We sat and thought about that for a moment; then Lane sighed and said, “They said we can probably get his computers back. Not the hard drives, but the rest of them. And the monitors, and his personal stuff.”
“What about Jack? I mean, the body.”
“I’ve got to go to the medical examiner’s office and sign for him. They’ve released it . . . him.”
“Huh. So maybe we should stop by his house and take a look around,” I said. Over time, I’d crept up on the blue Toyota. He edged over to make it onto an exit, and I chopped him off, nearly sending him into the retaining wall. At the bottom of the ramp, I went right and he went left, but I could see his middle finger wagging out the window.
“For what?” Lane was unaware of the drama.
“Those Jaz disks. He said he’d put them in the safest possible place.”
“You know what that means? I thought it was just a . . . phrase,” she said.
“Maybe. But we could look around.”
“The house is sealed.”
“Yeah,” I said. “With a piece of tape.”
4
The rest of the afternoon was taken up with the melancholy routines of violent death: claiming the body, signing for a bag full of personal effects that the cops didn’t want—besides the routine junk, Jack had $140 in his wallet, unless somebody had clipped it along the way, and Lane’s high school graduation photo, which made her cry again. She also signed a contract with a local funeral home to handle shipment of the body by air freight. The coffin cost $1,799, and came with a guarantee that neither of us was interested in reading.
When Lane was in Dallas the first time, to identify the body, she’d gone to look at Jack’s rented house, although she hadn’t been allowed inside. We cruised it late in the afternoon, a two-bedroom, L-shaped cement-block rambler painted an awful shade of electric pink. The exact shade, I thought, of a lawn flamingo. A short circular driveway took up most of the front yard. There was no carport or garage. We could see only one door, right in the middle of the house, under an aluminum awning. We continued around the block, and from the other side, could see a small screened porch jutting into the backyard.
And there was a fireplace chimney. Not much of one, but there was one.
“He always rented the cheapest livable place,” Lane said. “He’d fly back to California on weekends.”
“Didn’t like Texas?”
“Not a California kind of place,” she said.
“Some people would count that as a blessing. Most Texans, for example.”
She let the comment go by, as we cruised the house again.
“How do we get in?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see what lights are on, with the neighbors. If we can get in the back porch, we’ll have some cover.”
“Okay,” she said. Simple faith.
We did the block once more, and I looked for kids’ swing sets and bikes, basketball hoops, and dogs. LuEllen had trained me: if there are kids around, the parents in a family tend to be at home in the evening, and awake and alert. Basketball hoops often mean teenagers, and teenagers come and go at weird, inconvenient times. Dogs are the worst. Dogs bark: that’s how they earn their money, and in this neighborhood, they’d probably be listened to.
The house on the south side of Jack’s had a hurricane fence around the backyard, which could mean either kids or dogs. The one on the north side, a noxious-green one, was as simple and plain as Jack’s, with no sign of life. The house directly behind Jack’s had an aboveground swimming pool in the backyard, which probably meant kids.
If there were kids running around, or splashing in the pool, we’d have to forget it. If not, the biggest problem might be the streetlight across the street and down one house.
“What do you think?” Lane asked.
“We probably ought to sky-dive onto the roof and cut our way into the house with a keyhole saw . . .”
“Kidd . . .”
“We ought to sneak around the back between the green house and Jack’s place, if the green house doesn’t show any lights, then cut our way into the screen porch and see what the situation is there. Usually, there’s a way in.”
“If we break in, they’ll know it was us.”
I shook my head: “No, they won’t. We’re leaving for San Francisco at eleven o’clock tonight. If they don’t get around to the house for a few days . . . well, who knows what might have happened? And really, who cares? They’ve already searched the place.”
