By the light of the moon

bonehead joker.
    'Ice.'
    'Box.'
    Shepherd climbed, climbed. 'Ice.'
    'Show.'
    'Ice.'
    'Storm.'
    'Ice.'
    'Tea, ax, breaker, man, chest, water,' Jilly said, talking him
up the last rungs and into the attic.
    She helped him off the ladder, to his feet, away from the
trapdoor. She hugged him and told him he was terrific, and Shep
didn't resist, though he did say, 'Where's all the ice?'
    Down in the closet, Dylan switched off the light. He climbed
quickly in the darkness. 'Good work, Jackson.'
    ' De nada , O'Conner.'
    On his knees in the gloom, Dylan folded the accordion ladder
upward, as quietly as possible reloading it onto the back of the
trapdoor, which he would then pull shut. 'If they aren't upstairs
yet, they're coming,' he whispered. 'Take Shep over there, the
southwest corner, behind those boxes.'
    'Where's all the ice?' Shepherd asked too loudly.
    Jilly hushed him as she guided him across the shadow-choked
attic. He wasn't tall enough to rap the lowest rafters with his
forehead, but his big brother would have to duck.
    In lower realms the wrecking crew crashed into another room.
    A man shouted something unintelligible. Another man returned his
shout with a curse, and someone barked with laughter.
    A hardness, a roughness, a swagger of presumption in these
voices made them sound less like men to Jilly, more like the never
quite defined shapes in a nightmare chase, which pursued sometimes
on two feet, sometimes on four, alternately howling like men and
crying like beasts.
    She wondered when the cops would come. If they would
come. Dylan had said the nearest town was miles away. The closest
neighbor lived half a mile south of here. But surely somebody had
heard the gunfire.
    Of course the assault had started just five minutes ago, maybe
six, and no rural police force would be able to answer such a
remote call sooner than another five minutes, more likely ten.
    'Where's all the ice?' Shepherd asked as loudly as before.
    Instead of hushing him again, Jilly answered in a soft voice
with which she hoped to set an example: 'In the refrigerator,
honey. That's where all the ice is.'
    Behind stacked boxes in the southwest corner, Jilly encouraged
Shep to sit beside her on the dusty floor.
    Filtered through a screened fresh-air vent, a blush of daylight
revealed a long-dead bird – a sparrow, perhaps –
reduced by time to papery bones. Beneath the bones were trapped a
few feathers that drafts had not stirred to other corners of the
attic.
    The bird must have stolen in here on a chilly day, through some
chink in the eaves, and must have been unable to find its way out.
Perhaps having broken a wing battering against rafters, certainly
exhausted and hungry, it had waited for death by the screened vent,
where it could see the sky.
    'Where's all the ice?' Shepherd asked, this time lowering his
voice to a whisper.
    Worried that the kid had not come as far out of his ice corner
as she had thought when he climbed the ladder, or that he was
sliding into it once more, Jilly pressed forward with her new game,
seeking dialogue. 'There's ice in a margarita, isn't there,
sweetie? All slushy and nice. Man, I could use one now.'
    'Where's all the ice?'
    'In a picnic chest, there'd be ice.'
    'Where's all the ice?'
    'Christmas in New England, there'd be ice. And snow.'
    Moving gracefully and quietly for such a large man, Dylan loomed
out of the deeper darkness swaddling the center of the attic, into
the bird light that dimly illuminated their refuge, and sat next to
his brother. 'Still the ice?' he asked worriedly.
    'We're going somewhere,' Jilly assured him with more confidence
than she felt.
    'Where's all the ice?' Shep whispered.
    'Lots of ice in a skating rink.'
    'Where's all the ice?'
    'Nothing but ice in an icemaker .'
    Boots met doors on the second floor. Rooms were breached with
crash and clatter.
    Whispering yet more discreetly, Shepherd said, 'Where's all the
ice?'
    'I see champagne in a silver bucket,' Jilly said, matching his
quiet tones, 'crushed ice packed around the bottle.'
    'Where's all the ice?'
    'North Pole has a lot of ice.'
    'Ahhh,' Shepherd said, and for the moment he said no more.
    Jilly listened tensely as voices in rooms below replaced the
boom and crack of violent search. Mummified conspirators in
pyramidal tombs, speaking through their grave wrappings, could not
have been less clear, and nothing said below was intelligible up
here.
    'Ahhh,' Shep breathed.
    'We have to move along, buddy,' Dylan said. 'It's way past