by Bryan Gilmer
When she looked at the floor, Jeff waited a couple of beats. “Does anyone here have a salt-and-pepper beard, stand about 5’8? Maybe wear a snap-brim cap?”
Nagra shook her head at first, but then she stared at Jeff and her eyes opened wide. “Corey. Just started part time. In fact, he helped me put down some sick animals yesterday.”
“With sodium phenobarbital.”
She nodded and covered half her face with her right hand.
Jeff’s senses aroused. He was close. “What was his last name?”
“Hart.”
Jeff knew his ‘80s music. Corey Hart was another pseudonym. The “I Wear My Sunglasses at Night” singer.
Maddox hung up the phone. “He’s on his way with some detectives. I’m going to have to ask you to leave or to wait out in our reception area …”
“Did Lt. Cooperton say that?”
“I’m saying that.”
Maddox had Jeff by the triceps now and was pushing him down the corridor toward the reception area.
Nagra spoke to calm her colleague, but Maddox told her, “I just figured out why I recognize this guy – from the picture on the back of the Yellow Pages. He works for a fancy law firm downtown that loves to do pharma liability cases, and I figure he’s here because he intends to sue us.”
Jeff realized there probably were grounds for a negligence suit here, but the presumption still offended him. He wrenched himself free from Maddox and gained two steps on him. To his surprise, Maddox turned and disappeared back down the hall.
Jeff decided to make the most of the opportunity. When he reached the reception area, he extended a hand across Marinna’s desk, and she shook it with another unwavering gaze into his eyes.
“Thanks for your help,” Jeff said. “One more question: Is Corey working today?”
“No, he was scheduled, but he didn’t show up. Didn’t call in sick, either. He’s a sweetie. Loves animals. Do you know him?”
“Dr. Nagra mentioned him,” Jeff said.
“He’s kind of shy. I think he has a little crush on me.”
Yeah, who would’t, Jeff thought. He fished for more information about “Corey,” but she didn’t really seem to know much. Soon, Cooperton pushed through the glass front door.
He spotted Jeff. “Shit fire, son. I’m gonna have to get you a damn junior deputy badge or somethin’ if you keep doin’ our job for us.” Then to Marinna, “Here to see Dr. Maddox, young lady.”
Jeff waited an hour in the reception area until Cooperton re-emerged. The big lieutenant showed Jeff “Corey Hart’s” employment application.
This one listed an address of 13 Germantown Ave., Rocky Falls, N.C., and Cooperton confirmed that he he’d never heard of that street, either.
“They said he had a staff ID badge for this place with his damn picture on it, but when they check their computer, there isn’t a copy of the photo on file like for everybody else. He mighta made his own.”
“What about security cameras? I saw one mounted over the receptionist’s desk.”
“Good thinkin’. We’ll get his picture off that.”
Twenty-eight
When she woke up, EmmaJane was in some stinky old house in the country, locked inside a teeny bedroom with dirty brown carpet and an old couch and no other furniture and with, like, steel mesh over the one tiny window. All she could see outside was pine trees, woods. And her head hurt so bad
And her clothes were wrinkled and stretched from him all dragging her around and her shoulder was sore but she thought she was okay. He hadn’t like, molested her yet.
But he’d stuck his head in the door a few minutes ago and said, “Wait here. There’s something I want you to do for me later.”
So she was really scared and alone, and she wasn’t even sure whether she could trust these bottles of Aquafina standing here on the floor even though it seemed like they were still sealed from the factory. And she was soooo thirsty.
This was, like, really bad.
She sat with her back against the wall and just cried, sooo hard for at least an hour, and the sun went down, and she thought he must have left.
So she tried screaming a few times, but nobody came.
And what the hell: She twisted open the bottled water and took a couple of sips, and it tasted regular, she thought.