We found a Wal-Mart and bought burglary tools—might as well have the best—spent some time eating Tex-Mex, dropped the rental car with the airport Avis, and checked in with the airline. When we were set to fly, we rented another car from Hertz, using a perfectly good Wisconsin driver’s license and Amex gold card issued to my old pal and fishing buddy Harry Olson, of Hayward, Wisconsin. Harry didn’t exist, but he had money in the bank, a great credit rating, and a perfect driving record.
The fake ID convinced Lane that we really were going to break into her brother’s house: she’d been relaxed all afternoon, but now she was tightening up. “The question we have to ask ourselves,” she said, “is whether this is worth the trouble we could get into.”
“We won’t know unless we find the Jaz disks. Like you’ve been telling me, there are some odd things about this killing. If Jack was killed because of something with my name on it, I want to know what that something is. Without the cops getting it first.”
“Hmm.”
“You don’t have to go in,” I said. “All you have to do is show up with the car when I’m ready to leave.”
“If you’re going in, I’m going in.”
That would help; we could cut the search time in half. So I didn’t say no, though I had the feeling that if I had said no, and insisted on it, she might have given in.
“We won’t go in if the situation looks bad. If the neighborhood’s lit up, or we see people on the street.”
“Okay. That’s sensible.”
When we got back to the house, the neighborhood wasn’t all lit up, and there were no people on the street. The green house on the north side of Jack’s house was dark. There was no car in the drive, or in front of it.
We cruised it once and I stopped a block away. “You remember everything?” I said. “We’re joggers . . .”
“I remember, I remember,” she said. “If we’re gonna do it . . .”
“Let’s go.”
We jogged down the street, loose sweatpants and T-shirts. I was carrying a small olive-drab towel wrapped around our Wal-Mart tools. If we ran into cops, I was hoping I could pitch the towel into a bush before we had to talk with them.
That was the plan. Or, as Lane put it, “That’s the plan?”
The night was warm and you could still feel the day’s unnatural heat radiating from the blacktop. We stopped two houses away from Jack’s, as though we were catching a breather. Moved to the sidewalk. The streetlight was only about half-bright, and the shadows it cast seemed even darker than the other unlit spots.
“Anything?” I asked.
“No.” She giggled nervously. “God, I’m going nuts.”
“Be cool.” We sauntered on down the sidewalk, looking, looking. At the green house, we turned up the driveway, walked halfway around the loop, then cut across the lawn, and in five seconds, we were between the two houses, in the shadows. If caught and questioned at that moment, Lane was finding a bush to pee behind. We waited for a minute, two minutes, three—about a century and a half, in all—and nothing happened. No lights went on, we saw no movement. No dogs.
The house behind Jack’s, with the pool, showed a backyard light, and lights in the windows, but there was a croton hedge along the back fence, and it cast a shadow over us.
No sauntering, casual bullshit here. We duckwalked to the back porch, found the screen door locked, and the crack in the lock covered with a length of yellow plastic tape and a notice. I carefully peeled them off. The door wanted to rattl
e when I touched it: it was flimsy, meant to keep out nothing stronger than a blue-bottle fly. I unwrapped the towel, pulled out a short steel pry-bar, pried the door back enough that we could force the lock-tongue across the strike plate.
We eased the door open and slipped inside, crawling now. Listened again. Nothing at all: or almost nothing. Cars on a major street, three blocks away. A crazed bird somewhere, chirping into the dark. An air conditioner with a bad compressor. “Hope the rest is this easy,” Lane whispered.
“Shh.” We pulled on thin vinyl cleaning gloves and I stood up to look at the porch. The porch had been framed with two-by-fours, and around the top, where the two-by-fours met the screen panels, there was an inch-wide ledge. If I was naïve enough to try to hide a house key, that’s where I would have hidden it.
Hoping that reports of black widows and brown recluse spiders were exaggerated, I ran my fingers down the length of the two-by-fours until, in the second panel from the end of the porch, I knocked a key off. It tinkled onto the concrete floor and we stopped breathing for a moment; then I got down on a knee and groped around until I found it. The key still worked: it was a little corroded, but I polished it on my sweatpants, slipped it in and out of the door lock a few times, and we were in.
