Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  “He’s coming for you,” said the team leader.

  “Who?”

  “Fontaine.”

  “My guys have him covered.”

  “Are you sure?”

  There was no answer.

  “When was the last time you heard from your guys?”

  “I thought you was them.”

  “Time to choose a side.”

  “There are things I want.”

  “I know. Just tell me what I need to know.”

  “You’re in Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause. “You’re in the wrong city.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  They woke before dawn. Flynn returned the key to the office. No one was there. Perhaps the young guy was sneaking in a snooze. Perhaps he was using the bathroom. Flynn dropped the key next to the ancient computer that had served no purpose during his check-in the previous night.

  Hutton pulled into the first diner she saw that wasn’t a chain. She said she preferred the mom-and-pop places to the chains. Something about better distribution of wealth. Flynn didn’t care either way. He always expected diner food to be plentiful if lacking in imagination, the service to be brisk but professional as a minimum, and the coffee to be dishwater. He was wrong on two of those counts.

  The waitress was in her midthirties with long hair tied back, and offered a smile that belied the early hour and warmed the frosty morning. She called Flynn sweetheart and told him the cook did poached eggs like a French chef, and he took up that challenge, with bacon and sourdough. Hutton had an omelet, Denver style.

  The waitress told no lies. The eggs were done to perfection, with just the right amount of yolk running onto his toast. The cook sprinkled the top with cuttings of chives and a few shards of parmesan, which was unexpected but totally worked. The bacon was thick and artery-clogging perfection. His countrymen might have needed a few tips when it came to coffee, but no one came close to American bacon. Thick-cut and smoked to within an inch of existence. The check came in under twenty dollars, so Flynn left a fifty on the table. He figured people who rose that early and were that cheerful about it deserved all the encouragement he could offer.

  Hutton looked up a couple of possible options over her omelet, and they were standing across the street from a local real estate office in Katonah when it opened. Unfortunately the person opening the office was the office manager. She didn’t know much about foreclosures or real estate owned, other than it was a terrible shame when good people got kicked out of their homes. She wasn’t keen on suggesting an alternative office, which Flynn figured was a good quality in an office manager, but under gentle interrogation gave up the name of another office at the other end of the street.

  They walked the length of what appeared to be the main street. One side was occupied by twee colonial buildings housing general stores and restaurants and real estate agents and little places selling a pointless array of what were referred to as home goods. Hutton called them tchotchkes. The opposite side of the street featured a similar design aesthetic—a wine shop, hardware store and framing place, all backed by the rail line that ran south to Manhattan and terminated at Grand Central Station. They walked from one end of the downtown to the other, having passed three more real estate brokers before they found the office recommended to them.

  Hutton went in alone. She looked more professional, like she might even be one of those flipper type people. She also reasoned that a couple would offer more hope to the agent of a family home sale, and thus provoke more questions. Flynn happily waited on the sidewalk. The clouds had come in overnight and a gentle misty rain began to fall as he stood watching the parade of expensive European cars drive up and down the street.

  It took twenty minutes. Hutton offered her apologies—the agent had insisted she have an espresso from their new machine. Flynn shrugged. They marched back to the Yukon. A film of water had settled on the windshield. Hutton pulled out a computer printout of all the current REO listings. The agent had also provided a separate list, with a nudge and a wink, that she got from a banker friend, of REOs not yet formally listed. All told, there was a total of sixteen properties.

  They decided to do drive-bys. The Yukon had no GPS, so Hutton used her phone to input each location and Flynn navigated. They started with the closest to town and worked their way out. The first couple of houses were two and three blocks back from the town’s main street, and both bore small and tasteful For Sale signs on their lawns. Flynn scrubbed both off the list.

  “If they’re being marketed, they can be visited. Can you tell if that’s the case?”

  “Not from this list."

  “In that case, on y va.”

  They broke north and then east of the town, and then worked in quadrants back to the south. Nothing fit Dennison’s MO. The houses were on busy roads or they were still for sale or the neighbors were too close. One home backed onto the local firehouse. Hutton drove slow and took her time, and Flynn watched hard and studied the approaches and surroundings and the buildings themselves. He got out and walked three possibles, but wrote them off on closer inspection.

  Hutton studied her list and said the next best region was to the north, and they would have to backtrack through town. They stopped for lunch in the quaint downtown. Hutton dropped into a store and bought a small umbrella, and they moved next door to a cafe for sandwiches and iced tea. Neither spoke of the notion that they were on the wrong path, that they were wasting time. They pulled out into building rain and set off up Saw Mill River Parkway. The REO properties to the north were further out of town.

  Property fourteen of sixteen ticked all Flynn’s boxes. Hutton steered into a cul-de-sac surrounded by woods. There were only three homes on the street. One on the right, with a driveway about a hundred yards in from the cross road. The second on the left, a further fifty yards in. The third was at the end of the cul-de-sac.

