No Safe House (35 page)

When they’d pulled into the garage, Logan had said, “We’re gonna untie your legs so you can walk in. Don’t start kicking or anything.”

Jane moved her head up and down.

“Okay, then. Free up her legs,” he said to his brother.

“Just let me get out my knife,” Joseph said. He leaned over, put his mouth close to her ear. “It’s a mighty sharp knife.” Then she felt tugging at her ankles as he cut through the rope.

“Okay,” Joseph said, and she felt his hand graze along her thigh. It was like having a tarantula crawl on you.

Logan got her up into a sitting position, helped her work her butt over the hump, and her legs started extending out the open back door.

“I’ll lead you in,” Logan said.

They walked slowly around the car, their footsteps echoing on cold concrete. There were two steps up into the house, maybe ten paces down a hall. Then they stopped.

“Stairs down,” the man said.

She took them one at a time. They were just wide enough for two, which allowed the man to walk down with her, a hand at her elbow the whole way.

“Now turn left here. Okay, turn around—you can sit down. There’s a soft chair here.”

She sat. There was a cushion on the seat, but the back was wood. It felt like a kitchen chair.

“Okay, well, we’ll be in touch,” Logan said.

She sensed his retreat, then heard the sound of a door closing. She didn’t know whether he’d left a light on. The bag on her head didn’t allow any light through, although the weave was not so tight as to keep out air. Good thing, too, since she had only her nose to breathe through.

As she sat there in her own world of darkness, she struggled to free her wrists, but the rope was tight and cutting into her skin.

Jane could hear voices upstairs.

There had to be a kitchen or living room directly above her.
The voices sounded almost tinny, as though they were reaching her through a heat vent.

“I think he’ll deliver,” said someone. A man, but it didn’t sound like either of the two men who’d been in the car with her.

“I think Wyatt’s right,” Reggie said. “He’s not gonna let the girl die.”

Wyatt. The husband. The one who’d bagged her head and pushed her into the car. He must have driven here separately. So there were at least four of them. Reggie, Wyatt, Logan, and Joseph.

For a while, she heard nothing other than footsteps occasionally going by overhead. Then, from another part of the house, someone talking angrily, but no one was responding. Jane figured he had to be on a phone.

The door opened.

“Hey.” Reggie. “Your dad, or whatever the fuck he is, wants to hear your voice.”

She unwrapped the tape around her neck so he could lift the bag up far enough to get at the tape on her mouth.

“Hang on,” Reggie said into the phone. “Here she is.”

Jane shouted, “Vince, don’t—”

Reggie slapped the tape back into place, let the bag fall down. She left the room without taping the bag around Jane’s neck, and closed the door.

She thought she’d heard Vince say something, even though the woman hadn’t put the phone to her ear.

One word.

Baby?

Had he ever called her that before? Sweetheart, maybe. Honey. But never Baby.

Jane wanted to cry. She wanted to panic, too. But she kept herself from doing either.

She had to be tough.

She’d always been tough. She’d always known how to look after herself. She had to figure a way out of this.

They were going to kill her. She was sure of it. Didn’t matter whether Vince delivered or not.

They’d probably kill him, too, unless he had some brilliant plan to outsmart them.

She heard the door open again. Someone was entering the room.

Jane made a noise from behind the tape. “
Mm, mm, mm?
” It was the best “Who is it?” she could manage.

Whoever was there said nothing. But she could hear breathing.

They’d sent someone down to kill her. They’d convinced Vince she was alive, and they didn’t need her anymore. She bent forward and shook her head, trying to get the bag to fall off, but it stayed put.

“It’s okay,” a man said. “I just thought I’d come down and talk to you for a while. Keep you company. Help you pass the time.”

Joseph
.

VINCE
took less convincing than I might have thought. Cynthia showed him her Milford Department of Public Health ID, with photo. “This’ll persuade a home owner to let us into the attic without you having to threaten to blow their brains out.”

“I guess that’s better,” he said. The man seemed to be in a fog. He had to be thinking about Jane. I knew I was.

