10 Tahoe Trap Read online

  Paco continued to stare through his goggles at the orange foam as if he expected a creature to emerge.

  “Looks good,” I said.

  I found a matchstick on Diamond’s workbench. I dipped the wooden end into the pepper sauce in the five gallon bucket.

  “How hot will this taste if I touch it to my tongue?” I asked.

  Paco’s eyes got wide. “Real hot,” he said.

  I stuck out my tongue and gently touched the matchstick.

  At first it just tasted hot. Like hot sauce from the supermarket. Then the hotness grew and spread through my mouth. In twenty seconds my mouth was on fire. My nose burned. My eyes were watering enough to send tears down my cheeks.

  “Stay here,” I said. I rushed out of the garage. Spot came running, excited at my fast movement. I ran into Diamond’s kitchen, bent down and stuck my mouth under the kitchen faucet. Spot had come in with me, and he stuck his nose over the sink, sniffing at my head.

  The cold water took the edge off. I rinsed thoroughly. When I was done, the hotness came back, searing my tongue.

  I re-rinsed. And again.

  As I went back out to the garage, I saw an elderly man frowning at me from the upstairs window of the neighboring house. I gave him a little wave. He didn’t wave back.

  When I came back to the garage, Paco looked at me.

  “Was it hot?” he asked.

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Your eyes are red,” he said.

  “Over one million Scoville Units,” I said.

  We reloaded the blender and repeated the process.

  I had blender and strainer duty. Paco had mixer duty. We stopped adding detergent. The growing volume of juice still seemed to stay mixed.

  When we’d gone through the entire stock of chili peppers, we had about a gallon of juice in the bucket.

  I took the bucket lid and snapped it on.

  I wanted to attach the leaf blowers and test our setup. But I thought of the neighbor man. Leaf blowers make a huge amount of noise. Would the man ignore the sound of a jet plane or two taking off inside of Diamond’s garage? Or would he call the cops to check us out? I couldn’t take the risk. It would be hard to explain why we had such quantities of pepper spray and fire ants. It was risky, but we’d have to wait and test our gear at the tear-down house.

  “We now have two formidable weapons,” I said to Paco, my eyes still watering. “Fire Ants and pepper spray. Ain’t no superhero could stand up to those, huh?”

  Paco shook his head.

  FORTY-ONE

  We loaded Diamond’s old pickup with the Cassie’s Viper pepper juice and the fire ants, our extra vent pipe supplies, and several tools. I took care not to drop them. We drove into a cold rain as we climbed Kingsbury Grade back into the Tahoe Basin.

  We stopped at Street’s lab.

  “On our way to set the trap,” I said. “Wondered if we can leave Spot to help with your entomological studies.”

  “Sure.”

  “Also wondered if you have some dark construction paper and packing tape.”

  She shook her head. “The closest thing to that would be paper grocery bags. Would that work?”

  “Yeah.” I told her what I wanted. She helped me cut up some bags, taped them together into large, stiff sheets, then cut shapes out of them as I explained my idea.

  “It sounds kind of crazy,” Street said, “but it just might work.”

  When we were done, Paco and I left. The pickup was much roomier without Spot.

  We stopped at the hospital and got Celeste Redack’s house key from Doc Lee.

  As we drove out to the West Shore and around Emerald Bay, I talked to Paco about our plan to entice Salt and Pepper into breaking into a house where they would think Paco was staying.

  “We’re going to set a trap,” I said. “And...”

  “And I’m the bait,” he finished.

  “Yeah. The premise is simple. But pulling it off is complicated. I don’t want you to go into this without understanding that there are risks.”

  Paco was quiet.

  I stopped talking. I wanted him to sit on the idea. Let it steep. Paco was only ten, and he might not grasp the seriousness of the situation. But I could still remember when I was a kid, and I chafed at adults who didn’t tell me the truth all because they thought I was just a kid and wouldn’t understand. Maybe I didn’t understand important things as fully as an adult did, but I grew up feeling that it was a mistake for adults not to inform kids about serious stuff that affected them.

