“That’s the payoff. First, tell him how it went, Grandpa.”
As we cruised through a pass in the Hieroglyphic Mountains, the moon rose like a dot waiting for the stroke that would make it an exclamation point.
Sparky was silent for a long moment, and then he revealed that the Rainkings were not your typical family next door. “When I didn’t let those bad boys in, they started shouting through a bullhorn. They were rude. They threatened to break down the door if we didn’t disarm and come out. It would have been fun to watch them try. The front and back doors had a quarter-inch plate of steel sandwiched between layers of wood, and they were set in a steel frame with high and low deadbolts two inches long. So unless those fancy-dressed fascists could get a motorized battering ram, they were going to be a long time knocking it down. They might have been able to shoot out a window, but that would’ve taken a while, because the bulletproof glass would withstand everything but high-caliber armor-piercing rounds, not the kind of ammo in their sidearms. While they were jabbering their threats, Bridget and I went to the cellar, into the walk-in wine cooler, cycled open the secret door, and vamoosed into the escape tunnel.”
I thought my amazement gland had been previously squeezed dry for at least a week, but I was wrong. “Wow. If the Dirty Harry Clean Now delivery van hadn’t been in the alley behind the diner, I’d be locked up in a prison for the criminally unique. I got through on luck. But you had bulletproof glass, a secret door, and an escape tunnel. Are you survivalists or something?”
“No, no, no. Nothing silly like that,” Bridget said. “We stay as real as a stick in the eye. But Grandpa has something of a past. Don’t you, Grandpa?”
“Something of,” he acknowledged. “Here and there, this and that. You know how it is.”
“He was something, then something else, then another something that we don’t talk about. Then when he was thirty-six, twenty-three years ago—I wouldn’t be born for another five years—he became a contractor.”
“I built things,” Sparky clarified, perhaps so that I wouldn’t think he was a contract killer.
“By the time I was four,” Bridget said, “Grandpa realized we might need an escape tunnel. He had a construction company at the time, and he called on only his most trusted employees to work with him on our house without getting permits from the county.”
“When we finished,” Sparky said, “I gave the guys the company, so they had an incentive to keep their mouths shut.”
“That’s when he became Daphne Larkrise,” Bridget said. “So he could work from home and always be with me in case something wicked happened, which now it has.”
As I tried to track the history of Sparky Rainking, I became almost too dizzy to drive. “Daphne Larkrise. I’ve heard that name somewhere.”
“Of course you have,” Bridget said. “Everyone has. Daphne Larkrise is the most successful romance novelist of his time.”
“Her time,” Sparky corrected.
“Oops. Grandpa’s old friend, Daphne Larkrise, is the face of Daphne Larkrise and does all the interviews and publicity stuff for twenty-five percent of the action, but Grandpa writes the books. He is a brilliant writer.”
“I’m no John Grisham or Thomas Pynchon,” Sparky said, “but I’ve always been an incurable romantic, even though it could have gotten me killed back in the day when I was something and then something else and then another something that we don’t talk about.”
I glanced at the rearview mirror. At the moment, there were no headlights from westbound traffic to flense the mask of shadow from his face. “Where does this escape tunnel of yours lead?”
“Under the backyard and two hundred feet into the woods,” said Bridget, “to this fake boulder that’s like a lid. Hydraulics flip it open, so we can exit.”
“From there,” Sparky said, “we went on foot about a half mile, down through the woods to the county road, another property I own under the name Aurora Teagarden.”
“Ever since I was five,” Bridget explained, “we’ve kept one nondescript car or another there, packed with everything we’d need if we had to go on the run.”
I had maybe a hundred questions, maybe three hundred, but two big ones pried at me harder than the others. “So ever since Bridget was four and five, you’ve had a plan to escape. From whom?”
“We didn’t know,” Sparky said. “It was just obvious someone was going to come looking for her sooner or later. Turned out to be the ISA, but we’ve reason to believe there’s others more dangerous than they are and a whole lot stranger.”