I went to the garage and returned with a stepladder and four short bungee cords with hooks at each end. I tipped my head back, as though looking through the ceiling to our own attic, and said to him, “We’ll start here?”

Vince hesitated. “No. I haven’t got much time, and the other houses have more cash in them.”

So I carried the ladder outside and strapped it to the roof rack of the Escape with the bungee cords. It made sense that we all go in one car, and that included Grace. We didn’t have anyone to leave her with, and we certainly weren’t going to leave her at home after the terrifying events of this morning.

Once we were all in the car—Cynthia offered Vince the front seat next to me, not so much out of courtesy, I figured, but because she didn’t want him sitting in the back with Grace—we had to first go by Vince’s body shop headquarters. He had to collect any keys he’d need, plus a small notebook with addresses and security codes, that would get us into any house where no one was home. Also, he had to pick up what Bert and Gordie had already retrieved from their various hiding places around Milford. He’d stuffed it all into a couple of reusable eco shopping bags from Walgreens.

“We’ll—actually, Cynthia—will do the talking,” I said to him, glancing in the mirror in time to see him scowl. “And if you can tell me where exactly the money is in each house, I can scramble up there and get it.”

“You better not be thinking of ripping me off,” he said.

I was about to go after him for that, but held back, figuring Cynthia would tear a strip off him.

But it was Grace who said, “Wow, what a totally asshole-ish thing to say.”

Vince shifted in his seat to get a look at her.

“Yeah, that was me,” she said. “Look at all the shit your problems have put me and my parents through since last night—and yeah, okay, I screwed up big-time, too—but this was your bright idea to hide money in people’s homes and it’s all gone to shit and now my mom and dad are trying to save your ass and Jane’s, and you accuse them of trying to rip you off? Excuse me and all, but if that isn’t being a dick, I don’t know what is.”

Vince turned his eyes on me and said, “How long’s she been hanging out with Jane?”

“Long enough to learn how to talk to you, evidently,” I said.

He turned his head, stared straight ahead through the windshield. Without looking at any of us, he said, “Just what I need. Two kids busting my balls.”

At the first house on the list, we got off easy. The driveway ran all the way to a two-car garage that sat behind the house. We parked alongside it; then Cynthia and I walked around front to ring the bell. When no one came, we went back and told Vince, who got out, key in hand, and went around to the back door. The property was well shielded with trees and tall bushes along the property line, so we felt reasonably confident we could get in the house unseen.

Vince opened the place up and approached the beeping security pad. He entered a four-digit code and the beeping ceased.

“Teresa work here?” Cynthia asked, with just a hint of a sneer.

He shook his head. “We got it from the babysitter.”

Cynthia opted to stay by the car with Grace and keep watch. She’d phone me in the event of trouble. I got the ladder off the roof and followed Vince up to the second floor, careful not to bang the legs of the ladder into the walls.

“Easy one,” he said, pointing to the attic access, a panel in the ceiling in the upstairs hallway.

I opened up the ladder, pushed aside the panel when I’d reached the top step, and hauled myself up into the attic, where it was hot as hell. If it was eighty degrees outside, it had to be a hundred or more in here.

It was dark, too. Some ventilation slits built into the wall at one end cast a few pale slivers of light, and the opening I’d come up through provided more, but it still wasn’t easy to see.

“Coulda used a flashlight,” I said. “Or a fucking miner’s hat.”

“Next time,” Vince said, standing at the base of the ladder. “Not sure where exactly the stuff is. Gordie handled this place. We usually don’t like to put it too close to the opening. Go toward a corner.”

Getting around was no picnic. There was no floor. Just studs, with paper-backed insulation stuffed between them. There was just enough height for me to stand, and I angled my feet on the studs, straddling them so I wouldn’t slip through and possibly
put a hole in the ceiling underfoot. I took out my phone and once again used it for a flashlight.

I squatted down, reached between the studs, and lifted up chunks of insulation. When I didn’t find anything, I moved over to the next set of joists.

It didn’t take long to find something that caught my eye.

The light from the phone bounced off the shiny plastic of a dark green garbage bag. “I think I got it,” I said. I tucked my phone back into my pocket, pulled the insulation out, shoved it aside, grabbed hold of the bag, and lifted.