  It was a colonial that wasn’t really. Part of it maybe, originally. But it had been expanded back and to the side, and had risen like a loaf of bread. The listing said there were 3,500 square feet, which came out at a touch over 325 square meters. In France there were palaces that weren’t that large. Hutton suggested that wouldn’t include the garage, which had two roller doors, one the width of two vehicles, the other the width of one. A three-car garage. The property backed onto thick woods, lots of trunks but few leaves. Hutton drove slowly to the end of the street. There was no rounded turning area. More a dead end, so she stopped short of the property like an interested investor might do.

  “It’s secluded,” she said. “Neighbors, but they aren’t close. No line of sight, even with the winter trees.”

  “The woods are a good second exit, if they’ve been scouted out. But the lawn looks mowed.”

  “The lender is probably required by the city to maintain it. So it doesn’t affect everyone else’s property prices. But yard guys wouldn’t go inside.”

  “It looks empty,” said Flynn.

  “It is empty.”

  “No, I mean it looks empty. As in abandoned. There are leaves in the gutters. Yard guys might not do that if the bank is paying the bare minimum to do the bare minimum. And it looks cold. No lights, no heat.”

  “No power. Con Edison has probably cut it off.”

  “Even better. And there’s no lockbox. No real estate agent.”

  “But no vehicle.”

  “A vehicle would look wrong. The place is supposed to be abandoned. Either they jimmied the garage door and it’s inside there, or they have a path scoped out through the woods to another location. Maybe another street or a lot or something.”

  “I’m going to take a look,” said Hutton, unbuckling her seat.

  “Risky.”

  “Like an investor. Taking a quick peek.”

  She grabbed a folio from her messenger bag and opened the door. Then she popped the umbrella open and slipped down from the truck. Flynn watched her walk away through the rain. She looked like on
e of those people. An investor, or a banker. She still wore her black trousers and was in her expensive-looking greatcoat, scarf wrapped around and knotted stylishly. The umbrella was in one hand, the folio in the other. He watched her walk up the driveway. She stopped at the garage and tried to pull up the door. It didn’t budge. Not jimmied. She walked up to the porch and dropped the umbrella down. Then she walked the width of the house, stopping several times to peer in through the windows. She got to the end and turned and walked back, looking at her folio, appearing to take notes. Like an investor. She stopped at the front door and tried the knob. It must have been locked, because she collected her umbrella and disappeared down the side of the property. She was gone a tick over two minutes. She returned down to the end of the driveway, where the concrete met the blacktop, and she took another look at the property. Then she turned and strode back to the Yukon.

  “No one’s home,” she said as she landed back in the driver’s seat and tossed the umbrella in the rear. “Not for a while. The blinds are mostly closed, but I could see in a few places. The kitchen looks a mess.”

  “Dishes?”

  “Demolition. I’d say the previous owner was pretty unhappy about getting evicted. Probably had a high-paying job and got laid off and was trying to hide their financial worries from their golfing buddies. Happens a lot. Big house, nice cars, but still paycheck to paycheck. Anyway, they seem to have taken most of the kitchen cabinets, and the appliances. They left the sink. On the floor.”

  “Any signs of life?”

  “Nothing visible. But there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “The trees kind of hide it, but the land at the back rises up some. The back section of the house is higher.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s a basement under it. I couldn’t see into it, but I’d guess it joins up with the garage.”

  “A basement,” Flynn said to himself. “This feels right.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We need to go in. See if they’re in there.”

  Hutton frowned. “Now?”

  Flynn looked around. The clouds were heavy and damp and the afternoon light was failing.

  “No. Let’s wait. As soon as it’s dark.”

  They returned to the downtown in unrelenting rain and bought plastic rain ponchos. Most of the options were bright colors—oranges, pinks, yellows. Hutton went with a forest green, and Flynn chose a clear version. Hutton got two espressos in the cafe and they drank them in the Yukon. The night came on like lost consciousness. Gray was overlaid by black. The rain found its rhythm, not hard but not giving up. Workers from the city started returning, spilling from the train station into expensive cars. They waited until the cascade of commuters became a trickle, and Hutton drove back toward the house.

  Flynn told her go about three-fifths of a mile further up the cross street.

  “Three-fifths?” she asked. “Not a half, not three-quarters?”

  “I like three-fifths.”

  “You’re very strange.”

  “It’s close to a kilometer. I like kilometers.”

  “The metric system, hey? You didn’t learn American measures?”

  “Of course I did. Twelve inches to a foot. Three feet to a yard. Seventeen hundred and sixty yards to a mile. Tell me how that makes any sense.”

  “Don’t start. Tell me how metric makes sense?”

  “Ten millimeters to a centimeter, ten centimeters to a decimeter, ten decimeters to a meter. Simple.”

  “You really are strange.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They hiked back along the road under their ponchos. Hutton left her scarf behind but kept her coat underneath. She had repacked her courier bag and wore it strapped across her so the bag sat just above her butt, under the poncho. Flynn discarded his snow jacket. The poncho provided no respite from the cold, but he preferred the freedom of movement. He could live with the cold.

  They walked back along the road to the mouth of the street. The first house in the cul-de-sac burned with warm light behind closed drapes. The second house offered only patches of lamp light. The kind of lights that were probably on timers, as if the owners were yet to get home or had gone out for the evening.

  The REO property at the end of the cul-de-sac was dark.

