No Safe House (39 page)

“He been staying with some girl whose biker boyfriend mentioned me to him. At least that’s what he said.”

“Hiding stuff for biker gangs, too?” Reggie asked.

“Go on with your story.”

“So, Goemann fills us in on this unique banking service you offer. We asked him which house the stuff was hidden in, figuring maybe you told your depositors that, but he said he didn’t know. Me and Wyatt pressed him on that, and he came up with this house where a couple of old retired teachers lived. Turns out Goemann just pulled the address out of his ass, because we searched that house from top to bottom. Attic, too.”

The Bradleys
. These two had murdered Richard and Esther Bradley. Reggie and Wyatt were more than a couple of crooks trying to rip off another crook. They were stone-cold killers.

Vince said, “Hang a right here.”

I did. Now we were driving through the old downtown, along Broad Street. A minute later, we were on Golden Hill.

“Left up here,” Vince said, “and then stay on Bridgeport.” To Reggie, he said, “Now I’ve got a question for you.”

“Go ahead. We’re all friends here.”

“That was a lot of seed money you put in. Maybe not the biggest deposits I ever had, but cumulatively that was a chunk of change.”

“Well, first of all, we’re getting it all back, aren’t we?” she said. “But even if we didn’t, we did have some money to throw around. Ever heard of filing bogus returns to the IRS?”

“Let me guess,” he said. “Rip off identities, file returns in their name that claim decent refunds, have them sent to a PO box.”

“More or less. Wyatt here—he’s my husband—is the brains behind that.” I glanced in the mirror, saw the man smile.

Reggie continued. “We got refund checks coming in pretty steadily. Great line of work. Not like robbing a bank. You don’t get hurt. Maybe some RSI, all that time you have to spend at the computer, but other than that, it’s great. That’s Wyatt’s baby. I take on other jobs that are more physically demanding.”

“Like killing people?”

“Whatever.”

“So why this, then?” Vince said.

“Hmm?” Reggie said.

“Ripping off what’s in my houses, all this bullshit, when all you want is what Eli left with me.”

“Like I said, it’s a favor for my uncle. Getting back what belongs to him. But you can see how this has turned into a golden opportunity. It’s like fishing with nets. Maybe you’re just out for salmon, but if you end up with a ton of lobster, you don’t throw it back into the ocean.”

“Left at the lights up here,” Vince told me.

I put on the blinker and moved into the turning lane.

I slowed, tapped the brake, put my left blinker on. Once I was through the intersection and heading south, Vince gave me a couple more directions. Now we were heading down a street I knew very well.

“It’s up here,” Vince told me. “Turn into that house up there with the small SUV with the ladder on the roof.”

I pulled into the driveway, killed the engine. I’d had a feeling this might be where we were headed. No wonder Vince had told Cynthia and Grace to get lost.

I was home.

VINCE
had hidden Eli Goemann’s stuff in our attic?

If so, it hadn’t been there long. Reggie had made it clear that it had been left with Vince in only the last couple of weeks.

When the hell had he been in our house? Him, or one of his crew? And if there was nearly a quarter-million dollars hidden over our heads, why had Vince not wanted to bother getting it before we left to clear out other houses?

It wasn’t as if I could ask him right now.

“Nice little house for a nurse,” Reggie said as she took the keys from me and the four of us opened the doors of the BMW. I noticed she had Vince’s gun in her hand, and once Wyatt was out I saw he had his tucked into his waistband.

Vince struggled some to get out of the car, and he wobbled some when he got on his feet. He didn’t look well.

“I need to find a can,” he said. “I’m gonna overflow.”

“Huh?” Reggie said.

“My goddamn bag,” Vince said to her.

She blinked, taking a moment to figure out what he might be talking about. “Oh,” she said. “Well, let’s get inside.”

Vince pointed to my Escape. “Grab the ladder off that car. We could use that.”

Wyatt had a puzzled look on his face. “If the woman who lives here is at work, whose car is that?”

Shit
.

Vince didn’t wait a beat. “The hospital’s only five minutes from here. She bikes it.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

Vince shot him a look. “You think I’m gonna leave money in people’s houses and not know their routines?”

