They were just finishing up their lunch when the doorbell rang – the front door, so the Archers knew that it must not be anyone familiar enough with them to use the back door. John shook his head, got up from the table, and said, “I think maybe I’d better get this, just to be on the safe side.”

John grabbed his coat from the rack near the back door, slipped it on and headed for the front door. From inside, he could see two neatly dressed men standing there waiting. He opened the door, stepped outside, and closed it behind him. “Hi,” he said. “Can I help you?”

“Police officers,” one of the guys said, flashing a badge briefly. “We’re here to talk to Cody Archer and Janice Lufkin.”

“Not so fast,” John said. “If you were a local officer I’d know you, and you’re not. Now who are you?”

“Police officers, we showed you our badges,” the larger one said.

“You flashed a bit of metal at me,” John said. “For all I know you could have got it out of some cereal box.” He pulled a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Now let’s see some ID, and see it long enough that I can write down your names.”

“You don’t need that,” the smaller one sneered.

“Then you don’t need to see Cody and Janice,” John told them. “You haven’t told me anything about what this is about or why you need to talk to them. You probably know that there are several things going on, and as far as I’m concerned things are going to be done by the book.”

“All right,” the bigger one conceded, opening his leather ID case, containing his badge and an ID card. “We’re from the Regional Drug Task Force, and this is about their involvement with the drug house over on Railroad Street.”

“OK, not a problem,” John said. “If you gentlemen would wait here, I’ll go in and call our lawyer. He told me yesterday to expect you this afternoon, so he’s available and should be able to get here in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“There ain’t no need for a lawyer,” the smaller, meaner-looking one said. “We just need to talk to the kids for a while.”

“Oh, yes, there’s a need for a lawyer,” John said. “If for no more reason than that’s our attorney’s advice. The kids have a right to the presence of their attorney and we’re not going to compromise that right.”

“Yeah, but we don’t need that,” the smaller guy sneered. “All we need to do is to talk to them.”

“If you need to talk to them, you can wait till he gets here,” John told them. “You’re just wasting time that he could be spending getting here.”

“All right, call your damn attorney,” the little one snapped. “It ain’t going to help them none.”

“Good enough,” John said. “I’ll go in and call right now.”

“Do you mind if we come in?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I do mind,” John said. “I wouldn’t want you to mistake an invitation to get out of the cold as an excuse to search the house.”

“Hey, you’re really being a hard ass about this,” the smaller one said. “That might be considered an obstruction of justice.”

“I said you can talk to them if their attorney is present,” John said intransigently. “If you want to talk to them you can follow the rules.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” the big one said. “We’ll catch them some other time.”

“That still doesn’t mean that they’re going to talk to you without an attorney,” John told them. “Our attorney has instructed them to tell you to look at your watch if you ask what time it is if he’s not present. If you’d like to set up an appointment when he can be present, that’s fine, and we’ll be glad to cooperate.”

“I don’t see what business of yours it is, anyway.”

“Very simple,” John said. “The two of them are minors under my care. I’m willing to follow the rules, but you’d better be ready to follow them too.”

Even though the two cops hadn’t stuck around, John called Matt Schindenwulfe anyway – and had the speakerphone on when he did. “It seems pretty clear to me that they wanted to talk to Cody and Janice without me there,” he said. “Probably without you there, too.”

“Seemed like it to me,” John agreed.

“Don’t let them do it,” Schindenwulfe warned. “I told you that those guys have a reputation for being cowboys, and they’ve been known to create something when there isn’t much there. Tell the kids that, too.”

“We’re listening in,” Cody said. “I didn’t see them, but from what Dad said, those two seemed like they’ve seen one too many bad TV movies.”

“You might be right,” Schindenwulfe laughed. “These guys are not like Charlie Wexler. Hanging around with druggies seems to have made them take on some of the druggy style. Like I told you, don’t even talk to these guys without me present so they can’t ram something down your throats or make it out that you said something you didn’t say. Everybody – I would strongly advise that the kids have an adult present with them the next few days when these guys try again, and mark my words, they will try again.”

“Why not just go ahead and talk with them?” Cody asked.

“You don’t want to do it on your own,” Schindenwulfe told him. “My guess is that they figure you had something to do with the meth lab, and in their eyes you’re guilty until proven innocent. They think that if they can get you to somehow admit it that it’ll somehow justify their trouble. They don’t want me present because they know I’ll keep them from going over the line.”

“That’s crazy! I wouldn’t have anything to do with something like that.”

