by Gregory Ashe
That explained some of what had been happening. Until now, Hazard had assumed that Hoffmeister, being a cop, had made sure that his home was secure. That had raised the question of how someone had been getting inside to leave notes, sour the milk, paint with dog shit, whatever else they’d been doing. The same question had occurred to Hazard last night: how had someone gotten inside to leave a pig’s head without any sign of forced entry.
Now, pushing open the door, Hazard had his answer: Hoffmeister was a dumb fuck who didn’t protect himself. That raised a second question, of course: why hadn’t Hoffmeister replaced the locks after things got weird? Hazard would have to ask him.
With the door open, Hazard checked the strike plate, just to be sure. No signs or marks that tools had been used to force the door; now that Hazard knew how bad the lock was, he wasn’t surprised.
In the kitchen, Hazard took another minute to assess what he was seeing. The refrigerator was a straight shot from the back door; on one side, where a wall butted out because of the stairs to the basement, a Formica table with aluminum banding stood with three matching chairs. The other side of the kitchen had cabinets and the sink.
The straight line from the back door to the refrigerator was the most important part, Hazard thought. It would be easy to get inside Hoffmeister’s house. Easy to walk ten feet and get into the refrigerator. Drop off a pig’s head. Hang a note under a magnet. Put something in the milk—maybe just food coloring, maybe something worse, a poison that had the unexpected side effect of curdling the milk? Coming in the back door also gave access to the sink; Hoffmeister had mentioned that someone had left the faucets running, and the slow-draining sink had overflowed and ruined the floor. Studying the kitchen by daylight, Hazard could see that Hoffmeister was telling the truth about the ruined floor, at least. Laminate curled in the corners, and in places, it bubbled, as though the subfloor had warped or split. Hazard took a deep breath and smelled the hint of damp and mold underneath the kitchen’s primary odors of grease and burnt meat.
As far as Hazard knew, all the indoor vandalism had taken place in the kitchen. He crossed the room and headed further into the house. Why hadn’t this person, whoever was terrorizing Hoffmeister, messed with anything else?
The house was small. Hoffmeister’s bedroom was messy, but in a minor way: clothes left to fall, but only from a couple of days—whoever Hoffmeister paid to come in and clean must have come recently. The guest bedroom held neat stacks of cardboard boxes, and Hazard opened a few flaps to find a full set of baseball cards for the 1977 Cardinals lineup, an assortment of knee and elbow braces, a vintage copy of Lord of the Rings that looked like it had never been read, and bullets. Lots of bullets. Mostly .38 special.
The bathroom held nothing of interest, just the signs of a man who lived alone: razor left next to the sink, an ancient bottle of Aqua Velva, toothbrush laid flat on a shelf inside the medicine cabinet instead of in a toothbrush holder.
The living room, at the front of the house, had windows on two sides: narrow glass in frames that had twisted as the house shifted and settled over the years. When Hazard tried to raise the blinds, he found that they were stuck, wedged in the frames just like the windows themselves. He left them and tried the switches near the door. Three lamps came on, their bulbs giving off a watery, yellow light that seemed to pool at Hazard’s knees. That light was better than nothing, though.
A couch with a pullout bed, the loose weave of the upholstery torn to shit. A club chair with a jagged L of leather hanging off the back. No coffee table, but an empty glass sat on the floor next to the couch. When Hazard sniffed, he got bourbon.
Shoved under the club chair was an ancient rotary telephone. Hazard dragged it out and held the handset to his ear. No dial tone. He followed the cable to the jack; unplugged. After plugging it back in, he checked the phone again. This time, he heard the familiar tone. Hazard popped the plastic caps off the receiver and the transmitter, checking for anything unusual. He wasn’t familiar with telephone surveillance equipment firsthand, but he’d read about it, knew the basic principles.
He didn’t see anything unusual, so he put the handset back together and slid it back under the chair. When he disconnected the cable, he examined the jack, even going so far as to unscrew the yellowing plastic plate from the wall. Still nothing. Then he tried the electrical receptacle, just a few inches away from the jack. No joy. Aside from spotting the badly frayed end of the lamp’s cord, he found nothing. At this point, it was starting to look like Hoffmeister was more at risk of having his house burn down than from some mysterious assailant.