I went over to the Escape. Normally, to get something off the roof racks, I’d open a door or two and stand on the sill to make it easier to undo the bungee cords. But I wasn’t supposed to have a key to unlock it, so I had to stand on my toes to get the job done. I dragged the ladder down carefully.

I carried it to the front door, where everyone was waiting for me. “You’ve got the key, right?” Vince asked.

I reached into my pocket. “I do,” I said, pulling out a ring that included the keys to the Escape sitting in the driveway. If Wyatt or Reggie thought it odd that I kept my car remote on the same ring as the key to just one of the many houses Vince had access to, they didn’t mention it.

“And you know the code?” he asked.

“I’ve got it written down,” I said, and made a show of looking in my wallet for a scrap of paper—in fact, a gas receipt—which I then shoved back into my pocket. “Yeah, I’m good.”

I moved ahead of Vince and the others to get to the front door first. I fumbled some, getting the key in and turning the lock, and when the door opened and the security system began to beep, warning me that I had only a few seconds to disable it, I feigned a moment’s confusion, wondering where the keypad was.

I entered the four-digit code to stop the beeping, then went back out to bring in the ladder. Everyone moved a few steps into the house, at which point Wyatt took the gun from his waistband and held on to it.

“Bathroom,” Vince said.

I said, “It’s—”

And stopped myself.

Then, barely missing a beat, I said, “I think it’s just up the hall there. I used it last time I was here.”

Vince was really limping. He walked a few steps, found the ground-floor powder room, and stepped in. As he went to close the door, Wyatt held up a hand, blocking it.

“Not letting you out of my sight,” he said.

“Great,” Vince said. “You can see how I do it.”

From my position down the hall, I couldn’t see a thing, but I could imagine. I wondered how long Wyatt would really want to watch Vince empty a urine-filled plastic bag.

“Oh man,” Wyatt said.

Not long, as it turned out. Wyatt stepped out into the hall, just outside the door to the kitchen.

The kitchen
.

There were family pictures plastered all over the refrigerator, held in place with decorative magnets. If Reggie or Wyatt wandered in there, looked at the fridge, saw me in one of the snapshots, how was I going to explain that?

I backed into the kitchen, glanced at the fridge, gave the pictures as fast a glance as I could. Given that I was the one who had taken most of them, it was rare that any of them featured me. Plenty of Grace, and Cynthia, and Cynthia and Grace together. Of the dozen or more pictures, I was pretty sure I was in only one of them. I was with about twenty of my students, a three-year-old shot taken just before we all got on the bus to go see a play on Broadway. A rare excursion for my creative writing students
at the time. My head was so small in the pic that even if Wyatt or Reggie saw it, I wasn’t sure they would recognize me.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Reggie said after we heard a toilet flush and Vince came out of the bathroom.

“D’you wash your hands?” Wyatt asked.

Vince limped toward the stairs and began to climb them, followed by Wyatt and Reggie, and then me. I needed some distance ahead of me because I was carrying the ladder.

I had to pretend I didn’t instantly remember where the attic access was.

“In here, isn’t it, Vince?” I asked, standing outside the door to the room Cynthia and I used as a study.

“Yeah,” he said.

I entered the room, crossed it, and opened the closet. The panel to the attic was up there, and because the closet was deep, with the shelf and the rod for hangers recessed, it wasn’t hard to reach. I opened up the ladder, made sure it was steady.

“Who’s going up?” Reggie asked.

“You go ahead if you want,” Vince said. “But it’s not gonna be me. I can’t handle all the bending over. My legs and knees are killing me. And it’ll be hot as fucking hell up there.”

“I’m not going up there, either,” she said. “And I don’t know where it’s hidden.” She looked at me. “I’m guessing you do.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll go.”

“Me, too,” said Wyatt. “I’ll follow you up.”

I looked at Vince, who offered me an almost imperceptible nod.

“I could use a flashlight,” I said. “I’ve been using my phone all day, but it’s not the handiest thing.”

