“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.
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.