“All right, this is what we’ll do,” Young said. “Stone, you and Dino and Seth take the picnic boat up the creek to the boathouse. Seth, I don’t want you going in there. You stay in the boat.”
“All right,” Seth said.
“Ham, Lance and I will go with Ed in the Range Rover, and the four of us will take the main residence.”
“What about me?” Holly said. “I’m going.”
“Holly, are you sure you’re up to this?”
“Try and stop me.”
“All right, you go in the boat with Stone and Dino.”
“Good.”
“Now, all of you listen to me: Nobody shoots anybody unless he’s shot at first or is about to be shot at. Is that perfectly clear? If any shooting happens there’ll be a very thorough inquiry, and each of us will be held responsible for any action outside the legal use of firearms.”
Everybody nodded.
“We’ll keep in touch by cell phone. We’ll set them to vibrate, and they’ll make less noise than radios. I want everybody to have loaded weapons and two spare magazines. I’ll have an assault rifle, in case we need more firepower, and I have a shotgun in my car.”
“So do I,” Rawls said.
“What I don’t have is more than one armored vest. I’m required by regulation to wear that, and the rest of you will be going in bare chested.”
“So to speak,” Holly said.
“And I don’t want anybody to get shot, so you must all use extreme caution. We may be up against three men, and we don’t know what kind of weapons, if any, they have. We’ll make simultaneous entry to both buildings, entering front and back.”
Seth spoke up. “There’s no back entrance to the boathouse, just stairs going up from the dock underneath.”
“Good. All right, everybody check your weapons and ammo,” Young said, looking at his watch. “We have a long day up here, and it gets light early. We should be in position by three-thirty a.m. In the meantime, get some rest, and we’ll leave here at three.”
Chapter 59
STONE, DINO, HOLLY AND SETH went out to the dock and got the picnic boat ready for departure. The skies had clouded up, and darkness was complete. Seth got the engine started, and the lights from the dashboard instruments and the GPS plotter offered a little light in the cockpit.
“Look,” Seth said, pointing to the plotter screen. “The creek is on the electronic chart; that will make it a piece of cake to find, even in the dark. All we have to worry about is moored boats and rocks, and I pretty much know where those are.”
“Let’s go,” Stone said. “It’s going to start to get light soon, and I want to at least be in position off the creek before that happens.”
Seth moved the boat away from the dock, and at idle speed they began moving up the inlet, away from the harbor. They could hear nothing, except the rumble of the engine. Seth increased power a little. “We could go faster, if we use the spotlight,” he said.
“As long as we can navigate safely in the dark, I’d rather not announce our presence,” Stone said.
Then, without warning, they heard the whine of a big outboard engine, and a Boston Whaler flashed past them, rocking their boat with its wake.
“Shit,” Seth said. “I didn’t hear that coming; he must have been doing twenty knots.”
“Was that Caleb’s boat?” Stone asked.
“Hard to tell with no light,” Seth replied. “Lots of Whalers hereabouts.” They continued their way up the inlet, passing moored boats along the way, making seven knots, according to the speedometer. “Creek up ahead,” Seth said. “One o’clock and a hundred yards.” He throttled back to idle.
HAM BARKER WATCHED from the rear seat as Ed Rawls’s Range Rover turned into Caleb Stone’s driveway.
“Lights off,” said Sergeant Young from the front passenger seat. “I don’t want ”em to know we’re here until they open the door.“
“BMW convertible dead ahead,” Rawls said.