It was heavy with cash.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath. Like a tightrope walker moving from one wire to another, I stepped across the joists until I was over the opening.

“Look out below,” I said, and dropped the bag down alongside the ladder into Vince’s arms. “I gotta go back and replace the insulation.” No sense leaving evidence that we were here. I continued my high-wire act, moving from joist to joist with only limited ambient light.

My foot slipped.

My right shoe rode over the edge of the stud, down through the insulation, then hit something moderately solid, but not solid enough. My whole body dropped and my arms went out, my hands scrambling to catch nearby studs.

There was a loud crunching sound.

“What the hell was that?” Vince shouted.

“My foot,” I said. “I put a hole in the ceiling.”

I managed to work my foot back up, ragged drywall edges cutting into my ankle as I freed it. When I peered down where my foot had been, all I saw was darkness.

But then, suddenly, there was light, and Vince’s face looking up at me.

“It’s a closet,” he said. “You fuckin’ incompetent.”

“I’m fine, thanks for asking. So what the hell are we going to do?”

“Nothin’,” he said. “Nothin’ we can do. Let ’em think it was raccoons.” Any raccoon that could have done this could star in its own horror movie.

I still threw the other insulation back into place, although I don’t know what point there was in doing it, and maneuvered my way back to the opening. I dangled my legs down through the hole until I felt the ladder under my feet, took a couple of steps down, got the panel back in position. Vince was standing at the top of the stairs, bag in hand, looking at me impatiently as I folded the ladder.

“How many places did we hide money in, and we never went through the ceiling?” he said.

“No,” I said. “You just
lost
the money.”

As we emerged from the back door, Cynthia ran over from the car, saw the green bag hanging from Vince’s hand.

“Mission accomplished?” she asked.

We both nodded but neither of us spoke. Now that we had what we’d come for, we wanted to get the hell out of there. Vince reset the alarm, locked up, and got into the car as I was securing the ladder with the bungee cords.

As I got behind the wheel, I said, “Next?”

“Viscount Drive,” he said.

I backed out of the driveway and headed for the next house. From the backseat, Grace said, “Do you think, if you give them everything they want, all the money, they’ll let Jane go?”

Cynthia whispered something to our daughter, probably along the lines of, “Let’s not talk about that.”

But Vince answered anyway. “Probably not.”

“Why?” Grace asked.

“They’ll kill her, and me, too, because I’m not the kind of person to let this go.”

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the AC. “Then is there a point to this?” I asked. “Emptying out these houses.”

Vince kept staring straight ahead. “Oh yeah.”

“What? What’s the plan? If you figure they’re going to take the money and kill you and Jane anyway, what’s the plan?”

“I’m working on it,” Vince said.

“Would you like to let us in on it?” I asked.

“Make a left up here,” he said.

The house on Viscount was another two-story. A modest home, white siding, no garage.

“Cleaning lady? Nanny? Furnace repairman? Who you got on the inside here?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Vince said.

We pulled into the driveway. There was an old faded red Pontiac Firebird parked there, had to be more than thirty years old. Cynthia was out of the Escape first. As she got to the door and was ringing the bell, I was three steps behind her.

Ten seconds later, the door opened. A man in his early seventies, I guessed. Neatly dressed, shirt buttoned at the collar. Thin and tall, with a few straggly gray hairs atop his head.

“Yes?” he said.

Cynthia apologized for disturbing him, flashed her creds, and went into her spiel.

“We’ve had a disturbing increase in reports of household mold,” Cynthia said. “Perhaps you saw something about this in the paper or on the news?”

“Uh, the wife might have,” he said, angling his head back into the house. “Gwen!”

Seconds later, a silver-haired woman of similar age appeared, crowding the doorway. “Yes?”

“These people here are from the health department asking about mold.”

“Oh my,” she said. “We don’t have any of that.”

Cynthia nodded. “You’re probably right. The trouble with mold, of course, is that often you’re suffering the effects of it before you actually see it in your home. Mold grows most often in damp places, often behind walls or furniture, and more often than not in attics, maybe as a result of a leaky roof.”