Everyone just shrugged. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to run out to Home Depot and get me one, and I couldn’t tell them I knew they could find one in a kitchen drawer next to the sink.

“Fine, I’ll do without,” I said. “Which corner’d we put it in again?” I asked Vince.

“Dig around. You’ll find it.” He probably didn’t know. Gordie or Bert or Eldon had probably been up here, not him. “Try the farthest point from the opening, work your way back.”

I started up the ladder and stopped when I was close enough to move the panel out of the way, which created an almost two-foot-square opening. I shoved it off to the side, then poked my head through.

Another dark, hot environment. The opening was in the northeast corner of the house, so odds were the money was hidden in the southwest corner. I hauled myself up, then stood, awkwardly. There was enough room at the peak to stand totally upright. I moved over a few steps to make room for Wyatt, who still had the gun in his hand.

“Tell you what,” I said, handing him my phone, on which I had just opened the flashlight app. “Can you hold this, shine it in my general direction?”

“Sure,” he said, taking it with his left hand.

“Watch your step,” I warned him. “There’s no floor. Just the open studs. We used houses that hadn’t floored over the attic so we could get at the insulation easier.”

“Okay,” he said.

I walked across the studs, putting my hands on the inside of the roof to brace and balance myself. I followed the ridgeline until I reached the far wall, then had to stoop over to go into the corner.

I got down on my knees, straddling myself between studs, and reached down under the insulation. I kept running my hand along, hoping I’d bump into something.

I didn’t find anything between the first two sets of studs. I shifted myself over so I could check between the next set of studs.

Ran my hand along. And along, and—

I hit something. It felt like a cardboard box.

“Hang on,” I said, and started lifting out the insulation.

It was, indeed, a box. Long, low, and narrow. Most of the light from my phone in Wyatt’s hand was hitting my back, casting my discovery in shadow.

“You see okay?” Wyatt asked. “Or do you need me closer?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Long as I know it’s here, I can kind of feel my way around.”

Which was what I did. I lifted the flaps on the box and reached inside, expecting to feel wads and wads of paper.

And I did, in fact, feel some of that. But it was all crumpled, not in stacks. It had been used as packaging. My hand wasn’t finding anything that felt like cash, or a vase.

What I was touching was something very different.

This item was cold and hard and metallic. And there wasn’t just one. There were several. I traced my fingers along them, translating those tactile sensations into a mental image.

Guns
.

BEFORE
he did anything else, Nathaniel Braithwaite felt he had to find the dogs. Once that was done, well, he was
gone
.

Once he’d escaped from Vince Fleming’s two goons, he ran straight into the woods. Tripped twice. Took branches in the face. But he just kept going until he came out the other side, behind some small strip plaza. Out front, he found a woman sitting behind the wheel of a taxi drinking a coffee, and he got her to take him back to the neighborhood where he’d been walking Emily and King and where he would find his Cadillac.

“You walk into a propeller?” she asked, looking at his lip.

He’d heard the crash seconds after he’d bailed from the van, before they were able to perform any further Black & Decker dental surgery on him. Braithwaite glanced over his shoulder just for a second, long enough to see the mangled body of one of the men on the pavement in front of the FedEx truck.

He didn’t know what to feel. It wasn’t joy. Not at that moment. Just relief. The dead guy sure wasn’t going to be coming after him, and the accident would keep the other man too busy to pursue him.

But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be looking for him later.

Nathaniel got lucky soon after the cab dropped him off. King was scratching at the back door of his own house. Emily, rather than go back to her home, was still hanging out with King, stretched out on the grass, watching him try to carve his way back into his family’s residence.

When the dogs saw Braithwaite come around the corner of the house, they both ran to him, their tails wagging so hard their bodies were gyrating.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Natey’s back. It’s okay.”

He unlocked the door to King’s house, put the dog inside, then locked up again. Then he walked Emily to her place, which was only four houses down the street, and did the same.

The dogs were safe.

The other dogs he should have gotten to that day—well, they were just going to have to do their business on the floor. At least, when their owners got home that night, their pets would be there. They wouldn’t be off roaming the neighborhood. So what if they messed a few carpets?