As we sped along the street I was checking out parked cars and empty driveways, comparing the layout against the mental image I’d snapped the last time we were there. It all seemed quiet, normal, with no new cars too smart for the area, no suspicious vans. I was aware of a slight disorientation, even so, in trying to overlay my night-time memory onto daylight.
Following Trey’s directions, Scott pulled up hard enough in front of Henry’s run-down house to have the neighbours twitching. If this had been the kind of estate where the neighbours bothered taking notice of what people got up to.
The place looked worse in the harsh sunlight. The wooden siding of the house itself had once been done pale blue, as though with paint left over from a swimming pool. The broken trellis that skirted the bottom pretended to be white, as did the window trims and the wooden supports for the porch, which leaned very slightly over at an angle. This gave the effect that the whole structure was collapsing slowly sideways off the front of the house. For all I knew, that might have been the case.
My bag was still unzipped, ready. I swung it onto my shoulder as I opened the passenger door. “I suppose it’s pointless to tell you to stay in the car?” I said but I wasn’t really expecting an answer. Besides, the four of them had already hopped out onto the dusty dirt driveway. The sight of their ready grins made me scowl.
I led the way past the battered Corvette and up the rickety steps. I leaned on the bell, hearing it ring through the house but no-one came to answer. We stood like that for a few moments, waiting. The kids’ grins had become a little more forced now and they began to squabble in a lighthearted undertone amongst themselves.
I tuned out the bickering, wishing they were anywhere but behind me on this. All the time I let my eyes drift across the scene over the road from Henry’s place but there was nobody in sight. It jarred.
Saturday afternoon and nobody in sight. Not a single person. Not even a dog. As soon as we’d hit the end of the street something had spooked me and now I knew what it was.
Henry had been very specific about time. Why? Anyone needing proof of his connection to Trey couldn’t reasonably have expected him to have the kid on tap, instantly available, so why the tight deadline? Why the urgency? Unless . . .
My heart had begun to pump again, setting that tingle along my forearms, that shiver between my shoulders. I dropped my right hand nonchalantly into the open bag hanging from my shoulder as I pulled open the outer screen door with my left.
The inner door was old, the paint faded although with two tough-looking shiny locks at different heights along the leading edge. When I tried the handle, it turned without resistance and the door opened.
I heard Xander suck in a breath. “Man, are you sure we should—”
“Shut up,” I murmured, and nudged the door all the way wide. It swung slowly back against the wall of the hallway, revealing the same grotty little living space. The door at the end of the corridor was the only one closed. I took one step across the threshold but that was all I needed before I knew the smell.
When I brought my hand out of the bag the SIG was in it. I shrugged the bag onto the floor. Without looking over my shoulder I said tightly, “Get back in the truck. Turn it round and have the engine running.”
They didn’t argue with me. Maybe they’d caught the odour too, even if they couldn’t identify it. Living in a climate like Florida’s, how can you fail to recognise the smell of death for what it is?
“Is it – is it him?” Trey’s hushed voice by my shoulder sounded a little wavery.
I glanced back at him, took in the pale but determined face and didn’t repeat my last order.
“Yes, I think so,” I said. “You up to this?”
He nodded once and I wasn’t going to ask him again. Together we took the few short steps along the hallway and opened the door to Henry’s lair.
The man of the house was sitting in the chair where we’d last seen him, amid a sea of wreckage and destruction.
And blood.
Henry’s massive torso had been tied into position with nylon rope and his wrists had been handcuffed to the metal arms of the chair, then double-secured with silver duct tape around his forearms. They must have needed the two methods of holding him down while they methodically broke every one of his fingers.
They’d gagged him while they’d done it, wrapping more duct tape around his face, half covering one ear. It was tight enough to distort Henry’s bulging cheeks and make his jaw sag, like his whole head was being squeezed in the middle. The dirty dishcloth they’d forced into his mouth was just visible beneath the lower corner of the tape, poking out like a lizard tongue.
His head was slumped forwards so his chins rested on his chest. His eyes were closed, but I didn’t bother to check for a pulse. After the men who’d tortured him had finished extracting whatever he had to give them, they’d put a single bullet through the centre of his forehead. They’d held the barrel close enough for the explosive discharge to tattoo an imprint into his flesh around the small neat hole. Henry would, without a doubt, have known exactly what was coming to him.
It hadn’t been a small calibre gun they’d used, either. The impact had lifted off the back of his skull, radically redecorating the window and far wall of the room in the process. The round had kept going, scattering the slats of the venetian blind and taking out the small centre pane of glass, then travelling on to God knows where in the trees beyond.
Behind me I heard a slithering bump and I turned to find Trey had concertina’d slowly down the door jamb. He was still clutching desperately at the woodwork even after his skinny rump had hit the floor.
I opened my mouth to say something but realised there wasn’t much I could say that was going to help in a situation like this. I stepped carefully further into the room, trying to keep my feet out of the blood. The flinty taste of it was sharp on the back of my tongue as I breathed.
So that was why Henry had sounded breathless on the phone.
Not excitement. Not greed.
Pain.
Poor bastard.
But who had done this to him? And were they still waiting around to do the same to us?
With an acute awareness of time passing, I eyed what was left of Henry’s prized computer array. Every piece of it had been trashed and I didn’t know nearly enough about them to work out if anything could be salvaged from the ruins. But I was damned if I was going to come this far and leave with nothing. I turned back to Trey. He hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Trey,” I said, loudly. “Would any of this gear still work?”
He shook his head a little as if to clear it, like a boxer who’s just taken a good strong combination to the jaw and is doing his best, against all expectation, to stay in the fight.
“Wha-what?”
“Henry’s computers,” I said, slow and clear. “Would any of them still work enough for us to find out who he was in contact with?”
“I dunno,” Trey said, unable to take his eyes off the corpse. It was the hands, I noticed, more than the head that bothered him. It seemed such a deliberately sadistic act to take the hands of a man who lived by the dexterity of his fingers.
I moved in front of the boy, blocking the vision. “Trey,” I said again, bending over him. “We don’t have much time. Think about it.”
It took him a moment to refocus on me, like an old camera struggling to follow the action. “We might get something off of the hard drive, I guess,” he said at last.
“Great,” I said, giving him an encouraging smile. “Where do I find it and what does it look like?”
“Them,” he said. He cleared his throat. “He was using three separate systems. They’ll each have a hard drive, and he could have a back-up unit somewhere as well.”