No Safe House

  “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.

  FIFTY-NINE

  TERRY

  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 direct
ion?”

  “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.

  SIXTY

  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?

  If he had a chance—and he wasn’t sure that he would—Nathaniel would call these people and tell them he was quitting. Effective immediately. Yeah, they’d be upset. Some of them would start screaming at him over the phone. It was like your day care telling you they wouldn’t take your kid anymore, starting tomorrow. Work out some other arrangement.

  Some of his clients, Nathaniel knew, would phone in sick until they found someone else to take their dogs out for a poop and a run through the day.

  It wasn’t his problem.

  Nathaniel had bigger problems.

  He got behind the wheel of his car—God, how he loved this Caddy, the only reminder of his once successful life—and pointed it in the direction of home.

  Which wasn’t going to be home for much longer.

  Not only might that other guy from the van be looking for him, but there was Vince to worry about, too. The man who’d dragged him into all this. Braithwaite never wanted anything to do with that man again.

  Nathaniel drove past his place slowly, looking for Vince’s truck, or the van that had been used to kidnap him. He didn’t see them out front of his place, but they wouldn’t be dumb enough to park there, would they? So he did a quick tour of the neighborhood. The street behind, the next one over. When he didn’t see any vehicles that set off alarms for him, he drove back.

  Then thought, Shit.

  If one of them drove by anytime soon, they’d see his car and know he was home. Being kidnapped once in a day was enough. So he parked the Caddy one street over and hoofed it back. As he was mounting the steps to the porch, he encountered Barney, who had turned a couple of the chairs into a sawhorse, across which he’d placed a lengthy piece of sculpted wood. The handrail from along the stairs. He had some tools scattered about and a cell phone rested on one of the chair arms, but instead of working, he was leaning up against the wall, smoking a cigarette.

  Orland was sitting in a porch chair, staring vacantly at the street.

  “Nathaniel,” Barney said.

  “Hey,” the man replied, not even glancing at him as he reached for the door.

  “You okay? What happened to your lip there?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, you sure don’t look fine.”

  “Mind your own goddamn business,” Braithwaite snapped.

  Barney took a long drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose. “Okay, then.”

  The sound of a car coming to a halt out front of the house prompted Braithwaite to spin around. He felt his heart in his throat, but breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it was the woman from across the hall. Cynthia Archer. And she had a teenage girl with her. Her daughter. He’d seen her here before.

  But the last thing he wanted was to lose time chatting with them. He had much to do, and not much time to do it in.

  He took the steps up to the second floor two at a time. He was unlocking his door when he heard Cynthia call up to him.

  “Hey, Nate, hold up!”

  He pretended not to hear, got the door open, entered his apartment, and closed the door behind him.

  Pack.

  Under his bed he kept three empty suitcases and a fourth, smaller one that was already full. He hauled them all out, dropped the three empty ones on the bed, and placed the fourth in a chair. The others he unzipped, opened. Then he went to his four-drawer dresser, grabbed clothes, and threw them randomly into the cases.

  Someone was knocking on the door.

  He ignored it, went to his closet, ripped shirts off hangers, balling them up and tossing them into the suitcases.

  “Nate!”

  Cynthia’s voice coming through the door.

  “I know you’re in there. I want to talk to you.”

  He stopped, froze. If he didn’t make a sound, would she go away?

  Another knock. “I’m not leaving till you open this door,” she said.

  He dropped some shirts onto the bed, crossed through the living area to the door, and opened it. Cynthia stood there, daughter
next to her.

  “I’m kind of busy,” he said. “Come by later.”

  Grace looked at his mangled lip. “Eww,” she said.

  Her mother said, “I know what’s been going on.”

  “Going on with what?”

  “With you. And Vince Fleming. And today. His men—they grabbed you, right? They did that to you.”

  That caught him by surprise. How the hell did she know that? “I told you, I’m busy. Leave me alone.”

  Grace peered around him, got a view into the bedroom. “You taking a vacation?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Look, Mom,” she said. “He’s packing.”

  Cynthia forced her way into the apartment, headed straight for the bedroom. She stood at the door, took in the scene.

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Nathaniel said, sliding past Cynthia and flipping the lids of the suitcases closed. Now Grace was crowding into the room, too, standing by the chair where the fourth suitcase rested.

  “It’s got everything to do with us,” Cynthia said. “We’re all wrapped up in this together. You and me, we both got used, one way or another, by Vince. He used you to get into houses and hide drugs and money and other stuff there. And he used us by making our house one of his storage units.”

  “I never would have met that man if it wasn’t for you,” he said. “When he found out what I did, he . . . he coerced me.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. But what’s done is done. You made your choice to help him, and now you’re paying for it.”

  “He’s not an easy person to say no to. Had my ex-wife’s boyfriend beat up. I felt if I said no, he’d find a way to tie me to that. I didn’t know what to do.”

  He flipped the cases back open. He hadn’t wanted to pack in front of them, but he was wasting time. He opened another drawer. Socks, underwear. He grabbed everything and tossed it into a case.

  “Where you going?” Grace asked. Her hand was resting on the handle of the fourth case.