Unlocking the front door from the inside, Hazard examined the door, the strike plate, the jambs. Nothing. The usual wear and tear, perhaps a little more pronounced because of the house’s age and Hoffmeister’s obvious lack of care, but no sign of forced entry. And why should there be? These locks looked just as simple as the one on the back door. And Hoffmeister had already reported that whoever had entered hadn’t forced a way in.
But why did it bother Hazard so much?
He looked out on the street, tracing a path backward to the house, examining the jerry-rigged steps that led up to the porch. At night, the ancient street lights provided little illumination, but Hoffmeister’s porch light worked, and a neighbor might have noticed someone using the front door. Of course, nobody had seen anything. Ever.
Hazard looked at the steps again and then went back through the house, locking the doors behind him until he was outside on the back porch, considering the alley. He had reached a conclusion based on his inspection: the stairs made it physically impossible for Andy-Jack to have done any of the harassment himself. That gave Hazard a serious itch to talk to Andy-Jack Strout.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DECEMBER 18
TUESDAY
12:06 PM
JUST AFTER NOON, HAZARD DROVE through the Paradise Valley trailer park. As on his last visit, the trailer park looked abandoned. When he pulled up to Andy-Jack’s home, he saw that the wheelchair lift was down. That was interesting. That might mean that Andy-Jack Strout wasn’t home. Hazard wasn’t police anymore, and most of the time, that was a bitter pill. But right then, looking at the trailer, thinking it was probably empty and just waiting for a nosy detective to take a peek, Hazard felt a tight, nervous energy in his gut. He let himself out of the Odyssey.
The day was cold but sunny, everything limned with the stark light and shadow of a clear winter day. Hazard felt alone in the universe as he climbed the rickety porch; no one else in sight, not the twitch of a curtain, not even a dog yapping. When he got to the door, he knocked. A breeze picked up; on the next mobile home over, a Bright Lights flag snapped in the wind, drawn taut and then, when the breeze died, sagging against the aluminum frame again.
Hazard tried the door. The handle was locked, but he didn’t see a deadbolt. The louvered windows on the door looked solid; he messed around with them for a minute, seeing if he could force them, but the lowest louvre gave an ominous groan and he stopped before he broke anything.
Next, he tried bump keys, running through the special ring he kept until one of them matched the lock. The door wobbled open an inch. Hazard checked the street again; nothing but the sharp outline of winter sunlight on ancient trailers. Then he stepped inside.
On his first visit, Hazard had noticed the damage to the hallway from Andy-Jack’s chair: gouges in the paneling, black marks from the tires. He had seen the doorframes widened with a saw, to allow easier passage. Now he noticed mud tracked on the carpet, the flattened fibers, the dirty streaks where Andy-Jack had wheeled himself back and forth, trying to negotiate a hairpin turn.
Aside from those obvious indicators, though, it was hard to tell how much of the trailer’s condition was due to Andy-Jack’s recent injury. One arm of the couch, for example, was matted with grease, as though Andy-Jack had wiped his hand there a hundred times. Bad habit from lazy, filthy years? Or a new, frustrated accommodation becau
se Andy-Jack was too tired to wheel himself back to the kitchen when he forgot a napkin?
The trash, too, was difficult to explain. Bags of it mounded in the corner of the kitchen, layered with flattened pizza boxes and bags of half-empty takeout containers. A few, lazy flies drifted and settled when Hazard came near. Was this the result of Andy-Jack’s disability? Or had he always let the trash pile up? From what Hazard had seen of Paradise Valley, trash was one of the few constants: huge black sacks dotted the trailer park, many of them savaged open by raccoons or coyotes, spilling rotting garbage onto cement pads and weedy patches of dirt.