  “They could take me again,” Paco finally said.

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. We’ll try very hard to keep that from happening. I can’t guarantee that you’ll be safe. But I’ll do everything possible to keep you safe.”

  “You promise?”

  It was a question that radiated back through my past to my own childhood. I’d asked the same question when adults had made serious claims to me.

  “I can’t promise I can keep you safe. But I promise I’ll try.”

  On the north side of Emerald Bay, we drove past D.L. Bliss State Park and then Sugar Pine Point State Park. I told Paco what I had in mind.

  “When I picked up the key,” I said to Paco, “Doc Lee told me that this old house is two stories tall. My idea is to trick Salt and Pepper into thinking that you and Spot and I are upstairs in bed when we will, in fact, barricade ourselves downstairs. We’re going to be like Oz in the Wizard of Oz. Have you seen that movie?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, you’ll see what I mean when we get to the house. When these thugs break in, we can hit them with the pepper spray and the ants.”

  I glanced over at Paco. He was staring ahead, frowning.

  “After we set up our trap, we’ll take the Jeep so that Salt and Pepper will recognize us. We’ll stake out the vacation house where they’re staying.

  “Hopefully, they’ll come out at some point and see us. We’ll make like we’re trying to escape them, but we won’t do a good job of it. As they follow us, we’ll stay in populated areas so they don’t dare try to jump us. They’ll follow us to the trap. I’m hoping that when they see the situation, they’ll decide to wait until night to make their move.”

  The turn-off to Doctor Redack’s tear-down was as Doc Lee described, not far from Chamber’s Landing, on the mountain side of the highway.

  The house was in a quaint neighborhood of old cabins. To get to Redack’s house, we drove two blocks in from the highway, turned north and went three more blocks. We parked and walked up carrying our supplies in black plastic lawn-and-leaf bags. If anybody saw us, I hoped they would think that we were simply doing fall cleanup work.

  Redack’s tear-down was reminiscent of a Halloween Haunted House, a two-story affair that looked out of place in Tahoe. The clapboard siding had lost most of its paint long ago. It leaned to the north a foot or more.

  We moved fast, not wanting to attract attention from any neighbors, most of whom, I hoped, were vacation-home owners who wouldn’t be in the area until the ski resorts started up their chairlifts in another few weeks.

  The house had a ground-floor porch. Near the front door was a yellow Condemned Property sign. The porch steps were rickety, and a floorboard to the left of the door was missing, a long dark opening waiting to break someone’s ankle.

  The key the doctor had given me worked in the front door lock, and we were inside in seconds.

  Because my cargo was precious and dangerous, I moved with care, setting them one at a time in the kitchen. I opened the plastic bags so the ants would have plenty of air.

  I brought the leaf blowers inside and set them on the kitchen counter.

  Looking at the layout, we plotted our strategy. How the men would likely break in, and what and how and where and when our response should be. I included Paco in my deliberations. Partly, to make him feel included. Mostly because he’d already demonstrated with the pepper spray and fire ant concepts that he
had valuable ideas.

  I explained my thought that while Salt and Pepper might first try the windows, they were the kind of guys who were inclined to kick in the door and storm us with a Blitzkrieg assault.

  Paco asked what a Blitzkrieg assault was. When I started talking about Hitler and World War II, his eyes glazed over. I may as well have been talking about the Trojan War and Homer’s post-war Odyssey where Cassie got her quote about how quick men are to flare up.

  I segued to a discussion of how Paco and I intended to out-surprise Salt and Pepper with our own shocking counterattack.

  I looked around for a way to disguise our dryer-vent, flexible hose through which we wanted to deliver our goods. The house relied on a simple wall-mounted furnace on the outside wall of the living room, so there was no duct work system to tap into.