The interior of the house was almost dark, with some illumination leaking in from the front, from the streetlight, and through the back windows. The place smelled like carpet cleaner. We groped our way to a hall, and I switched on one of our flashlights—I’d taped the lens to get a single needle-thin beam of light.
“Remember,” I said, “Never turn the flashlight up. Always keep it down. If you don’t bounce it off a window, nobody’ll see us.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. She headed for the bedroom-office, while I went to the living room. I knew exactly where I was going. Jack had met LuEllen in Redmond, and we’d had a couple of beers together at a motel bar. The conversation had drifted to burglary, which wasn’t unusual, given the circumstances of our being in Redmond in the first place.
LuEllen had told Jack about a guy who lived in Grosse Point Farms, Michigan, and had a lockbox built into the floor of his fireplace. The fireplace was one of those remote-control gas things, and all the heat went straight up—and the fireproof box under the fireplace was not only invisible, it was absolutely, completely counterintuitive: who’d put valuables where there was a fire?
LuEllen had said, “He thought it was the safest possible place. And it would have been, I’d never have found it in a million years, if his wife hadn’t told me about it.”
Jack had laughed about that: the safest possible place. Was the line in the letter just an easy cliché? Maybe.
A few minutes later, I was ready to give up. This was an old, crappy concrete-with-steel firebox, one of the instant fireplaces installed by the millions in low-end ramblers. There was a flue, which could be opened, but I could neither see nor feel anything inside it. When I got down on my hands and knees for an inch-by-inch inspection with the flashlight, there was no sign of a crack, a seam, a false plate.
Lane came out just as I was backing away. “What are you doing?” she whispered.
“I thought he might have hidden it around the fireplace,” I said.
“Why?”
I explained, quickly, and she said, “That should have worked.” But it hadn’t. “There is a crawl space up above, under the eaves,” she said. “There’s a hatch in the bathroom.”
“The feds probably already looked,” I said.
“We should take a peek, anyway.”
The hatch was right in the middle of the bathroom ceiling. I stood on the toilet and pushed it up, and could just barely feel around the edges of the opening. All I could feel was insulation.
“Anything?” Lane asked.
“Can’t reach far enough in,” I grunted, stretching up as far as I could.
“Make me a step and boost me up,” she said.
I hopped off the toilet, interlaced my fingers. She stepped into it, and I lifted her belly-high into the hole. She pushed herself the rest of the way up, and whispered down, “Give me a couple of minutes. There’s a walk-board up here, but there’s all this insulation.”
I stepped out of the bathroom and tried to think. Might the fireplace have some kind of hatch in the back, to shovel out cinders? I’d seen those on other . . .
I stepped back into the bathroom. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Lane, keeping my voice low. “I want to look in the utility room.”
“Okay.”
I found my way back to the utility room, passed on the washer, dryer, and water heater, and went to the furnace. The furnace was one of those baby things you find in the south, no bigger than a twenty-gallon can, with a grill on the front and an access hatch on the back. The access hatch was crammed with switches and valves, with no space for anything else, so I pulled off the grill. Nothing. There was a dark space above the grill opening, small pipes twisting around some furnace apparatus I didn’t know about. I couldn’t see anything, and just reached inside . . . and felt something hard, square, and loose. I rattled it, and a taped bundle of Jaz-disk boxes almost fell on my feet.
I pushed the grill back in place and headed for the bathroom: and that involved moving slowly along the front-room wall. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see a little better in the gloom, especially with the front-room curtains half open. As I moved along the front-room wall, my eye caught a movement in the yard. I froze, uncertain that I’d seen it. Then I saw it again, a man’s shoulder on the sidewalk, apparently walking up to the house.
I continued back to the bathroom, almost tripped over the tool towel, picked it up, and hissed up at the hatch: “Lane.”
