This left only the garage, the door to which was in the kitchen.
Instinct told him to crouch as he pulled the door open and lifted his gun.
He found himself aiming at a shadowy space, filled with sealed boxes and furniture and other items awaiting their final home.
No movement.
He needed to check behind the cartons, a good hiding space, if Merritt was in fact here. The odds were that he was not, but the consequence if that slim chance proved to be the case would not be good.
Shaw could only search behind the boxes by walking around the stacks.
Making him a perfect target.
And so he picked another option: with his left hand he shoved the top row of cartons into the space behind them, keeping the Glock pointed toward where an attacker would emerge.
One by one, they fell with varying types and levels of noise. China and glassware were not his priorities, but nothing seemed to shatter.
This took less than a minute. He circled around and confirmed no one was here.
When he finished, he returned to the kitchen, locked the door and began turning on lights. He walked from room to room, looking for anything that might tell him where Allison had gone.
It didn’t take long to see that this would probably be futile. The bedroom in the back was empty, except for a few storage boxes, which were sealed. As for the other two, it looked like a tornado had swept through them. Of course they’d been in a hurry to leave, but this was not the result of fast, careless packing. The rooms had been tossed, and by somebody who knew what they were doing — an ex-cop, for instance. Drawers had been removed and inverted, as Merritt would have looked for anything taped underneath. The contents of the desk, dresser and bedside tables were in different piles on the carpeted floor. Shaw could just about tell where Merritt had sat to sort through what he’d gathered.
The same was true about the daughter’s room.
Anything helpful would be gone.
He doused the lights and stepped outside, then walked to a neighbor’s house. The home was dark, except for one interior light, dim, and he was not surprised there was no answer when he rang the bell. The residence on the other side was well lit and occupied. The woman who answered nodded pleasantly to a smiling Shaw — his expression of choice for getting information from strangers. He told her he was a friend of Allison’s mother’s, a not wholly deceptive statement, and had some things to give her. She was supposed to be home but she wasn’t answering the door.
“You know when they’ll be back?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t seen them today. Matter of fact, they keep to themselves mostly. The mother and girl. Always seemed suspicious. Not social at all. I left cupcakes, and she mailed me a note. I thought she’d come over in person.”
Shaw thanked her and returned to the street in front of the house and walked to the intersection of Maple View and Cross County, a four-lane thoroughfare. Sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of the block was a man in dusty rumpled clothing. A sign beside him informed passersby he was out of work and a veteran.
Shaw approached. He dropped a ten into a cardboard box, in which sat a few coins.
“Bless you.” Spoken with an understandable hint of wariness, since Shaw was not walking on after the donation.
“Got a question.” He displayed pictures of Allison and Hannah on his phone. “These two, they’re missing. You seen them today?”
He frowned, tilted his head.
A twenty made its way into the box.
“Yeah, they left, fast, was hours ago. Her SUV ran the stop sign. A driver gave her the finger. She just kept going fast, till she got to the truck.”
“What truck?”
“White pickup. Was about there.” He pointed.
“Ford F-150?”
He shrugged.
“You said she stopped?”
The man chuckled. “Yep. Let the air out of a tire. Then kept going. Bat outta hell.”
There were skid marks where she’d gunned the engine.
“How soon after she left did the driver of the truck come back?”
“Oh, right after. Dangerous-looking guy. Pale, spooky. Ghoulish. Don’t hear that word much, do you?”
Shaw pulled out his phone and showed a mug shot of Merritt.
“Yeah, him.”
“What’d he do after he got the spare on?”
“Drove off after her.”
“You have a phone?”
“I got a phone.”
Shaw dug into his pocket and peeled off a hundred in twenties. Into the box they went.
“My, oh, my.”
Shaw also dropped a card with his burner numbers on it; only that, no name. “Give me your number.”
He glanced up cautiously. “You gonna sell it to a telemarketer?” Then grinned. He recited the number and Shaw loaded it into his phone.
“You see that white pickup around the house, call me.”
“I will.”
Shaw turned to leave.
“But he won’t be back.”
Facing the man again. “How do you know?”
“You spooked him good.”
“What do you mean?”
“You pull up on that motorcycle of yours and not three minutes later he’s climbing out that window.” He pointed to the garage. “He runs to the pickup and, this time, goes east.” Tugging a lengthy eyebrow. “Can I still have the hundred?”
Shaw sprinted to the Yamaha, fired up the engine and skidded into the street.
Two miles later, having passed scores of arteries major and arteries minor, which would have taken Merritt anywhere through the warren that was this part of Ferrington, he braked sharply to a stop, lifted his phone and composed a text to Sonja Nilsson.
Just before he hit send he received one.
From her.
Both messages said largely the same thing.
31
Jon Merritt parked the F-150 in one of the many vacant lots near the river, off Manufacturers Row.
There had been no point in engaging the guy on the motorcycle.
Muscle.
But working for who?
A big question. But he didn’t waste time speculating. He had to move. So far his only crimes — known crimes — were violating a restraining order and trespassing. Soon this would change, of course, and even the Hero of Beacon Hill would no longer be immune from pursuit.
But for now, he had a certain period of grace.
He climbed from the truck’s cab. Some crack and meth heads, scrawny men and a few women, sat or stood on the riverwalk, eyeing him. They were twitchy and desperate and hoping he could hook them up. Or, if not, he might have something they could relieve him of, which in turn they could barter for a hit. Two men rose unsteadily and approached. He displayed the gun and they turned and vanished, as if the wind had blown them on their way. Just like the bum at the bus depot.
People like these were mosquitoes. All it took was a slap, and they were gone.
Merritt walked west toward the Fourth Street Bridge. The city’s paint jobs had been haphazard, both the original sickly green and more recent darker versions of a similar hue. Much rust too. He crossed on the sidewalk, which was edged with a ten-foot chain-link barrier. The fencing had been added some years ago after the bridge had become a popular site for suicides. This was curious since the distance from bridge to water was about fifty feet. You couldn’t work up lethal velocity in that distance. The deaths — mostly laid-off workers — came from drowning.
Merritt had run some of these cases as a rookie. He thought if he ever wanted to take his life it would be by firearm, not the suffocation of drowning, especially in this toxic soup.
The autumn moon was a disk camouflaged by haze — some smoke, some pollution. This was Ferrington. Better than when Merritt was a teenager, his father working in one of the plants that spewed whatever it was the towers spewed. He’d heard it was just heated air; the poisons were treated into nothingness within the factory. That was a lie, of course.