  The living room took up the front of the house. Behind the living room was the dining room on the left and the kitchen on the right. As was common in older houses, the kitchen was separated from the dining room by a door.

  I looked in the kitchen. There was no obvious way to get our ants and home-brew pepper spray from the kitchen into the living room.

  Back in the living room, I studied the wall for hints about the best way to punch a hole big enough for dryer vent flex-hose. The wall was made of old wood paneling. It was too dark to see the tiny nail holes that would tell me where the studs were located. And I didn’t have a saw. A determined person can go through sheet rock with a sturdy butter knife. But even flimsy wood paneling resists such tools. I’d have to find a different approach. I was about to leave when I saw the light switch.

  I made a rough measurement with my arms and hands. Walked back to the kitchen. Measured. It made sense that the kitchen switch was near the living room switch so the wires could be routed through the wall together.

  My pocketknife has a small slotted screwdriver.

  Unlike the living room, the kitchen wall was sheetrock. I took off the kitchen switch plate.

  Fortunately, the electrical box had been nailed to the studs with short roofing nails. By sticking my pocketknife driver into the opening at an angle, I was able to get the shaft of the driver above and below the box and lever the nails out of the wood. The box was now loose but roughly held in place by the Romex wire that went both up and down from the box. By wiggling the box, I could see that the wires going up went directly into another box, which faced the opposite direction.

  The living room switch.

  I went around, removed the living room switch plate and levered out the nails that held that electrical box in place. The two boxes were now much looser, and I could push them sideways, away from the stud.

  Back in the kitchen, I used my pocketknife to cut away the sheet rock above the opening, moving up behind the box that faced the living room. In ten minutes, I had an elongated opening in the kitchen, the upper portion of which lined up with the living room switch opening.

  I was able to push the two linked boxes away from the stud, compress the flex hose into an oval shape, and insert it through the opening.

  Paco tore off pieces of duct tape. I positioned the hose to point out toward the main part of the living room where someone would walk if they came in through the front door or windows and headed toward the stairs. I ran the pieces of duct tape from the inside of the flex hose onto the edges of the wall opening.

  In the light, it was very obvious. But at night, with the lights out, it wouldn’t be the first thing that attackers noticed. Even if they shined flashlights around right after they broke in, it would be too late for them.

  I plugged one of the leaf blowers into an outlet above the kitchen counter and the other into an extension cord that I ran around the corner into the bathroom. My hope was that the two rooms were on different circuits so we could run both blowers at once without blowing the circuit breakers.

  I realized that I could only fit one vent pipe through the wall. Fortunately, we had enough extra vent pipe to make a Y intersection.

  I took the new Y vent pipe and taped it to the flex tube that went through the wall. Then I attached both leaf blowers to the Y. With both air streams narrowing to one tube, the pressure might be too much. I didn’t want it to explode.

  “Paco, let’s test these babies. Make sure they work and that the outlets have power. You hold this one.”

  He looked at me, a little concern on his face.

  “Let it rest on the counter. Just hold it tight so that it doesn’t take off.”

  He took hold of the handles.

  “Put a little weight on it and put your thumb on the switch. I’ll do the same with the other one. On the count of three, we’ll turn them both on. Then we’ll turn them off. A short blast should prevent the entire neighborhood from getting worried. These things make quite the noise, so be prepared. Ready?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, ready, set, go!”

  We both hit the switches. In the enclosed space of the kitchen, the sudden roar was like a Space Shuttle at blastoff. The tube on my blower immediately came undone. The blast of air went across the counter and peeled a large piece of wallpaper off the wall. We shut them off, and the blowers wound down. The ensuing silence was dramatic after the crush of sound.

  Paco’s eyes were wide.

  “Kinda loud, huh?”

  He nodded.

  “I guess I didn’t get mine taped well enough. Help me hook them up to the bucket lids?”