Twenty-nine
The Boston Market roasted chicken dinner smelled so delicious that it took all Jeff’s discipline not to start eating it in the car – but he didn’t want to grease the Audi’s steering wheel or sacrifice a dress shirt. What the plastic plate held was far from a home-cooked meal, but it would be the closest thing he’d had since Ashlyn had been gone. He turned over the moral implications of staying in a relationship with a woman who wasn’t right for you because she was pretty and fed you well. Many a marriage had been built on less.
But he had cheated on her. The very same day she’d left! He had to end it soon. He would have to go up to Baltimore and see her, end it in person, but certainly not tell her about Caroline. When? Sometime…
When he pulled into his alley, Jeff squinted at new black scuffs on the temporary plywood garage doors. He’d gotten the padlock key back from his general contractor after the walls were done, so no one should have been inside the loft since Jeff had left this morning.
He had to push harder than usual to get his key into the lock. He parked the car and got out balancing the dinner carefully on the fingertips of his left hand. He rode the freight up to his apartment. When he opened the heavy steel door, the lights were on.
Jeff looked toward his living room and flinched at the ears-boxed sensation of sudden fear. He dropped the plate to the floor without meaning to, and the lid popped off, spilling food across the concrete.
His living room was full of furniture.
A leather loveseat stood under a framed Edward Hopper print centered on one of the new walls, grouped with a glass-top coffee table, recliner and floor lamp. His new TV stood opposite the sofa in an expensive armoire. What the fuck? The remote control now rested on the alien coffee table at a casual angle.
Jeff’s vision narrowed to a tunnel, and his body’s systems seemed to be shutting down one by one. He hurried down the short hallway and into the main bedroom. It was furnished too: An ostentatious walnut queen-size bed, neatly made with a plaid spread. A dresser, nightstands and chest. He pulled a nightstand away from the wall, and a drawer slid open, spilling knicknacks he’d never seen. He looked at the back panel: a Haverty’s Furniture label.
The Ellis burglar – or maybe burglars.
The panic prickled in the balls of his feet.
Jeff ground his teeth. The room was neatly arranged, with a bedside phone, lamps, even a book called Blink he knew had been some kind of best-seller left open to a middle page next to a glass of water on one bedside table. The air mattress where he’d slept the previous night lay deflated on the other side of the bed, long slashes cut into the vinyl.
Jeff breathed fast and shallow. Someone could still be in the building. He got an extra jolt of adrenaline. He had no weapon. He turned back toward the doorway, trying but failing to see into the shadows outside the bathroom. Then he bolted down the stairs and outside.
He juggled his mobile phone, found the record of Cooperton’s call that morning and hit SEND. The phone seemed to ring 10 times before Cooperton picked up.
Jeff’s voice broke: “I think I found the Ellis’ furniture.”
Thirty
The Rocky Falls Value Warehouse Club closed at 6:15 p.m. on Fridays. At that moment, Leonard was lying on a stack of brand-new queen-size mattresses on the top rack of overhead storage, probably 25 feet off the floor.
Dozens of little birds – sparrows or finches something – lived up here in the rafters. He watched them fly short trips from steel beam to steel beam. He figured there was plenty for them to eat in a place that sold carbs by the ton. He had a lot in common with these birds, making his way in the world by stealing crumbs.
The first birds must have flown in through the loading bays. Then they must have bred in here, because there were a lot of them. Leonard figured the store manager either didn’t know how to get rid of them or was too pansy to poison them. He loved that the birds had reclaimed the territory after their forest had been turned into a 10-acre rainwater collector.
Down in the aisles, Leonard could hear the store employees hastily “zoning,” tidying up the sections of the warehouse they were responsible for, just like the guys at DIY Warehouse always had to do before the managers would let them go home. Leonard’s mood darkened. He would make sure no one was here this time before he came out of hiding. At least Robert had been an asshole who deserved it; he had no such assurance about anyone he would run into here.
