The barbarians had arrived at the gate, and no cauldrons of boiling oil had been set upon the parapets to drive them back with a rain of terror.
Beneath the deadbolt was a simpler lock to which the passkey would next be applied. The security chain remained engaged, but it would not hold against even one good kick from a brute who knew just where to place his boot.
Even as the deadbolt retracted, Dylan grabbed one of the three straight-backed chairs that still stood before the desk. He crossed the room in long strides, tipped the chair backward under the knob, and braced the door shut as the passkey turned the second lock.
As short of time as he was of money, he dared not wait to see if the bracing chair kept the door tightly shut or instead allowed a dangerous degree of play. Forced to trust the makeshift barricade as he had needed to trust Shep’s wizardry at folding, Dylan raced into the bathroom, snatched the envelope of cash from his shaving kit, and shoved it into a pants pocket.
Returning to the bedroom, he saw that the door was indeed closed tight, the chair wedged firmly in place, as the knob worked back and forth and wood creaked under steady pressure.
For precious seconds, the men outside might believe that the resistance they encountered could be attributed to a problem with one of the locks. He couldn’t count on them being stupid, however, or even gullible, and considering how aggressively they drove their black Suburbans, he couldn’t expect them to be patient, either.
Already, Jilly had unplugged, closed, and secured the laptop. She slung her purse over one shoulder, turned to Dylan as he approached, and pointed at the ceiling, for some reason reminding him of Mary Poppins, but a Mary Poppins who had never been rinsed pale by England’s bad weather, clearly intending by her gesture to say Up and away!
A cessation of the creaking-wood sounds and the resumption of the stealthy clicking of a key in the lock suggested that the pumped-up golfers were still bamboozled.
Shep stood in the classic Shep pose, a portrait of defeat at the hands of cruel Nature, looking nothing whatsoever like a wizard.
‘Okay, buddy,’ Dylan whispered, ‘do your thing and fold us out of here.’
Arms hanging slack at his sides, Shepherd made no move to tweak the three of them to safety.
‘Now, kiddo. Now. Let’s go.’
‘It’s no more wrong than spitting out a bug,’ Jilly reminded Shepherd.
The faint click-click of key in keyhole gave way again to the protest of hinge screws biting in the jamb and to the quiet creaking of the straight-backed chair responding to a relentless pressure on the door.
‘No fold, no cake,’ Dylan whispered urgently, for cake and Road Runner cartoons were more motivating to Shep than fame and fortune would have been to most men.
At the mention of cake, Jilly gasped and said, ‘Don’t take us back to the coffee shop, Shep!’
Her admonition drew from Shepherd a question that explained his hesitation: ‘Where?’
Outside, the killers lost patience with the stealthy approach and resorted to the lust for drama that seemed to be their most reliable characteristic. A shoulder or a boot heel struck the door, which shuddered, and the bracing chair shrieked like a tramped cat.
‘Where?’ Jilly demanded of Dylan. ‘Where?’
Battered again, the door boomed a timpani note, and something in the structure of the chair cracked, but held.
In transit from the women’s restroom, he had imagined numerous unintended destinations that would have proved disastrous, but now he could not think of a single place in this world where they might wisely seek sanctuary.
The crash of determined meat against resistant wood came again, and the meat grunted not with pain or anger, but as if a perverse pleasure had been taken from this punishment.
Immediately following the grunt came another crash, but this time it was the brittle percussion of shattering glass. The closed drapes stirred at one of the windows as fragments of the broken pane rapped off the back of the fabric.
‘Home,’ Dylan told Shepherd. ‘Take us home, Shep. Take us home real quick.’