  Paco tore off more duct tape and handed me pieces while I secured the blowers to the counter and fit the blower nozzles into the vent pipes that were already attached to the bucket lids. Paco’s blower attached to the lid from the pepper spray. My blower attached to the lid from the ant bucket. Then both of them plugged into the Y, which gathered ants and pepper spray together to shoot through the wall into the living room.

  When it came time to use our weapon, we only had to switch the current lids on the buckets for the custom lids with the Venturi pipes that would suck out the pepper juice and the ants.

  Next, we rigged some lights, downstairs and up. We strung extension cords from the kitchen, out the kitchen window, up the outside of the house, and back in through the upstairs bedroom windows.

  We covered the upstairs windows with newspaper sheets. It would look like someone had simply arranged for the cheapest kind of temporary window covering.

  The next task was the tour de force of our project.

  Street had helped me cut and tape Kraft paper bags into two-foot-long shapes that resembled a tall man and a boy and a Great Dane. Upstairs in the house, I had Paco hold the cutouts while I suspended them from light nylon line. I put some screw-eyes in the ceiling, then ran the line up through the screw-eyes and across to a window at the back of the house.

  I used one set of cutouts in one room, and another set – cut in a different shape – in another room. The nylon lines went out the window.

  Back outside, I pulled the lines down to a screw eye just outside the kitchen window. We labeled the extension cords and the lines by attaching pieces of masking tape. Cord number one had one piece of tape. Cord number two, two pieces, etc. That way we could tell which was which in relative darkness.

  I went outside and talked through the window to Paco in the kitchen. As I directed him, Paco worked the extension cords. Then he worked the nylon lines as if they were the strings on marionettes. Paco called out which number cord or line he was pulling on. I made notes.

  Lights came on upstairs. Paper cutouts moved across the room. Because the cutouts were close to the lights, the shadows were projected much larger on the newsprint window coverings. Although it was still daytime, the house was well-shaded by big fir trees. I could make out the faint shadow of a man moving across the newsprint window covering. Then came a boy. Then a giant dog.

  The man moved back. The light went out. Another light turned on in a different room. The man went in. He was lit from a different angle. It looked like he was carrying something. Bedclothes,
maybe. The boy joined him. They appeared to talk. Then they moved back from the window. It looked like the boy lay down on a bed. The light went out.

  It was a crude but powerful illusion. If the nylon cords didn’t get tangled, and if the lights didn’t malfunction, it would be a convincing suggestion of Paco and Spot and me going to bed.

  I had Paco run through the process again. We developed a choreography. Then Paco went outside, staying where I could see him through the window. I gave him the show, then called him in.

  “You think it will work?” I asked.

  Paco nodded. Serious.

  Next, we covered the inside of the kitchen windows with black garbage bags, leaving loose corners out of which we could peek. If someone came during the day, it would look suspicious. But I hoped Salt and Pepper would come under cover of night.

  The kitchen windows had old-fashioned shutters that were still functional. I shut them, and used Diamond’s portable driver to buzz multiple screws around the perimeter of the shutters to screw them shut. The wood was old and split in a few places, but the shutters seemed strong.

  On the inside of the kitchen door, I screwed large brackets into both sides of the door frame, then dropped a two-by-four into the brackets. It would withstand a substantial assault.

  To discourage entry to the kitchen, we dragged a downed tree branch over near the back door of the house. In a vacant, neighboring lot, we found two more large branches that had broken off in a storm. We arranged them so that they looked like they’d fallen in place. But they also provided a bit of a barrier to the kitchen door and windows.

  “After we immobilize the men,” I said, “we’ll pull this two-by-four out of the brackets and go out the kitchen door. We’ll have to jump over these branches. Will you remember that?”

  Paco nodded.

  FORTY-TWO

  When all was ready, we drove around the lake to Street’s lab. It was getting dark. The rain increased.

  Spot pushed forward when Street let us in, not to see me, but to see Paco, his new sleeping companion.