The mail stand offered three sizes of postboxes, ranging from envelope width for standard mail to large enough to suit residents who didn’t want packages left on their doorsteps. A label on one of the bigger mailboxes matched Burke’s house number. Maybe he collected stamps and received an entire bushel of correspondence from around the world every day. Or maybe he bought his ammunition online.
USPS didn’t invest heavily in the latest lock engineering. I had the pins clicking into place in less time than it had taken me to walk from the car to the mail stand. The little metal door swung open.
I’d expected to see an empty box, or at most a couple of letters. Sufficient to fulfill a burglar’s standard precaution and verify whether the Burkes had been home recently.
Instead I had to extend a quick hand to stop a short tower of paper from tumbling out onto the wet ground. Loads of mail. Junk circulars, political fliers, coupon books, enough volume to fill half the available square footage.
The postmarks at the bottom of the pile were from more than a week ago. I had hit the jackpot. The Burkes must be on vacation for the holidays.
Then I just as quickly revised my guess. Vacation would mean a hold on their mail, not renting a bigger postbox. This must be a common thing for Burke and his wife, being away from home for long periods.
He had his Russian passport. Maybe they were abroad. Conducting whatever business paid for ranch houses and large postboxes in a sleepy neighborhood.
My quick memorization of the environs from online maps told me Burke’s house bumped up against one of the trails leading down to the lake. I walked up the street to find a gap in the treeline. One leap over a sodden ditch to the trail, and a fast stroll through the dark, and I was looking at Burke’s slash of backyard, its fence shrouded by blackberry brambles and creeping ivy.
The same single light still shone from the house, increasing the depth of the shadows in the yard. I saw no cameras or motion sensors or other signs of security beyond the simple lock on the sliding-glass door. The Burkes kept their curtains drawn. They had planted rows of short cypress trees on either side of the property, as a privacy screen from their immediate neighbors. All the better for me. No water dishes or chew toys or fecal land mines on the grass that signaled a dog, either. This was about as clear a coast as I could hope for.
I was nervous, and I realized why. Burke could be my father. A narrow chance, but a chance nonetheless. A better person than me might consider breaking into his immediate relation’s home to be crossing a moral line.
Burke might also be someone who put bullets into people for money. That was a more pressing reason to be jumpy.
Trail maintenance near the lake didn’t include limbing up the lower branches of the fir trees. It was much easier to climb one of the tall evergreens and drop ten feet down into the backyard than to fight through the brambles. I landed on the strip of bark that bordered the lawn, just a soft rustle above silent.
For a moment, I didn’t move. The house remained equally still.
My first stop was the window with the light shining behind it. A deep blue curtain obscured the interior of the room. I watched, and listened, until I was ninety percent confident that despite that lamp’s claim, the room was empty. And likely the entire house with it.
At the sliding door, I removed the scanner from my pocket. A slender silver box the same size and shape as a surge protector, the scanner was similar to the receiver I’d used when meeting Panni from the FBI at the Japanese garden. It made a sweep of low-band wireless frequencies, nothing more than 900 MHz, looking for a spike in activity. Low frequencies are best at penetrating walls and furniture, ideal for silent alarms. The scanner’s digital readout remained blank as I swept it across the edges of the doorframe.
I made a visual check as well. No telltale contact pads around the sliding door or the nearby window. No motion sensors under the eaves. Peering through the glass I could see straight through to the front door on the other side of the slim house, partly illuminated by the streetlamps on Amsbury shining through a vertical strip of pebbled glass at the doorframe. I didn’t see an alarm keypad on the nearest wall. Could it be this easy?
There was still a tiny possibility that someone was in the house, asleep. I rapped softly on the glass. A minute went by before I used the pick gun to unlock the door. It slid open with the slightest of shudders.
The scanner in my hand stayed dormant. I slipped my wet running shoes off and stepped inside.
Spotless. Both my entry, and the home as well. The Burkes must have a housecleaner as well as a landscaper.
