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.Don’t tempt me.”“Come on, Monty,” Caroline said.“Let’s not get ourselves shot by this lunatic.”She marched into the feed room, taking off her cardigan as she went, as if she planned to settle in and make herself at home.Dr.Blake and Dad followed more slowly, and I trudged in last and set Rob down on the floor as gently as I could.“If only I had my medical bag,” Dad said, as he knelt down beside Rob and busied himself with an examination.Werzel stayed at the doorway, checking the room.Apparently he liked what he saw.Dr.Blake was standing in the corner with his arms crossed, frowning thunderously at Werzel.Caroline had hung her sweater up on the wall and was sitting primly on a bale of hay.“Okay,” Werzel said.“You can all stay here.Except for you.I still need you.”He was pointing the gun at me.Chapter 32Back out in the main barn, it was still intermittently raining hysterical hens, and the other animals were growing restless.“Let’s fetch those boxes,” Werzel said.The louse could at least have given me a coat.When I came back in with the first box, I heard raised voices coming from the feed room.“Don’t be an idiot!” Dr.Blake was bellowing.“But we have to do something!” Dad yelled back.“Well, that’s a stupid plan,” Dr.Blake countered.“Can you think of a better one?” Dad asked,“Will you two old fools shut up so I can think!” Caroline boomed.They continued to haggle loudly the whole time I was carrying boxes in from Werzel’s Subaru.If they really did have some kind of plan I wished they’d keep their voices down while they were discussing it.Were any of them really that hard of hearing? Or perhaps they didn’t think they could be heard over the mooing of the cows, the baaing of the sheep, and the squawking of the hens, most of whom had made it down to solid ground and were practicing wind sprints up and down the barn floor.Werzel had me stack the boxes on the middle of the barn floor just outside the feed room door.Yes, if I were going to burn the barn down with my prisoners locked in the feed room, that was where I’d start the blaze.I was on the last load, with the can of kerosene perched on top of the box, by the time I finally thought of a plan.I was going to pretend to be losing my grip on the box, stop to shift it, and then drop it, whirl around, and brain him with the kerosene can.Not a brilliant plan, but the best I could think of.I was tensing to strike when I tripped over one of the hens.The box I was carrying overturned, spilling out its contents—several dozen brown nine-by-twelve labeled envelopes.“Get up! And pick that stuff up!” Werzel snapped.“Okay,” I wheezed, as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me in the fall.I pretended to be struggling to get up on one knee, paused as if getting my breath, and began grabbing envelopes.I noticed a familiar local name on one envelope—one of the Pruitts—and then made a determined effort not to read any others.“Hurry up!” Werzel said.“I’m hurrying,” I said.I pretended to hurry, chattering my teeth slightly and shaking my hands to make it more plausible that I was fumbling the envelopes so badly.I fumbled them all out of my hands when I got to the kerosene can, the better to grab it and swing as hard as I could at Werzel.Unfortunately, I missed.“Nice try,” he said, stepping all too easily out of the way.“But I’m not—yech!”As he stepped back, Ernest the llama spat at him—not ordinary spit, either, but the nasty-smelling greenish stuff llamas produce when they’re really vexed.The horrid gob landed directly on his face.Werzel scrambled as far from Ernest as possible, reaching down as he went for a handful of hay to scrub off the llama-spit.When he stood up again, he backed up against the other side of the central aisle.“That’s it,” he said.The traces of green goop still running down his face only made his smug smile even nastier.“You’ve outlived your usefulness.Time for—owww!He’d backed up against Cousin the donkey’s stall.Cousin’s head suddenly appeared over the stall door, and he sank his enormous yellow teeth into Werzel’s upraised gun arm.Werzel yelped and dropped the gun.I dived for it.Unfortunately, since Cousin wasn’t a bulldog, he let go to try for another bite, allowing Werzel to dive for the gun, too.We cracked skulls so hard that I saw stars.Werzel must have, too, though, and it slowed him down long enough for me to emerge with the gun.I scrambled to my feet and backed away.After one of his police training sessions, Horace had told me how many feet away you needed to be from a running assailant to ensure that you could shoot him before he reached you.Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember the exact distance—ten feet? Twenty feet? Or was that yards? All I could remember was that it was a lot farther than I would have guessed.I kept backing as fast as I could without tripping over the rampaging hens, and Werzel staggered to his feet.“Give me that,” he said, taking a step toward me.“I don’t think so.” I stopped backing, put both hands on the gun, and aimed it at him.He started backing away again.I felt relieved until I realized he was backing toward the feed room door.Did I dare shoot? If I missed would the bullets go through the wall where they could hit Dad, Dr.Blake, or Caroline?“Stop or I’ll shoot!” I said.He kept backing.I pulled the trigger.Nothing happened.I tried again.The trigger clicked slightly.Werzel looked puzzled.“I could have sworn I had more bullets,” he said.“You jerk,” I said.The idea that he’d held me at gunpoint for the last hour with an unloaded gun was the last straw.I switched my grip on the gun so I could use it as a club and took a step toward him.Maybe not the smartest move.Werzel grabbed a nearby pitchfork and aimed it at me, the nasty smile returning to his green goo-stained face.Just then the feed room door fell backward off its hinges into the feed room and Caroline Willner stepped out holding a club.No, on closer inspection, I realized she was carrying a plaster replica of a cow’s hind leg.What the—“Take that, you fiend!” she shouted, as she cracked Werzel over the head with the fake cow leg.The weapon crumbled, but it did the trick.Werzel staggered and fell over, and Caroline and Dad both raced to sit on him.“Quick!” Dad shouted.“Take the pitchfork away!”“Get some rope!” Caroline ordered.I wrested the pitchfork out of Werzel’s hand and was tying him up with a dog leash I found hanging on the wall when the door at the other end of the barn flew open.“Hands up!”Chief Burke and Sammy entered in a gust of snowflakes, guns drawn and pointing at us.“About time,” Dr.Blake grumbled.“Thanks, Debbie Anne [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]