The Chemist

He shook his head and pressed the button to power up the phone.

“Fine,” she muttered.

As she packed up her first-aid supplies, she watched Daniel from the corner of her eye. He pulled up the only number that had ever called, but before he could touch it, the phone rang again.

Daniel sucked in a deep breath, the same way he had before making the first pass on her ear. She imagined this conversation would be the harder of the tasks.

He hit the screen. She could hear Kevin shrieking so loudly that at first she thought the phone was on speaker mode.

“YOU DON’T HANG UP ON ME, YOU —”

“Kev, it’s me. Kev! It’s Danny!”

“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?”

“It’s my fault, Kev. I was an idiot. I ruined everything. I’m so sorry!”

“WHAT ARE YOU BABBLING ABOUT?”

“Arnie’s dead, Kev. I’m so sorry. And some of the dogs, I’m not sure how many. It’s all my fault. I wish I could tell you how —”

“PUT THE POISON LADY ON THE PHONE!”

“This is on me, Kev. I messed up —”

Kevin’s voice was calmer when he interrupted now. “There’s no time for this, Danny. Give her the phone. I need someone who can talk sense.”

She stood up and reached for the phone. Daniel watched anxiously as she held it a few inches away from her ear.

“Are you secure?” Kevin asked.

Surprised by his businesslike detachment, she answered in the same tone. “For the moment, but we’ve got to move.”

“Have you torched the house?”

“I was just about to.”

“There’s kerosene in the closet under the stairs.”

“Thanks.”

“Call me when you’re on the road.”

He hung up.

Well, that had gone better than she’d hoped. She handed the phone back to Daniel. His expression was blank with surprise. The gas in the house would long since have dissipated, so she didn’t bother with the mask. Daniel followed her inside, but she made Einstein keep watch at the door.

“Get some clothes out of Kevin’s room,” she instructed. She could have sent him upstairs for the first set he’d borrowed, but that would take more time, and she didn’t know how he would react to the bodies. She could see his eyes cutting away to the sofa that obscured Arnie, and then back to her. They both had to keep it together. They still had a long night ahead of them if they were going to be alive tomorrow. “When you have enough for a few days, get to the kitchen and grab anything that’s nonperishable. Water, too, as much as we’ve got.”

He nodded and headed down the hall to Kevin’s room. She darted up the stairs.

“Do you want these guns?” he called up after her.

She dodged around the bodies, careful not to slip in the blood slick. “No, those’ve killed people. If we get caught, I don’t want to be linked to anything. Kevin’s guns will be clean.”

In her room, she stripped off her blood-spattered clothes and pulled on clean jeans and a T-shirt. She gathered up her sleeping bag, wrapping the rest of her clothes in it, then grabbed her lab kit in her open hand and kicked the bloody clothes into the hallway. She hurried back down the stairs and out to the car with her awkward load. While Daniel foraged in the kitchen, she located the kerosene. Kevin had three five-gallon gas cans stashed together. He could only have intended them for lighting up the house. She was glad that he was so prepared and businesslike. It meant his reaction – once Daniel was safe – was likely to be more pragmatic than violent. She hoped.

She started upstairs, making sure her clothes and the bodies were well saturated with the kerosene. The wooden floors wouldn’t need as much help. She splashed the baseboards in all three rooms, then trailed the rest down the stairs. She grabbed another can and hurried through the ground floor. It was the first time she’d seen the other bedrooms. They were both large and well appointed with luxurious attached baths. She was glad Arnie had had a comfortable life here. She wished she could have done something to spare him this. But even if she and Daniel had left the first day the missing-person trap had run on the news, Arnie would still have ended up like this. It was a depressing thought.

Daniel’s fingerprints were in the dogs’ outbuilding, but there was no way to fool Carston’s counterpart at the CIA into thinking Daniel – or Kevin – had died here, so it didn’t really matter. They would know Daniel was on the run. She didn’t want to torch the outbuilding and endanger the animals. It didn’t have a wide gravel skirt like the house did, which would hopefully prevent a wildfire. No doubt Kevin had laid the gravel for exactly this reason.

Daniel was waiting for her in front of the Humvee.

“Back this up,” she said, waving toward the Humvee. “See if you can get the dogs to move, too.”

He got to work. She had the pack of matches from her first-aid kit. She’d left a nice thick trail of kerosene down the middle of the porch steps, so it was easy to set that trail alight and then get out of the way before the blaze really got going. When she turned, the dogs were automatically backing away from the flames. That was good.

Alex opened the driver-side door and called for Einstein. He jumped over the seat in one bound and then positioned himself next to Lola. His ears were up and his tongue out. He still looked eager; Alex envied his energy and positivity.

Daniel was walking through the crowd of surviving animals, giving each one an emphatic “At ease.” She hoped that would help when the fire trucks started rolling up. The noise of the shootout wouldn’t have carried to any of the distant neighbors, but the orange light of the fire against the black night sky was another matter. They had to run now. She couldn’t think of anything else she could do for the dogs. It felt like failure – these animals had saved her and Daniel’s lives.