It wasn’t a flashy house, like Dr. Claybeck’s midcentury marvel. Most of the furnishings looked like they had been acquired through catalogs, and not so long ago. The watercolors on the walls, too. As clean and uncontroversial as a home prepared by a Realtor to show prospective buyers. All the dishes put away. No clutter on the countertops. One lone raincoat hanging on the line of pegs by the front door, but no messy shoes below. Even the roll of paper towels on the kitchen wall looked fresh from the plastic, the first sheet still stuck to the ones below. Only the black-painted ceiling beams offered a hint of individuality.
I left the back door open—in the event I had to suddenly bolt—and stepped softly down the hall.
The bathroom and two identical bedrooms followed the same pattern. Very clean, very colorless. Men’s toiletries in the bathroom, but not so much as a whisker stub in the bone-dry sink or soap scum in the tub. The dresser drawers and closets held men’s clothes. Not enough of them to fill many washing machines at the laundromat. Sweaters, mostly XL, a couple of sport coats in 46R, and two pairs of lace-up dress shoes, one brown and one black, sized eleven-and-a-half. Same size as the sneakers I’d just removed.
Most of the clothes looked lightly used, but not enough that any of the garments were truly broken in. Even the socks neatly folded in the dresser had their creases from the original packaging.
From Panni’s records I knew Burke had bought the house ten years ago. He might have moved in yesterday, for all it showed. And he’d apparently left his wife, Natalia, back in Smolensk or wherever she was from.
I spent a few more minutes searching through hall closets and under kitchen counters. There were only a handful of things beyond the expected linens and appliances. Some camping gear and old stereo equipment was about as intriguing as it got. The spare bedroom lived up to the name. Spare. No filing cabinet or computer or other personal records. In a kitchen drawer I found bills from the past quarter for the house’s water and power, its trash pickup, its landscaping. I used my phone to snag a picture of each.
Locking the back door behind me, I put on my shoes and left the Burke home—no longer an accurate word for the place, I was sure—via the side of the house to Amsbury Street. A quick walk put me back at the Barracuda.
I took a moment to sit and muse about the strangeness of it all.
The house was spitting distance from deserted. For what reason? Had Burke moved, separated from his wife, and now the house on Amsbury was just an investment waiting for the market to bubble again? Was it a safe house in case he needed to crash somewhere in an emergency? That didn’t match. It didn’t make sense to use his address of record as a refuge.
But the idea redirected my thoughts back to the stack of mail I’d seen in Burke’s postbox. No magazine subscriptions. No bank statements. No cards or personal letters. Only junk that might as well have been addressed to Occupant.
I recalled my impression of Burke’s home being ready for an open house showing. Realtors had a word for that: staged. That was what Sean Burke’s house was. Just a bare façade of a dwelling, there to provide an impression but nothing more. Soulless.
As I drove down Amsbury Street one last time, my skin prickled. It took me a few seconds to catch up to why.
Burke’s house had contained no photographs at all.
That simple fact shouldn’t have surprised me, not with how impersonal the rest of the interior had
been. But the similarity to the home I had once shared with my grandfather was positively spooky.
Fourteen
I’d discovered my gym through a Facebook group that provided community info and general bullshit sessions for the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Fort Lewis. Most of the group’s posts concentrated on activities near the base, but there was usually a mention when a brother got something going in Seattle. One of those Rangers was a former second lieutenant from 1st Bat named Twelvetrees, and one of those somethings was his venture into training MMA fighters.
The LT’s business had suffered a rough start. His first location had been burglarized of all its brand-new equipment. When Twelvetrees had posted on the battalion group, it was to ask if any brothers had old punching bags or dumbbells or gloves they could spare, or at least lend, while his stable of fighters got ready for their upcoming bouts.
