for a minute, during which Devon’s chattering increased. “Hey, do you need some extra clothes?” JC asked, finally realizing that she wasn’t exactly warm.
Devon looked JC up and down. He had about six inches on her. “I really don’t think you’re my size.”
Laughing, JC shook his head. “I’ve got some sweatpants and a t-shirt that you can fit into. I’d offer some of Marissa’s clothes to you, but something about her tells me that she’s not the type to share.”
“And something tells me that I wouldn’t exactly be comfortable in her clothes,” Devon said dryly. At the moment, it looked like Marissa was wearing a Victoria’s Secrets dress and little else. The dress was a skintight red, with a fluffy white ruff around the sleeves and neck. Devon could imagine the rest of her wardrobe. “Hey, Mendoza, can I run upstairs to get some new clothes and change?”
Mendoza looked up from his thoughts and began speaking before Callaway could say anything, which Mendoza knew he would do. “Yeah. Stay away from the windows though, and don’t take too long. You going up with her, JC?”
JC nodded as Devon started up the stairs, following behind her. She stopped at the top and allowed him to pass her since she didn’t know which room was his. He led her to the far room and headed into the darkness.
Devon halted at the doorway. There was very little light coming in from the window, and the fire downstairs lit the upstairs bedroom not at all. She could vaguely see the outline of JC turn towards her when she didn’t follow him in.
“Hey, we’ve got a bathroom in here that you can change in,” JC offered as he searched through the dresser drawer for the promised sweatpants and t-shirt. She still stood in the doorway. “Do you want to change in here or the downstairs bathroom?”
“Oh, well. I was…going to go…and see if there was a tank-top of Marissa’s that I could borrow to wear under your shirt,” Devon said, grasping for straws as to why she wouldn’t enter the dark bedroom. What kind of adult was still scared of the dark?
“Oh, okay, her and Justin’s room is down at the end of the hall, where we first came up the stairs. Do you want to take these and change in their bathroom?”
Devon nodded, then shook her head again. “Umm…can you…will you come with me to get the shirt?”
JC gave her a weird look, but agreed. He pulled his bedroom door shut behind him and they walked down the hall to Justin and Marissa’s room. Devon paused outside their door and peered over the banister, at the couple still busy making out on the loveseat. “Hey, Marissa, can I borrow a tank top?”
Devon got the expected response, an agreeing wave of the hand, not paying any attention to the request. Shrugging, Devon opened the bedroom door, but still didn’t go in. “Hey, JC, can we go downstairs and get a flashlight or a candle or something to help me find the shirt?”
“Yeah. We have some Christmas candles. I think they’re in my room, hold on.”
Staying where she was, Devon watched JC disappear back into his room and come back in a few seconds holding a lit red candle. Even with the candle, Devon didn’t want to enter the room by herself. “Will you hold the candle for me while I look for the tank top?”
“Sure,” JC said, finally sensing that she wasn’t about to enter a dark room all by herself. It was something that she would never admit aloud, her fear of the dark, but for some reason, she wasn’t uncomfortable with JC figuring out her unreasonable fear. Maybe it was because she knew so much about him that his knowing this little factoid about her didn’t cause Devon too much grief. Hell, she knew he had a weird fear of shots, maybe he didn’t think her fear of the dark was all that odd.
JC pointed out what he recognized as Justin’s stuff on top of one of the dressers, so Devon started looking through the other one. She found a black tank top pretty quickly, and finally took the offered clothes from JC. Opening the door to the bathroom that Justin and Marissa shared with the bedroom next to theirs, she noticed the small circular window. Again, not much light. She didn’t know how she was going to manage this.
Trying to conquer her fear, she entered the large bathroom and closed the door almost all the way, leaving a small crack, with the tiniest shaft of dim light coming into the room from JC’s candle. He stood right outside the door with it. Turning away from the door, Devon took off his sweater, chanting to herself silently that she could do this. She wasn’t a little kid anymore, there weren’t any monsters in her closet, nothing hiding in the floor waiting to grab her ankles. With this last thought, she hopped up on the bathroom sink, scared out of her mind.