“You’re right, it’s crazy,” Schindenwulfe agreed. “But these guys believe in simple answers, even if they’re not the right ones. Don’t get me wrong, you’re probably going to have to talk with them sooner or later, but you don’t want to let it happen in such a way that they can put words in your mouth. These guys tend to be arrogant young punks who use intimidation to get their way. Sometimes it works, considering what they’re up against. But when it doesn’t work people get hurt.”

“How long is this going to last?” Candice wanted to know.

“Hard to say,” the attorney told her. “Since they’re not local, they’re going to have to show they’re accomplishing something pretty quickly, say the next few days. But that doesn’t mean they won’t keep their eyes open for a lot longer. In any case, for the next few days, make sure all your doors and windows are locked, and don’t talk with them without my being there.”

“This is going to be a huge pain in the butt,” John sighed. “We’ve got other things to do in the next few days, mostly getting Janice settled in.”

“I hate to say this, but it goes with the territory,” the attorney said. “The worst should blow over in the next few days, but be on your guard and keep your nose clean in any case.”

“All right,” John said. “Thanks for sticking with us on this, Matt.”

“Yeah, you owe me a cup of coffee out at the café some morning,” the attorney laughed. “See you at the courthouse in the morning.”

John clicked off the speakerphone. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he groaned in disgust. “I guess there’s not much we can do but just deal with it. Candice, I guess we weren’t planning on working tomorrow anyway, but we’ll have to work out something for the rest of the week.”

“I’m sorry,” Janice said. “I didn’t mean to be this much trouble.”

“It’s trouble,” John agreed. “But it’s nothing you did, and something that just needs to be fixed, so we’ll just have to take the time to fix it. Janice, tell me honestly: did you have any idea what your father and brother were up to?”

“I knew they were up to something,” she said shyly. “I really didn’t have any idea what. I never would have thought that they’d be doing something like building a drug lab in the basement.”

“Would you have done anything if you had known?”

Janice was silent for a moment before she replied softly, “No, I guess not. I was too scared of them.”

“Well,” Candice sighed. “I guess this is just part of what it takes to get you over that fear. There are pretty obviously going to be some rough days coming, but I think it’ll all work out in the end. Now, let’s see if we can figure out some way to get our minds off of this problem. Janice, I think you need to sit down or lie down and relax. How about if we find a movie and slap it in the DVD player?”

They settled on Hatari, a John Wayne film that was older than any of them, a fun film about capturing African animals for zoos. It was exciting and escapist; it gave them a chance to relax and enjoy themselves without having to consider all the problems of the day.

Cody had seen it before, of course – all of them had except Janice – and he enjoyed the thrilling animal chase scenes, of which the movie had many. But during the quiet parts of the rather simplistic plot, his mind strayed to his musings of the night before, about wanting to become a policeman. If being a cop meant having to be an asshole like those drug task force guys, then there ought to be some different career for him. It was clear to him that all cops weren’t Charlie Wexler. Really, when he got right down to it, he really didn’t know all that much about being a cop, and some of the stuff he picked up off of TV obviously didn’t have much to do with real life.Maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a cop after all. He wasn’t about to take it off of his list, but it was going to take a little more consideration and maybe some talking with both Charlie Wexler and Mr. Schindenwulfe before he settled on it a little more firmly. At least, he thought, it wasn’t something he had to make up his mind about right away.

“Christ, you just know they have to be covering something up,” Mike Livingston snorted as he got back into the unmarked police car. “The fucking kid’s dad, especially. The way he acted, what do you want to bet that there’s a hell of a stash of meth somewhere in that house?”

“Just about have to figure it,” his partner, Mike LaFayette agreed as he slammed the door on the other side. “It’d be the obvious place for the kids to hide it. You don’t figure kids are too smart, they’d probably do something stupid like hide it around the house.”

“We ought to see about getting a warrant and go through that place like a vacuum cleaner,” Livingston agreed. “The hell of it is, you know the shit has to be there, I know it has to be there, but where’s the probable cause for a warrant?”

“Do we really need a warrant? I mean, remember that drug house we knocked over down in Camden a couple months ago. We just attacked the place, tore it apart, and as soon as we found the damn shit we didn’t need a warrant or any of that happy horseshit. Once we had the proof, it wasn’t no problem to get a postdated warrant, and everything was sweet.”

“Yeah, but this ain’t the rougher side of Camden,” the plainclothes drug cop behind the wheel shook his head. “It helps when you have a tame judge. I mean, like I said, we know the shit has to be there, but getting a warrant out of a local yokel judge like they have here is something else.”