My curiosity had been piqued. I exchanged messages with Twelvetrees online. He’d said he hoped the cops were able to trace the gear; that he’d etched 12T on every piece. I wasn’t as optimistic, given the smaller scale of the theft and the manpower constraints of the SPD, but I kept that to myself. I told the lieutenant I’d do some hunting.
Almost everything that had been stolen was heavy. The punching bags—the largest of them two hundred pounds—would have required more than one person to take down and carry. It didn’t take intuitive genius to guess a truck or van had pulled right up to the door, with two or three men inside. At least one of them had been familiar enough with the gym to know it was worth knocking over.
The free weights would be worth far more if sold as a set. I tried eBay and Craigslist and other sources for new listings. I checked pawnshops I knew might not give a crap about the provenance of their inventories. I came up blank.
Then it dawned on me: Who would want a metric ton of fighting gear?
I asked Twelvetrees if he’d had any prospective clients who’d come from other gyms but never signed on. He remembered a guy from Lacey who claimed to have a few pro fights and was looking to become a trainer. The guy had told Twelvetrees that he would come back to work out and talk more, but that was the last the LT had seen him. With a little mental digging, Twelvetrees recalled the dude’s name—Hepp—and that he’d had a shaved head and a tattoo of flames on the side of his neck. It gave me somewhere to start.
A gym called World Class Warriors had opened two weeks prior in Lacey. It had a basic webpage with address and hours and photos. One of the photos showed an instructor working with kids, his flame tattoo stretched as he extended his neck to call out instructions.
I took a drive. World Class Warriors was open. Hepp’s bullet head was visible toward the back, leading a group in abdominal exercises. I paid ten bucks for a pass and waited until the evening class let out.
Hepp caught me scratching at the red paint on the dumbbells, exposing the etching underneath. 12T. He protested, vehemently. I knocked him down, twice, along with one of his more foolhardy middleweight fighters, before holding a seventy-pound dumbbell suspended over Hepp’s throat while I explained to him how he was going to spend his night. The alternative would be a squad of highly motivated Rangers making an impromptu sortie to Lacey.
It took Hepp three hard hours to load my truck with the stolen gear, working alone. By the end, all of the fight was out of him. I let him keep the ten bucks’ gym fee but warned him that if Twelvetrees so much as saw a cockroach in his newest place, it would be Hepp’s fault.
Two days easy work, and I’d earned myself a lifetime membership, along with a key to unlock Twelvetrees Fitness at any hour.
Which was how Cyndra and I found ourselves in the former auto-body shop at nine in the morning, working on the basics of the deadlift. In the opposite corner of the gym, two fighters named Oscar and Cannonball shadowboxed in the ring. I showed Cyn what the movement looked like before rolling a ten-kilogram barbell with no plates on it in front of her toes.
“Keep your spine straight,” I said, “and pull a little on the bar. Feel the muscles in your back engage?”
“Uh huh. I just pick it up?”
“Push with your legs. Let them do the work of getting the bar off the ground.”
She did. We refined the motion a few times before I put a five-pound plate on either side of the bar. Twelvetrees had positioned the plate racks to conceal bolts still jutting from the concrete floor, remnants of the auto shop’s hydraulic lifts. The gym still smelled faintly of oil from its past life.
“I can lift more than that,” Cyn said.
“Sure. But try this ten times first. Take it slow.”
She did. By the last rep her face was crimson and she had to concentrate every second to keep her back from arching.
“What’s it for?” she said after a couple of breaths.
“Darn near everything. But especially your back and legs. Perfect for derby. Get some water; we’ll try bench press next.”
“I can do more.”
“You’ll feel it tomorrow as is. Tell me about Los Angeles.”
“Huh? It was fine.”
“‘Fine’ like fun, or ‘fine’ like you got through it?”
“Mostly got through it. Dad’s happy. And I got to see some of the kids I used to live with.”