She didn’t dare turn around, knowing that the bathroom mirror would be above the sink, right behind her. It was the one thing that scared her about the dark more than anything else: mirrors. She could remember her grandmother’s tales about spirits in the mirror, and had tried playing Bloody Mary in their bathroom once. A greenish glow had appeared in the mirror in the middle of what she thought was merely another one of her grandmother’s games, and Devon had flipped, running to the bathroom door and yanking it open. Only, it didn’t budge and Devon had grown hysterical trying to get the door open, terrified of turning around and seeing what might be in the mirror.
Remembering all this, Devon started to freak out again and jumped off the sink, pushing the door open with a great shove and tearing out of the room, running straight into JC. His arms went around her in an effort to keep his balance, hold the candle, and stop Devon from running him down.
“Devon, you okay?” JC asked. He could feel her shuddering and knew instinctively that it wasn’t from the cold anymore. “Devon? What’s going on, was there something in the bathroom?” Thoughts of the Cougar instantly filled his mind and he tried to get Devon to look up from the front of his shirt.
“No. No, there was nothing in there,” Devon mumbled against his shirt front, trying to get a hold of herself and stop the chills that were coursing through her. She started chanting in her mind again, that there was nothing in the dark to be afraid of, that she could handle this. It didn’t work any better this time than it had the first.
“Devon, what happened? You’re still in your soaked clothes.”
“I know. I know. I just…I freaked. I’m sorry,” Devon said, her hands still clenched in the folds of his shirt.
“No, hey, that’s alright. It’s understandable at a time like this,” JC murmured comfortingly as he rubbed small circles on her back with his free hand.
“It had nothing to do with the Cougar. Just something that happened when I was little. I...I just don’t like dark rooms, especially bathrooms.”
“Okay. Well, you can change in here, if you want. I’ll stay with the candle, but I’ll turn around. Does that sound okay?” JC asked, his hand still on her back. Her face was buried in his shoulder, but he could feel her nod.
“Can you get the clothes? I left them on the bathroom counter.”
“Of course. Do you want to keep the candle while I do that?”
Devon nodded again. JC would have gone to get the clothes, but she didn’t show any signs of being ready to let go of his shirt, and she felt oddly right with his arms around her. Moving his hand to her hair, he started stroking it, slowly, comfortingly, waiting till she was ready to let him go before stopping.
Another few minutes passed before she started to unclench her fingers. She slowly lowered her arms to her sides and JC ran his hand over her hair one last time before letting her go. Handing the candle over to her, he went into the bathroom quickly, feeling for the clothes as his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. He wondered what could have freaked her out so much that she had run from the room almost hyperventilating. Not wanting to leave her alone too long, he quickly went back, and took the candle from her still shaking hands. He saw that the wax had dripped onto her fingers, but it didn’t look like she had even noticed.
“Here you go,” he said quietly, passing the clothes over to her, and turning to face the bedroom door. Having the candlelight moved further away from her knocked Devon out of her near-comatose state and JC heard her changing in a hurry. She tapped him on the shoulder when she was done. Silently, JC took the clothes from her and handed her the candle again, then walked into the bathroom and hung the clothes over the shower rack. Realizing as he hung her clothes up that he had forgotten about getting her socks, he went back into the bedroom.
“Do you need to borrow some of Marissa’s socks or anything like that? She probably has a pair of slippers or something.”
Devon shook her head. “Not really, as long as you don’t mind me stepping on the bottom of your sweatpants,” she said, pointing to her feet. JC looked down and saw that his sweatpants were long enough to entirely cover her feet.
“I don’t mind at all. You ready to head back downstairs?” At her nod, JC put a hand on her lower back and ushered her from the room. He took the candle from her before she could get more melted wax dripped onto her hand and blew it out when they got out into the hallway.
They went down the stairs slowly, with Devon in front and being careful not to slip on the polished wood stairs with the sweatpants covering her feet.