“True,” LaFayette sighed. “That local yokel of an assistant chief ain’t helping things a damn bit, either. Face it, that kid offed two people, he ought to be parked in the slammer nice and cozy were we could reason with him. But shit, he turned him loose without hardly a slap on the wrist, like he did a public service or something. Anyplace else, a local cop would be glad to grease the skids for us with a local judge, but this guy really seems to have some kind of a cob up his butt.”

“Tell you the truth, I’m not so sure how crazy I am about just busting in there and waiting for the paperwork afterwards,” Livingston, the more senior of the two, said. “That house has probably got enough guns in it to stock an army, and that kid is supposed to be one hell of a good shot. I mean, he’d have to be to off two people with head shots like that.”

“Well, when you put it that way I’m not so damn sure that I’d want to be on point myself. Maybe if we do it we ought to let that joker Smithies take point. I sure as hell would like to see the kid off a cop, especially a useless one like him. Then we’d see how quick they’d turn him loose.”

“Yeah, but something like that we really ought to have a warrant before we hit the place,” Livingston pointed out. “With maybe a cop or two shot, some of the perps shot, we’d have our tits in a wringer if the paperwork wasn’t pretty straight.”

“The only thing I can think of is that that pussy assistant chief isn’t going to be running things forever. He’s just filling in while the head honcho is out of town for a few days. In fact, the guy in charge is supposed to be back tomorrow. From what I hear, he’s not a local yokel, he’s from Chicago or someplace like that, he ought to know how this shit has to go down. There’s a good chance he might be a little more willing to listen to reason.”

“Well, shit,” Livingston grumbled. “I guess that means there ain’t much we can do tonight. Let’s go have a talk with him first thing in the morning. Christ, I guess that means there ain’t much we can do but go back and tear that fucking dump apart some more.”

Bedtime came earlier than normal. Everyone was tired; it had been an exhausting and stressful weekend all around. Janice didn’t have much in the way of energy reserves anyway, and had been acting almost groggy at times. Cody was so far behind on sleep he wasn’t sure if he would ever catch up. John and Candice weren’t exactly operating at full power, either; when Candice made the suggestion that Janice probably ought to go to bed, it didn’t take long for everyone else to decide that it sounded like a pretty good idea.

Janice wasn’t quite up to climbing the stairs by herself. She was hurting more than she had earlier, even though she’d mostly spent the evening lying back in a recliner in the living room. Both Candice and Cody had to help her up the stairs and to Shay’s room; as soon as Cody left, Candice helped her get out of her clothes and into warm flannel pajamas. She helped her get into Shay’s bed and prop a couple extra pillows around her to make her more comfortable. “You sleep tight, now,” Candice smiled as she turned out the light. “If you need anything, just call out and someone will come to help you.”

“Thank you, Candice,” Janice replied, still using the name a little gingerly. “You’re too good to me.”

“No, we’re not,” Candice told her softly. “We’re just trying to help you get through this the best we can.”

Not far up the hall, Cody took advantage of his mother helping Janice get ready for bed by getting to the shower ahead of everyone else. In spite of the quiet afternoon, Cody had plenty on his mind, and with good reason. At the moment he was just too tired to want to try and contemplate it. Maybe tomorrow things would make a little more sense.

It was a quick shower; in a few minutes he was done drying off. He pulled on some clean underwear and headed for his bed, where he hadn’t slept in a couple nights; it really felt good to be under the covers where he could relax.

But sleep wouldn’t come. All of the hassles and issues of the last few days just wouldn’t leave his mind. He felt good that he and his family had reached out to Janice; that seemed to take away a lot of the guilt he felt about what he’d had to do back on Thursday evening. But it was clear that there were plenty of problems remaining: those two cops from the drug task force earlier caused him to realize that there were going to be plenty of problems there. After what Mr. Schindenwulfe had said, it seemed pretty clear that they were looking for someone to hang. It looked to him like he was a candidate, especially since it still wasn’t a sure thing that he wasn’t going to have to go to court for killing Janice’s father and brother. Even if he got by all that, he could see all kinds of problems with the kids when he went back to school. There would be problems for Janice too, he realized. When the truth of what had happened with her got out – and given the rumor mills around town, there was no doubt that it had already gotten out – she was going to catch hell from everyone. He knew that he would try to protect her from that stuff the best that he could, but what his best could be was very much an unknown quantity.

The house grew quiet as his parents showered and headed for bed, but still Cody lay awake, turning things over in his troubled mind. Sleep wasn’t coming, and without warning he felt a weight shift the balance of the bed slightly, too big to be a cat. Now what the hell? He turned to see, and in the darkness of the room saw a thin shape that could only be one person. “Jan?” he whispered.

“Cody,” she replied. “I can’t get to sleep. I’m . . . well, I’m scared.”