In their foster homes. “Are they solid?” Meaning were they leading what most people would consider law-abiding lives. Cyndra was the daughter of a former crook and, just like me, had grown up with a skewed perspective. Hell, mine was still skewed. I was just aware of it. And trying to keep Cyndra from falling into her old habits.
“Yes,” she said. “Farrah got a job at the Northridge mall. She sells big pretzels.”
I grinned. “How many’d you eat while you were there?”
“Like six.”
My phone rang. I practically leapt across the rubberized mats to grab it off the apron of the ring.
Willard. Finally. I had reached out to my grandfather’s onetime criminal cohort last night, letting him know it was urgent. With every hour that had ticked by since, I’d grown more convinced that Willard was occupied with his own work and wouldn’t respond.
I told Cyndra to practice her flexed-arm hang on the pull-up bar while I took the call.
“Got your messages,” he said in his meat-grinder voice. “All three of ʼem. You ever sleep?”
“When there’s time.” The two fighters in the ring had begun working with the mitts. I walked toward the entrance so I could hear Willard over the pop of Cannonball’s fists on leather.
“Time you don’t have. That came through loud and clear, during your second voice mail, I think.”
“It kept cutting me off. I figured the faster you had the details, the faster you could get to work.”
Willard rumbled his discontent. “If. If I get to work. This is a long list you gave me. Genesee Architectural Cooperative. H&L Construction. Blueprints, electrical plans . . .”
“They built Ceres Biotech within the last year. And I need whatever specs you can find on their security company. By this time tomorrow.”
“It’s the holidays, Van.”
I wondered if my grandfather had had an equally difficult time getting Willard to commit to a job. Not that the huge man was unwilling. Just deliberate to a fault.
“No rest for the wicked,” I said. “I can give you eight grand for the intel, and another twelve if you’ll back me up during the score.”
“A fool and his money, huh?”
My cash reserves from my unexpected windfall had dwindled rapidly. Getting my neck out of the noose seemed a good reason to blow the last of it.
“Give me a couple of hours,” Willard said. “By then I’ll know if any of this is even possible.”
“As long as I’m pushing my credit, there’s other help I need.” I took a breath. “From Elana.”
“Fuck you,” Willard said, loud enough I glanced up to see if Cyndra had overheard. She’d grown bored of hanging from the chin-up bar and had gone back to more deadlifts, with
more weight. “You keep my niece out of this.”
“It’s just some snoop work. Hollis or I would be recognized.”
“Let me do it.”
“You stand out like a bowling ball in a fish tank,” I said. “Elana can be there and gone fast enough.”
“Are you asking or telling me?”
“Call it a courtesy notice.”
“Some courtesy. Every time you call me I get the same feeling. As though I’m reaching into a garbage disposal to fish something out, and your finger is poised over the switch.”
He hung up.
When I turned around, Cyndra took a flash picture of me. “There.”
“I should have put your phone at the top of the climbing wall. Least you’d have to work for it.”
She held out the phone to show me. Video of her lifting the barbell, already on TikTok. She swiped the screen and I saw myself, looking startled, for an instant before Cyndra pulled it away to continue tapping messages in the app.
“Wren says hi,” Cyndra said. With enough innocence for a platoon of angels.
“Say hi back.”
“You should. Here. Text her.”
“I’ll text her you’re slacking off to DM your whole school. You’ll be doing laps for a week.”
Cyn scowled. “That’s not fair.”
“Fair is what you make out of what you get. Let’s go to work.”
Junior Year, Part One
I was late for registration at the start of the second semester, having overslept because Dono and I had been out late the night before to case a gated community in Magnolia. All of the shop electives I had wanted were full. Technical theater with Ms. Nasgate was the best of what was left.
I figured I’d just make the most of it, work the spotlight, and maybe practice my rewiring skills on the electricals in Watson High’s auditorium. If I wanted Dono to teach me more about greasing home security systems, I had to master the basics, and I was forbidden from messing with our house since I’d accidentally shorted everything out over winter break.
A Dangerous Breed Page 9