  There were no night lights, no path lights leading up the driveway, nothing on a timer. The white garage door and the trim around the windows glowed through the rain and gave the house a sense of structure. Flynn followed Hutton up the side of the house where she had gone earlier in the day. They followed the property up as Hutton had described. The rear was ten feet higher than the front. The yard went back for an indeterminable distance, possibly fifty yards, before meeting the tree line. The rear of the house was a bank of sliding glass doors that opened onto a deck made of some kind of slip-resistant wood substitute. Perhaps it was easier to maintain. Hutton led Flynn to the sliding doors and stopped under the eaves. Her poncho was shedding water everywhere.

  “This looks like the vulnerable point,” she said.

  Flynn nodded. He had to agree. Glass always was. He noticed that the sliding doors had been covered with large sheets of paper. Perhaps a nod to security. Maybe the kitchen had been damaged by someone other than the owner. He pushed the hood of his poncho back and walked under the eaves along the glass doors. Windows were easy, but noisy. He wasn’t so worried about rousing the neighbors, but he didn’t want to tip off anyone who might be inside before he needed to. He stopped before a conventional door at the end of the windows. It was white painted wood with six panes of glass slotted into it. Flynn could see that the door led into the kitchen. He crouched to look at the deadlock. It was new. Probably installed by a contractor working for the lender. And like the yard guys, probably getting paid the bare minimum and therefore installing the bare minimum. He looked up at Hutton.

  “You have a force tool?”

  “What about the glass?”

  “I prefer to leave no footprints. If possible.”

  Hutton nodded and reached in under her poncho. She pulled out a small purse, like someone might keep pocket change in. She unzipped it and handed the tool to Flynn. It was like a rudimentary screwdriver, long and thin at one end, a broad basic square-edged handle at the other. Flynn pushed the thin end into the keyhole. Then he pulled out his Glock and ejected the magazine and the round in the chamber and handed them to Hutton. It was a safe weapon with three passive safeties. But there was a fourth safety, the most important of them. His brain. He didn’t want the gun loaded for what he was about to do.

  He slotted the end of the force tool in through the trigger guard of the Glock and then turned the gun until it was tight on the corners of the tool. Then he pushed the barrel of the gun like a wrench. He needed to create torque in order to turn the force tool in the lock. There was potential to damage a good handgun, but he was reckoning on the gun being of better manufacture than the lock.

  It was. The barrel moved and the gun turned and the force tool rotated in the lock as if it were a key. Flynn slid the gun off and Hutton handed him the magazine, where she had pushed the previously chambered round back into place. Flynn slipped the magazine back in and pulled the slide and chambered the round again. He handed the force tool to Hutton as he stood and then looked at her. Her hair was damp despite the poncho. She nodded.

  Flynn pushed the door open and stepped inside, Glock held up and ready. The kitchen was large and long, with an island that ran up the middle. He crossed the space to the other wall, where a space in the cabinets had previously housed a wall oven. He took a couple of steps to just short of where the wall stopped and the kitchen opened up into what he assumed would be the living space. Open concept, they called it. Hutton closed the door and dropped low. She moved along the wall of windows, until she reached the end of the island. Flynn saw her stop, but he couldn’t hear her above the rain landing on the deck outside.

  He edged to the end of the kitch
en wall and then spun around so his weapon swept across the open space. It was dark but there were few hiding spaces. There was no furniture. No lounges or sofas or china cabinets. Just a pale Scandinavian-style wood floor that almost glowed in the darkness. He moved around into the room, and Hutton followed on the other side. They worked together to sweep the lower floor and found nothing. No sign of anyone having been there in some time. Then they moved upstairs. Slowly, up the stairs, crossing over each other as the steps banked around on themselves, and then a little faster as they entered each room. Every one was empty. Four bedrooms. All vacant.

  Flynn led the way down. Got to the bottom and listened hard. Heard nothing but the distant patter of rain through double-glazed windows. The house gave no other sounds. No shifting or easing of the structure. Not the hum of electronics running through the walls. No bursts from a heat pump pulsing on and off. Nothing. Flynn stepped back toward the kitchen side of the living space. Off to the side was another door.

  The basement. Flynn turned the knob and opened the door slowly. Looked around as much as he could without sticking his head through the doorway. The kitchen where he stood was dark. The basement was another order of darkness altogether. Like a black hole in space. It smelled like a cave, damp and musty, with overtones of latex paint and two-stroke motor oil. He stood at the head of the steps, listening. He heard nothing. No shifting, no bursts, no hums. It felt like the house. Empty. Ox Dennison wasn’t here, if he ever had been. If he had ever gotten up from that small room in Iraq, where Flynn had shot him before the building exploded. Flynn realized that Dennison was a dream he was chasing. Events were real, but the explanation behind them had to be something he hadn’t thought of yet.

  Then he heard the grunt.

  It was soft and involuntary and barely audible over the white noise of the rain outside. A uniquely human sound. Not a cat or a dog or a rodent. The sound of someone trying to be quiet but trying so hard that they betrayed themselves. Perhaps discomfort or just from trying to hold their breath too long.