* * *
The mattress was so comfy Leonard actually dozed off for a few minutes. He woke and looked at his watch. The lights were off, and he didn’t hear movement. But he lay still and waited 15 more minutes anyway. Then he pulled on latex gloves and stood on his mattress. Its heavy plastic covering crinkled, giving him a vague feeling of shame. He remembered how being screamed at didn’t make you less likely to piss the bed.
Leonard’s head was just below a ceiling beam. He could see to the far walls of the store, though he didn’t have the angle to see into every aisle. He stood perfectly still and waited for the A/C blower to shut off. His heart was thumping. He didn’t hear anything or see movement. He concentrated as he climbed down the end of the rack. He laughed at the idea of falling to his death, cracking open his skull on the concrete floor and having them find him here in the morning. They’d think he was the latest victim of the DIY Warehouse burglar! They’d be right.
On the floor, he crept from aisle to aisle along one side wall, looking down the length of each to the opposite end of the store. It was dim, but about a tenth of the overhead lights stayed on all the time. So he could see. He went to the loading bay area in back, and the only little office he could find was locked up tight. He checked the crack underneath the door. No light. He exhaled loudly and walked down one of the main aisles to the registers at the front, where he grabbed one of the gigantic shopping carts. He had worked up a powerful thirst, so he slid a case of bottled water onto the lower rack of the cart, wrenched one bottle free, cracked the top and downed it in a messy series of gulps, liking the cold splashes on his chest. He stuck the bottle back into the case in the empty space.
He rolled his cart to the personal care department, where there were vats of contact lens solution, bricks of deodorant soap and cylinders of shampoo heavy enough to break your foot if you dropped one in the shower. He stopped the cart and grabbed one case of VWClub diapers, size 2, one case of baby wipes and a case of formula. He grinned at the symbolism, the brilliance, the personal significance of this composition for him.
He wheeled this little load toward the back of the store. He left the cart near the rollup door the managers used to bring cars inside for display up near Customer Service. Leonard went back to the front for a new cart. He salivated even before he reached the entire pallet stacked with 2-liter bottles of name-brand waterless hand sanitizer, shrink-wrapped into packages of two.
Nearly a gallon of the stuff being offered for $12.47. It didn’t taste as good as Kroger’s but that didn’t really matter. It was such a good deal. He stripped away the plastic overwrap from one bottle and depressed the big pump on top – it reminded him of the containers they kept ketchup in at the ballpark.
He tilted his head sideways and squirted it into his mouth, and it drooled down his cheek and dripped off his earlobe and onto the floor. He grimaced at the taste, but the prickly burn on the way down was – fiery. Fiery and good.
Leonard stacked the cart with dozens of bottles of the stuff, the weight of the load making it hard to get the thing rolling after he was done.
He made it back to the roll-up door and carefully unscrewed the alarm sensor, keeping it in alignment with its other half on the doorframe, then taping the two pieces together to make the alarm system think the door was always closed. He opened the door, and the harsh rattling of the metal hurt his ears.
It looked dark outside beyond the bluish-white parking lot lights. He hummed the appropriate tune. He ran out to the plain white van he was driving today and pulled it through the open bay door, the only one on this side of the building, and the only bay in the building that was level with the ground. He shut the door behind him and thought its metallic boom sounded like an orchestra’s kettle drum. The thought gave him a rush. An orchestra, playing his music …
This sanitizer tasted all wrong – the aftertaste of the non-ethyl alcohol ingredients was overpowering. From the van’s floorboard, Leonard grabbed one of the bottles of Haut-Brión he’d brought along, uncorked it with his Swiss army knife and turned it up. The first mouthful of that was harsh against the sanitizer bite, but the second tasted fantastic.
Damn, was he thirsty. He’d chugged down a third of the wine before he realized it. Didn’t want to have too much. Lots more to do tonight. Needed to keep his edge, plus, he had to remember not to take this fine wine for granted, no matter how plentiful it was now that he was famous. He swallowed like a cartoon character and held the bottle over his head. “To a brilliant new jazz album.”