“Took you long enough,” Callaway grumbled as they descended into the living room. JC gave him an odd look, wondering why the two of them always seemed to be at each other’s throats. Devon was still too shaky from being in the dark bathroom to start one of their arguments. After putting the candle in one of the candleholders on the fireplace mantle, just in case someone needed to use it to go to the bathroom later on, JC moved back to the staircase where Devon had stayed.
“All right,” Callaway said, looking somewhat disappointed that he hadn’t gotten a rise out of Devon. “Well, while you two were up there, Mendoza and I decided to go for help.”
This finally got Devon’s attention. When JC had joined her at the staircase, she inched herself closer to him until she was pressed against his side, still chilled from what had happened up stairs. Although she did have to admit that being in JC’s clothes had an oddly warming affect on her. But now she turned to Callaway. “Going for help? In a snowstorm. Now I’m sure Joey’s seen this one.”
“We don’t exactly have much choice, now do we, Devon? It’s not like the Cougar can go anywhere,” Callaway started, but was cut off by Mendoza before anything could get started.
“We have to do something, Devon. We have no way of contacting the Reno office, and anyone who comes in is a potential target of the Cougar’s. If we go out first, we have a chance of getting away undetected. The nearest neighboring estate is about three-quarters of a mile to the west. With any luck, their phones won’t be down, and we can call in reinforcements and apprehend this guy once and for all.”
“So the two of you are just going to run off to play Hero, leaving us alone here?” Devon asked, growing angry. This was the exact reason she couldn’t stand most of the agents that she came across in the Vegas office. They were all so assured of their own superiority, their own skill, their own power that they sometimes threw caution to the wind, so sure that FBI Agents, of all people, couldn’t be taken down.
“You’re hardly alone,” Callaway pointed out dryly. “You’ll have three highly-trained bodyguards here to protect you.”
“How do you think you’re even going to be able to find the neighbor’s house? I could barely find this house walking from the front gate.”
“You found it because of the lights. We’ll just head west until we see some houselights and follow those,” Mendoza intervened.
“And if their electricity is down? Then what?”
“Then we just keep walking west,” Callaway said. “We will have some flashlights, we just won’t turn them on until we’re far enough away that the Cougar won’t be able to follow us.”
“Repeat after me, BLIZZARD! You weren’t raised out here like I was, Callaway. You have no idea how easy it will be to get lost out there.”
“Oh, please, you were raised in Vegas! You have no idea either. The next house is just over the fence, so if we lose our way, we walk till we hit a fence and follow it till we see the house. You guys will have to keep candles burning in the windows in case we need to find our way back. The house only has two flashlights, which we’re taking, but plenty of candles, so you should be fine.”
“This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard!” Devon protested again.
“Well, we don’t have too many others,” Mendoza said tiredly, shrugging into his winter jacket and slipping a hat on. Both he and Callaway already had their ski pants on, and Callaway was already to go with his jacket, hat, gloves, and scarf, holding onto both of the flashlights.
Devon could only shake her head as the two agents went out the backdoor, guessing that the Cougar was watching the front door and hoping to escape his notice.
The room was eerily silent as the guys went around, lighting candles in the window while trying to stay out of what could possibly be the Cougar’s sight.
“Why didn’t you guys say anything?” Devon asked, frustrated after all the windows had been lit and they were all back in their previous positions, even Justin. The bodyguards were still struggling to get the tree set up.
Mike looked up from his position under the tree, trying the screw the damn thing into the stand so it would be straight and less likely to fall if hit by a running three-year-old. “We’ve been living with those G-men for three days. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to change their minds when y’all were down in Vegas, but even after three days, we know that those guys are arrogantly stubborn in thinking they know what is right.”
Devon sighed, silently admitting that Mike had a very good point indeed.
The room was silent again, except for the occasional curse from the bodyguards as Tyson or Lonnie got poked in the eye by a wayward branch, and the sound of the dice rolling their way across the Monopoly board.
Leaning tiredly against JC’s shoulder, Devon realized she was very ready to get some badly needed sleep. Adrenalin rushes like the ones she’d had a couple of times already that day left the worst drained feeling.
She was almost asleep standing up, leaning against the stairway and JC, when they all heard the gunshot from outside.
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