“What?” A white patch, her face, hovered over the hatch.
“Somebody coming,” I said. “I’m gonna hand you the towel.”
As I said it, I heard a scratching at the front door. Somebody was peeling the police tape off the front, and taking care to be quiet about it. I stood on the toilet, handed her the tool towel. “Take the disks,” I said.
“You found them!”
“Move back; I’m coming up.”
I had to stand on my tiptoes to get my hands around the joists at the edge of the hatch. I heard the key in the lock, got a grip, and did a pull-up and then a push-up through the hatch. The door opened outside, and Lane whispered, “Now what?” and I whispered, “Shut up. Shine your light on the hatch.”
She turned her light on the hatch board. I picked it up, and carefully settled it back into its slot. As long as nobody was doing a thorough search . . .
Whoever was down below us was as quiet as we’d been. After a few minutes, Lane said, “Are you sure they’re down there?”
I nodded: “I heard a key in the lock.”
A minute later: “I don’t hear anybody,” she said.
“Quiet.”
I was standing on a joist. A long plank ran down to the end of the house, to a head-sized vent that looked out over the front yard. Half hunched against the low overhead, I eased down the board and peered through the vent. A sports utility vehicle—maybe a 4Runner or a Pathfinder, I could only see the front end of it—was parked in front of the green house, a spot that had been empty when we came in. There was no other movement on the street, although I could see a television through a window across the street. Then I heard the door open below me, softly, and a man stepped out onto the curved driveway. He looked back and said, “Hurry, goddamnit.”
As he turned to talk, I caught an image of his face, eye-blink quick. A second man pushed the door shut, and they hurried toward the SUV. The second guy was carrying what looked like . . .
“A gas can,” I said aloud. “Ah, shit.” I turned back toward Lane.
“Get out, get out,” I said, “Get the hatch up, get the hatch up, get . . .”
“What, what . . . ?”
She was looking toward me, still whispering, as I scrambled frantically down the plank, and she was not lift
ing the hatch.
“Get the goddamn hatch . . .” I was almost on top of her before she lifted it up, still uncertain.
“Drop through,” I said, urgently. “Hurry—they’re going to burn the place.”
She got it: no question. She put her feet over the edge, held on with her hands for a second, dangled, and then dropped into the bathroom.
“Disks,” I said. I handed the bundle down, then dropped into the bathroom myself. I stepped into the hallway, and the air was thick with gasoline fumes and something else. “Out the back.”
“What?” She’d taken a step toward the front room, to see what was happening. I took a step after her, caught her arm. Just beyond her, a burning rag hung from a string that must have been taped or thumb-tacked to the ceiling. The “something else” odor was burning cotton. As I caught her arm, the string, already burning, parted, and the rag dropped to the floor.
The gas went with a whump, like a giant pilot light—or napalm, for that matter—and I jerked her back, and her sweatshirt was burning and I beat at it with my hands as I dragged her through the firelight to the back door.
She was screaming and beat at her shirt with her free hand. I twisted her and got the bottom of the back of the shirt and ripped it up over her head and off, and she groaned and said, “I’m burned,” and I led her out the door and around the house and said, “Run, run, run,” and we ran through the backyards of the green house and the next house over, and then around onto the sidewalk and down the street.
In one minute, we were at the car. In three minutes, we were a mile away.
“How bad?” I asked.
“My arms, my hands, my face,” she said. “I don’t think it’s too bad.”
“Gotta find a good light,” I said.
We found a good light at a hot-bed motel a couple of miles from the airport. I checked in with the Harry Olson ID. The clerk was locked behind a thick bulletproof glass window, and I said, “We’ll want to check out early; we got a real early flight.” He grunted, said, “Drop the key in the box,” pointed at a locked box hung on the side of the motel, and went back to a gun magazine whose lead story was, “Exposed! Handgun Control Inc.’s 5-Year Plan to Disarm America: Read It and Weep.”
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 50