“Jan, there’s nothing to be scared of,” he whispered, trying to reassure her.

“I know, but I’m still scared,” she admitted. She hesitated for an instant, then went on, “I’m scared that this is all a dream, and that I’ll wake up . . . well . . . back there.”

“It’s not a dream,” he said, a little more solidly. “You’re safe now. You know that, don’t you?

“I’d like to believe it but I just can’t quite do it,” she replied in a distressed tone. “Cody, at least I knew I could sleep in the hospital when you were there to protect me. Could I, well . . . just be here with you? Maybe you could hold my hand like you did in the hospital?”

Oh, hell, Cody thought. It can’t hurt anything, and if it’ll help her feel better and get some sleep it ought to be worth it. “Sure,” he said softly. “There’s plenty of room.”

“Thank you, Cody,” she said as she opened up the covers on the far side of the bed. “Maybe this is something I shouldn’t be asking you, but . . . well . . . ”

“If you get a good night’s sleep it will be worth it,” he said as she settled down on the far side of the bed. She was not close to him, not cuddling, just there, close enough that he could put his hand in hers like he had done the past two nights. “Good night, Jan,” he whispered. “We’ll all feel better in the morning after we get some sleep.”

“Thank you, Cody,” she said again. “You’re so good to me.”

They lay there quietly for a while. Cody found himself contemplating the fact that he was actually in bed with a teenage girl and the thought of sex never coming to the forefront of his mind. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about with her, not now, maybe not ever, considering the hell she had been through, but having her there brought a bit of relaxation to his own racing thoughts.

At least he got to sleep – perhaps for a few minutes, perhaps longer, he wasn’t sure. He definitely knew he’d been asleep when he was suddenly awakened by feeling a shaking Janice plastered up next to him, her cast-wrapped arm thrown around him roughly as her frantic voice said, “Cody . . . Oh, Cody, thank God you’re real. Cody, oh my god, that was horrible . . . ”

“Jan?” he mumbled, throwing off his sleep, and rolling a little to get an arm around her, trying to avoid where her ribs were wrapped and hurting. “What happened?”

“I . . . I must have been dreaming. Cody, they came for me again, and, oh God, it was horrible.”

“It was just a dream,” he reassured her. “It’s all right, now. I’m here, I’m real. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

It took a while and no few tears for him to get her settled down a little. “Maybe we’d better think about trying to get a little more sleep,” he suggested.

“Oh, God, Cody, now I’m scared to go to sleep, I’m afraid they’re going to come for me in my dreams again.”

“They’re just dreams,” he told the girl who still clung to him like life itself. “They can’t hurt you.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not scared,” she cried.

“You’d better get some sleep somehow. You’ve got a big day tomorrow, and it’s not going to be any better if you haven’t had some rest.”

“I don’t know how I could sleep,” she protested, the tears rolling now.

Cody was silent for a moment, just about stumped. He thought for a moment about calling his parents – maybe they might have an idea. He thought back to when he had been littler, and had some bad dreams, especially when they had been facing the prospect of leaving his friends in Decatur behind and moving up here to unknown country where there were bears and all kinds of evil creatures filling the woods. He remembered that at times his folks taking him to bed with them, just to change circumstances a little, to let him know he was safe and protected. But Janice was already in bed with him, so that wasn’t helping. She needed to know she was protected . . . and an idea crossed his mind.

“Jan, stay here for a moment,” he told her, turning back the covers and rolling out of bed, and turning on the light on the bedside stand.

“You’re leaving me?”

“Just for a minute. I’ve got to get something. I’ll be right back.”

Not knowing if this was a good idea or not, Cody thought it was at least worth a try as he headed down the darkened stairs to the main floor. The basement stairs weren’t anything he wanted to try in the dark, so he turned on the light, headed down past the workshop area for the model railroad to the gun safe. It locked with a combination lock, which only took him a few seconds to open.

The police still had his P226, of course, but there was something in the gun safe that was even better for what he had in mind: his mother’s Smith and Wesson .357 magnum intended for dealing with things like moose and polar bears. It was a heavier and more powerful weapon than the P226, and what’s more, it looked like it. He grabbed a box of ammunition to go with it, and headed back up the stairs.

Back in his room, he sat down on the bed, rolled out the cylinder and began to load rounds into it as Janice watched him wide-eyed. He finished loading the revolver and put it on the bedside stand. “Cody,” she managed to ask, “What’s that for?”

He turned and looked her straight in the eye. “Janice,” he said. “I told you that you’re safe with me. If they come for you again, I’ll just have to kill them for you again.”

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