Persuader (17 page)

I couldn’t make out the color in the darkness. They looked gray. They looked like they had been pulled out of a rug’s burlap backing. They meant nothing to me. So I moved on.

I found what I wanted in the fourth garage. I opened the doors wide and let in just about enough moonlight to see by. The dusty old Saab the maid had used for her marketing was in there, parked head-in close to a workbench. There was a grimy window behind the bench. Gray moonlight on the ocean outside. The bench had a vise screwed to it and was covered in tools. The tools were old. Their handles were wood that had darkened with age and oil. I found a bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle. The handle was bulbous, turned from oak. The spike was maybe two inches long. I put it into the vise, maybe a quarter-inch deep. Tightened the vise hard. Pulled on the handle and bent the spike into a neat right angle. Loosened the vise and checked my work and put it away in my shirt pocket.

Then I found a chisel. It was a woodworking item. It had a half-inch blade and a nice ash handle. It was probably seventy years old. I hunted around and found a carborundum whetstone and a rusty can of sharpening fluid. Dabbed some fluid on the stone and spread it with the tip of the chisel. Worked the steel back and forth until it showed bright. One of the many high schools I went to was an old-fashioned place in Guam where shop was graded by how well you did with the scut work, like sharpening tools. We all scored high.

It was the kind of accomplishment we were interested in. That class had the best knives I ever saw. I turned the chisel over and did the other face. I got the edge square and true. It looked like high-grade Pittsburgh steel. I wiped it on my pants. Didn’t test the edge on my thumb. I didn’t particularly want to bleed. I knew it was razor sharp just by looking at it.

I came out into the courtyard and squatted down in the angle of the walls and loaded my pockets. I had the chisel if things needed to stay quiet, and I had the Glock if it was OK to go noisy. Then I scoped out my priorities. The house first, I decided. There was a strong possibility that I would never get another look at it.

The outer door to the kitchen porch was locked, but the mechanism was crude. It was a token three-lever affair. I put the bent spike of the bradawl in like a key and felt for the tumblers. They were big and obvious. It took me less than a minute to get inside. I stopped again and listened carefully. I didn’t want to walk in on the cook. Maybe she was up late, baking a special pie. Or maybe the Irish girl was in there doing something. But there was only silence. I crossed the porch and knelt down in front of the inner door.

Same crude lock. Same short time. I backed off a foot and swung the door open. Smelled the kitchen smells. Listened again. The room was cold and deserted. I put the bradawl on the floor in front of me. Put the chisel next to it. Added the Glock and the spare magazines. I didn’t want to set the metal detector off. In the still of the night it would have sounded like a siren. I slid the bradawl along the floor, tight against the boards.

Pushed it right through the doorway and into the kitchen. Did the same with the chisel.

Kept it tight against the floor and rolled it all the way inside. Almost all commercial metal detectors have a dead zone right at the bottom. That’s because men’s dress shoes are made with a steel shank in the sole. It gives the shoe flexibility and strength. Metal detectors are designed to ignore shoes. It makes sense, because otherwise they would beep every time a guy with decent footwear passed through.

I slid the Glock through the dead zone and followed it with one magazine at a time.

Pushed everything as far inside as I could reach. Then I stood up and walked through the door. Closed it quietly behind me. Picked up all my gear and reloaded my pockets.

Debated taking my shoes off. It’s easier to creep around quietly in socks. But if it comes to it, shoes are great weapons. Kick somebody with your shoes on, and you disable them.

With your shoes off, you break a toe. And they take time to put back on. If I had to get out fast, I didn’t want to be running around on the rocks barefoot. Or climbing the wall. I decided to keep them on and walk carefully. It was a solidly-built house. Worth the risk. I went to work.

First I searched the kitchen for a flashlight. Didn’t find one. Most houses on the end of a long power line spur have outages from time to time, so most people who live in them keep something handy. But the Becks didn’t seem to. The best I could find was a box of kitchen matches. I put three in my pocket and struck one on the box. Used the flickering light to look for the big bunch of keys I had left on the table. Those keys would have helped me a lot, but they weren’t there. Not on the table, not on some hook near the door, not anywhere. I wasn’t very surprised. It would have been too good to be true to find them.

I blew out the match and found my way in the dark to the head of the basement stairs.

Crept all the way down and struck another match with my thumbnail at the bottom.

Followed the tangle of wires on the ceiling back to the breaker box. There was a flashlight on a shelf right next to it. Classic dumb place to keep a flashlight. If a breaker pops the box is your destination, not your starting point.

The flashlight was a big black Maglite the length of a nightstick. Six D cells inside. We used to use them in the army. They were guaranteed unbreakable, but we found that depended on what you hit with them, and how hard. I lit it up and blew out the match.

Spat on the burned stub and put it in my pocket. Used the flashlight to check the breaker box. It had a gray metal door with twenty circuit breakers inside. None of them was labeled gatehouse. It must have been separately supplied, which made sense. No point in running power all the way to the main house and then running some of it all the way back to the lodge. Better to give the lodge its own tap on the incoming power line. I wasn’t surprised, but I was vaguely disappointed. It would have been sweet to be able to turn the wall lights off. I shrugged and closed the box and turned around and went to look at the two locked doors I had found that morning.

They weren’t locked anymore. First thing you always do before attacking a lock is to check it’s not already open. Nothing makes you feel stupider than picking a lock that isn’t locked. These weren’t. Both doors opened easily with a turn of the handle.

The first room was completely empty. It was more or less a perfect cube, maybe eight feet on a side. I played the flashlight beam all over it. It had rock walls and a cement floor. No windows. It looked like a storeroom. It was immaculately clean and there was nothing in it. Nothing at all. No carpet fibers. Not even trash or dirt. It had been swept and vacuumed, probably earlier that day. It was a little dank and damp. Exactly how you would expect a stone cellar to feel. I could smell the distinctive dusty smell of a vacuum cleaner bag. And there was a trace of something else in the air. A faint, tantalizing odor right at the edge of imperceptibility. It was vaguely familiar. Rich, and papery.