Hazard passed deeper into the trailer. The bathroom, with its newly widened doorway, showed the signs of further accommodations to Andy-Jack’s new condition. A simple wooden ramp ran up to the lip of the shower; the sliding doors had been removed, and in their place a vinyl curtain hung on a tension rod , allowing easier access to the cramped stall. Handrails had been crudely hammered into place on either side of the stall, with a second set near the toilet. Hand soap and a toothbrush and a flattened tube of toothpaste had been moved to the front of the sink, where Andy-Jack could reach them.
Hazard moved down the hallway again. He wasn’t sure why Andy-Jack made him itch. Everything about the harassment made it impossible that Andy-Jack was directly responsible; maybe Hazard simply liked the impossibility of it.
Next, the bedroom. Andy-Jack’s bed was made. When Hazard twitched back the sheets, he saw the linens yellow with body oil. He folded them back into place and checked the dresser. The top drawers had been emptied—too high for Andy-Jack to reach—and the lower drawers were crammed full. More clothes were heaped on the floor, as though someone had finally reached the end of their patience and tossed everything into a pile. Hazard found balled-up socks, a pair of Mario Brothers briefs, a Tim McGraw cologne, Tiger Balm, jeans with the word Juicy stitched on the back in silver thread, a box of expired condoms, and twenty-seven dollars folded and closed up in an empty tin of shoe polish.
He moved to the closet, sliding the door open. It had slipped from the hinge, and it made a hell of a racket as Hazard forced it to one side. Empty hangers hung from a rod; clothes lay on the floor. Hazard poked through them without turning up anything interesting, forced the door back into place, and moved on.
The last room in the trailer had probably been intended to be a bedroom, but now it seemed to serve as storage and workshop and office, all rolled into one. Judging by the density of scrapes and rubber marks at the end of the hall, Andy-Jack spent a lot of time in this room. A folding table took up one wall, and a variety of machine parts and pieces of electrical equipment covered the plastic tabletop. Pliers, wire cutters, voltmeters, electrical tape, screwdrivers of every shape and size, something that Hazard recognized as a circuit board, although he had no idea what purpose it served. Lots of nuts and bolts and washers. An avalanche of pennies, God only knew why. The air smelled like metal and machine grease.
Opposite the spare parts and tools, a second folding table seemed to serve as Andy-Jack’s desk. Utility bills, a flyer for something called the White Zionist Brotherhood, a packet of winter mint gum, four stubby pencils with erasers ground down to the ferrule, a fixed utility knife, CD covers for three Billy Joel albums—River of Dreams was the only one Hazard recognized—and a sheaf of papers that had been wadded up and pitched against the wall. Hazard used the side of his hands to smooth these out.
Medical bills. Nothing surprising, Hazard thought, for a guy without insurance. Exorbitant costs. Eight hundred dollars for the wheelchair alone. He thought back to Andy-Jack saying Hoffmeister was worth more to him alive than dead. With debts like these, Hazard didn’t doubt it. He took pictures of the pages with his phone, being sure to get the name of the primary care physician.
This room had a closet too, and when Hazard opened it, his heart beat a little faster. Guns. Four rifles leaned in the corner: two Marlins, a Winchester, and a Springfield. A gun safe—small, for handguns—was bolted to the floor. Hazard checked the safe door, just in case, but it was locked. Keyed to a fingerprint, most likely Andy-Jack’s.
Hazard was tempted. In an ideal universe, he could walk out the door with all four rifles under his arm, drop them off at the station, and have the ballistics compared against the casing and bullets recovered from the shooting outside his house. Barring that, he would have liked to fire a round from each and take the casing and recovered bullet for inspection. Unfortunately, neither possibility was realistic. He had the sinking feeling that he’d need Somers to get a warrant.
Before closing the closet door, Hazard rose up on tip toes and scanned the shelf. Several old coffee cans had been pushed to the back. Sliding one forward, Hazard tipped it to glance inside. Brass sparkled back at him.
Casings. Hundreds of recovered casings. Hazard checked the next coffee can. And the next. All three of them were full of brass.