He was feeling playful, so he stuck the cork back into the bottleneck, took off one glove and deposited a perfect set of fingerprints on the shoulder of the bottle. He carried it to the wine department and placed it in the second row of a bunch of $7 bottles of Australian shiraz. He didn’t think anyone would find it or realize what it was, at least not right away, but if they could, more power to them. To promote a new album, you had to create buzz. A month from now, someone would pay big money for that bottle on eBay. The stage was set, and now it was time to perform the rest of the album with a little solo that had occurred to him along the way.
Thirty-one
Sarah and Annie were both still at the office when Jeff called to tell them what had happened at his loft. Soon they were both standing with him on the sidewalk outside his place. After more than an hour, Cooperton walked over with a Raleigh Police detective holding a clear plastic bag containing a piece of paper and a separate baggie with an empty Carolina Blonde bottle.
“We got his prints.”
“From where?”
“That’s the thing. They musta touched everything in the place, movin’ the furniture in there like that, but prints were just on this beer bottle. It was sitting on top of your little refrigerator. Big mistake. They match the ones from the forklift at the home center. Might get DNA off the bottle, too.”
Jeff’s throat tightened. The person or people who had skewered the DIY supervisor had been in HIS HOME. “He drank my last beer?” He looked at the baggie.
“Yeah,” Cooperton said, his face tight. “He left this note under the bottle.”
Cooperton angled the baggie under the streetlight so they could read the permanent marker scrawl beneath the moist ring the bottle had left:
“ITFD:
5. Emptiness and Fullness.”
“Beats the shit out of me,” Cooperton said. “Aw, damn, ’scuse my language, ladies.”
Sarah glared at the sexist remark masquerading as chivalrous. “Sounds like an acronym.”
“I don’t know what the hell it means, but I know it ain’t no joke,” Cooperton said. “Be right back.”
“Annie, would you bang on doors and see if neighbors saw anybody moving the furniture in?” Sarah said.
Annie looked around, and Jeff guessed she was wondering where she would find any neighbors, but she headed down the sidewalk, without a word, to try.
Jeff wandered around the outside of the bakery for another hour or more in his own personal fog as evidence techs and cops went in and out with cameras and equipment. About 11, a Ford Explorer pulled up to the curb, and Caroline Kramden stepped out.
Now she was going to write a story about him. He turned his back on her and strode t
he opposite direction down the sidewalk, fuming.
Her heels clicked quickly against the pavement, and he felt her hand on his shoulder. He whirled around to face her.
Before he spoke, she said, “I’m not here for work.” She said it with a softness that made him believe her instantly. “When Cooperton got called down here, I heard it on our police scanner. I checked in with him on the cell, and he told me off the record what had happened. I didn’t tell anyone in our newsroom, and they won’t ever catch on tonight that it’s anything other than a routine burglary.”
She grabbed his right hand with both of hers. “I’m sorry about before. I’m just on my way home. I wanted to stop by and see about you.”
She waved her hand toward the police cars. “These guys aren’t going to let you back in there tonight. You need someplace to stay. When you get done with them, why don’t you come back to my place. I may be asleep, but you just go on and let yourself in, okay?” She pressed her apartment key into his palm and squeezed his hand with long, cool fingers to close it around the key. “If you want to sleep on the couch, that’s okay, too. But you can …”
She broke eye contact and looked at her feet, “Crawl in next to me again. That was nice.”
Jeff hadn’t seen this sincere side of her, and the gentleness felt good to him. But before he could reply, she had turned her shoulder and was walking toward her car.
SATURDAY
Thirty-two
The crunch and buzz of the coffee grinder woke Jeff. He looked around at the stylish cherry bedroom furniture and smelled Caroline’s shampoo on the linens. He piled the blanket and pillow by his feet and sat up, his gaze following a shaft of sunlight streaming into the bedroom from the small living room.