Something I should know. I stepped right inside the room and shut off the flashlight.

Closed my eyes and stood in the absolute blackness and concentrated. The smell disappeared. It was like my movements had disturbed the air molecules and the one part in a billion I was interested in had diffused itself into the clammy background of underground granite. I tried hard, but I couldn’t get it. So I gave it up. It was like memory. To chase it meant to lose it. And I didn’t have time to waste.

I switched the flashlight back on and came out into the basement corridor and closed the door quietly behind me. Stood still and listened. I could hear the furnace. Nothing else. I tried the next room. It was empty, too. But only in the sense that it was currently unoccupied. It had stuff in it. It was a bedroom.

It was a little larger than the storeroom. It was maybe twelve-by-ten. The flashlight beam showed me rock walls, a cement floor, no windows. There was a thin mattress on the floor. It had wrinkled sheets and an old blanket strewn across it. No pillows. It was cold in the room. I could smell stale food, stale perfume, sleep, and sweat, and fear.

I searched the whole room carefully. It was dirty. But I found nothing of significance until I pulled the mattress aside. Under it, scratched into the cement of the floor, was a single word: justice. It was written all in spidery capital letters. They were uneven and chalky. But they were clear. And emphatic. And underneath the letters were numbers. Six of them, in three groups of two. Month, day, year. Yesterday’s date. The letters and the numbers were scratched deeper and wider than marks made with a pin or a nail or the tip of a scissor. I guessed they had been made with the tine of a fork. I put the mattress back in position and took a look at the door. It was solid oak. It was thick and heavy. It had no inside keyhole. Not a bedroom. A prison cell.

I stepped outside and closed the door and stood still again and listened hard. Nothing. I spent fifteen minutes on the rest of the basement and found nothing at all, not that I expected to. I wouldn’t have been left to run around there that morning if there was anything for a person to find. So I killed the flashlight and crept back up the stairs in the dark. Went back to the kitchen and searched it until I found a big black trash can liner.

Then I wanted a towel. Best thing I could find was a worn linen square designed to dry dishes with. I folded both items neatly and jammed them in my pockets. Then I came back out into the hallway and went to look at the parts of the house I hadn’t seen before.

There were a lot to choose from. The whole place was a warren. I started at the front, where I had first come in the day before. The big oak door was closed tight. I gave it a wide berth, because I didn’t know how sensitive the metal detector was. Some of them beep when you’re a foot away. The floors were solid oak planks, covered in rugs. I stepped carefully, but I wasn’t too worried about noise. The rugs and the drapes and the paneling would soak up sound.

I scouted the whole of the ground floor. Only one place caught my attention. On the north side next to the room where I had spent the time with Beck was another locked door. It was opposite the family dining room, across a wide interior hallway. It was the only locked door on the ground floor. Therefore it was the only room that interested me. Its lock was a big brass item from back when things were manufactured with pride and aplomb. It had all kinds of fancy filigree edges where it was screwed into the wood. The screw heads themselves were rubbed smooth by a hundred and fifty years of polishing. It was probably original to the house. Some old artisan up in nineteenth-century Portland had probably fashioned it by hand, in between making boat chandlery. It took me about a second and a half to open.

The room was a den. Not an office, not a study, not a family room. I covered every inch with the flashlight beam. There was no television in there. No desk, no computer. It was just a room, simply furnished in an old-fashioned style. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled across the window. There was a big armchair padded with buttoned red leather.

There was a glass-fronted collector’s cabinet. And rugs. They were three-deep on the floor. I checked my watch. It was nearly one o’clock. I had been on the loose for nearly an hour. I stepped into the room and closed the door quietly.

The collector’s cabinet was nearly six feet tall. It had two full-width drawers at the bottom and locked glass doors above them. Behind the glass were five Thompson submachine guns. They were the classic drum-magazine gangster weapons from the 1920s, the pieces you see in old grainy black-and-white photographs of Al Capone’s soldiers. They were displayed alternately facing left and right, resting on custom hardwood pegs that held them exactly level. They were all identical. And they all looked brand new. They looked like they had never been fired. Like they had never even been touched. The armchair was set to face the cabinet. There was nothing else of significance in the room. I sat down in the chair and got to wondering why anybody would want to spend time gazing at five old grease guns.

Then I heard footsteps. A light tread, upstairs, directly over my head. Three paces, four, five. Fast quiet steps. Not just deference to the time of night. A real attempt at concealment. I got up out of the chair. Stood still. Turned the flashlight off and put it in my left hand. Put the chisel in my right. I heard a door close softly. Then there was silence. I listened hard. Focused on every tiny sound. The background rush of the heating system built to a roar in my ears. My breathing was deafening. Nothing from above. Then the footsteps started again.

They were heading for the stairs. I locked myself inside the room. I knelt behind the door and tripped the tumblers, one, two, and listened to the creak of the staircase. It wasn’t Richard coming down. It wasn’t a twenty-year-old. There was a measured caution in the tread. Some kind of stiffness. Somebody getting slower and quieter as they approached the bottom. The sound disappeared altogether in the hallway. I pictured someone standing on the thick rugs, surrounded by the drapes and the paneling, looking around, listening hard. Maybe heading my way. I picked up the flashlight and the chisel again. The Glock was in my waistband. I had no doubt I could fight my way out of the house. No doubt at all. But approaching an alert Paulie over hundreds of yards of open ground and through the stadium lights would be difficult. And a firefight now would bury the mission forever.