Hazard carried the three coffee cans to the desk. Then he went to the kitchen, grabbed a handful of plastic sandwich bags, and returned to the office. With his hands tucked inside the sandwich bags to prevent accidentally transferring prints, he sorted through the casings. The large quantity was easily separated into two different kinds: a longer casing that Hazard guessed was a .30-06, and slightly shorter casing that he thought was probably a .30-30. He gathered samples of both casings from each coffee can. With the brass jumbled together, it was impossible to tell which casings belonged to which rifle. Still, it was a start. And it was better than nothing. A match would at least tell them if one of the rifles had been fired out of the green Chevy.
Hazard did one last sweep of the trailer, making sure he had returned everything to the way he had found it. Then he set the thumb lock and pulled the door shut behind him. He drove quickly out of the trailer park, where hate hung like a miasma. On his way out, he saw a toppled FOR SALE sign, its picket exposed. Hazard mistook it, for a moment, for a fallen protest sign, the kind someone might have carried in a demonstration. His mind flashed back to the Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and suddenly, Hazard thought he knew why Hoffmeister had been so worried about Pastor Wesley. Hazard slowed, pulling onto the shoulder, and made a U-turn.
He needed to make a quick stop at the flea market before he saw the pastor again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DECEMBER 18
TUESDAY
2:12 PM
A MAN CRASHED INTO HAZARD as he walked into The Hyssop Branch. The guy swore, staggered, and kept going without looking back. Hazard thought the back of his head looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Then, shaking off the moment, Hazard continued into the church, bearing his offering. A little old man was pushing a sweeper brush over the carpet, and his eyes locked on Hazard as he worked the sweeper back and forth over the same spot.
“You’re going to wear out the fucking carpet,” Hazard said as he stalked past. Then, since this place was technically a church, even if it was the hippy-dippy kind, he muttered, “Pardon my language.”
Just outside the pastor’s office, the girl, Jamie, caught Hazard.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Hazard kept going toward the door. “Dealing with him.”
“You can’t.” She trotted alongside, panting a little. She had hair like an Irish Setter, Hazard thought, although maybe more auburn than red. “You can’t. Last time, he was upset all day.”
When Hazard got to the door, he shoved it open.
“You can’t,” the girl howled, seizing Hazard’s arm, digging blunt nails into his flesh. Her eyes were rolling wildly. If she snapped at him, if she broke skin, Hazard wondered if the vet would have to put her down.
“Get off me,” he said, shaking her loose.
Inside the office, Wesley was rising behind his desk, shouting, “What’s going on? Jamie, stop it. Mr. Hazard, what do you think you’re—”
“Trying to bring you a fucking peace offering,” Hazard growled. He turned the chair he’d go
tten at the flea market—a close match to the one he had broken—and placed it in front of the desk. Jamie still hadn’t let go, and Hazard shook the arm she was holding. “Do you have a bone? A chew toy?”
“Jamie, it’s all right.” Wesley came around the desk, took Jamie’s hand, and gently worked her fingers loose. “You’re very upset. Take a few deep breaths.”
“He was so mean last time. He broke your chair, and he yelled at you, and—”
“I know. Don’t worry.” Wesley’s eyes cut once to Hazard. “Some people can’t help who they are.”
“He—”
“Why don’t you check on the kids in the preschool? And then, maybe you can borrow some of their milk and cookies and make up a tray?” Wesley grinned. “You know I need a snack in the afternoon.”
“They have Oreos.”
“I love Oreos.”
Jamie took her time leaving: she had to find an enormous, sequined purse, which hung almost to her knees on its strap; then she had to stare at Hazard; and then, after Wesley gave her a push, she scrambled off toward the preschool.
“She’s had a very hard life,” Wesley said, rounding on Hazard. He barely came up to the middle of Hazard’s chest, but he pressed forward, jabbing a finger at Hazard. “She’s come a long way, and she’s happy here. Or she is most days. When she doesn’t have to deal with an asshole.”
“This is a house of God,” Hazard said. “You’re a pastor.”
“They teach us all the bad words in the seminary. And don’t worry about God; She already knows you’re an asshole.”
Hazard had to fight the sudden urge to smile. Instead, he toed the chair he had brought.
“Usually, when people apologize, they admit they were wrong. They say they were sorry.”