"Fuck that."
"I'm coming," she insisted. "He's my man and two of us can go through the place faster than one."
"Not a bad idea," said Del. "No offense, man, but you kinda smell like a cop. If somebody sees you in the hallway, before you get in… Lily'd be a little camouflage."
Lucas looked from Lily to Del and back. "All right," he said. "Let's go."
"Hope there's nobody crashing in here. You know, a guest," Lily said as they crossed the street. Hood's building was made of old red sandstone; the wooden windows showed dry rot.
"Don't worry, I'll cover you," Lucas said. He tried to make it light, a joke, but it came out macho.
She stared back at him. "You can be a pain in the ass, you know?"
"That was supposed to be a joke."
"Yeah. Well." Her eyes broke away.
Lucas shook his head. He wasn't doing anything right. He followed her up the stoop into the building. First door on the right. He knocked once. No answer. And again. No answer. He put the key in the lock, cracked the door. Lily looked down the hall, checking the other doorways for watchers.
"Hello?" Lucas made it loud, but not too loud. Then he whistled. "Here, boy. Here, pup."
After a few seconds of silence, Lily said, "Nobody home."
"Probably a fuckin' Rottweiler under the bed with its tongue cut out to make it mean," Lucas said. He pushed open the door and they stepped inside.
"That's a heck of a door," Lucas said as he eased it shut.
"What?"
"It's an old building. They still have the original doors- solid oak or walnut or something," Lucas said, rapping on the door with his knuckles. "By the time apartments get this old, one landlord or another has usually stripped out all the original doors and sold them. They're probably worth as much as the apartment building."
They were in the living room. Two rickety occasional chairs, a recliner with a stained fabric cover, the brown metal cube of an aging color television. Two red vinyl bean-bag chairs lay on the floor in front of the TV, leaking tiny white Styrofoam beads on the wooden floor. The apartment smelled of some kind of stew or soup-lentils, maybe. White beans.
Lucas led the way through a quick check of the apartment, glancing into two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen with its peeling linoleum and thirties gas stove with a fold-down top.
"How do we know which is Hood's room?" Lily asked.
"You look at the stuff on the chests," Lucas said. "There's always some shit."
"You sound like you do this quite a bit," she said.
"I mostly talk to a lot of burglars," Lucas said, suppressing a grin. He headed toward a bedroom.
"What do you want me to do?" Lily asked.
"Look in the kitchen, around the telephone," Lucas said. He took the miniature tape recorder out of his pocket. "Push the red button to record. Dictate any phone numbers you find written around. Any times or place names. Anyplace Hood might have been."
The first bedroom had one bed and a ramshackle chest. The bed was unmade, the bedclothes twisted in a pile. Lucas stooped and looked under it. There were several boxes, but a patina of dust suggested that they hadn't been moved recently. He stood and went over to the six-drawer chest. Notes, gas-station charge slips, cash-register receipts, ballpoint pens, paper clips and pennies were scattered across the top. He checked the charge slips: Tomas Peck. Wrong guy. Lucas quickly looked through the drawers and the closet for weapons. Nothing.
The second bedroom had two beds and no chests. All the clothing was stacked inside boxes, some plastic and made for storage, some cardboard and made for moving. Personal papers were scattered across a windowsill next to one of the beds. He picked up a letter, glanced at the address: Billy Hood. The return address was in Bemidji and the handwriting was feminine. His wife, probably. Lucas looked through the letter, but it was mostly a litany of complaints followed by a request for money for the wife and a daughter.
He quickly went through the boxes stacked beside the bed. One was half full of underwear and socks, a second was stacked with several pairs of worn jeans and a couple of belts. A third held winter-weight shirts and sweaters, with a couple sets of thermal underwear.
The bedroom had one closet. The door was standing open and Lucas patted down the shirts and jackets hanging inside. Nothing. He dropped to his knees and pushed the clothing out of the way and checked the bottom. A lever-action Sears.30-.30. He cranked the lever down. Unloaded. A box of shells sat on the floor beside the butt. He got up, looked around, found a torn pair of underpants.
"What're you doing?" Lily was in the doorway.
"Found a gun. I'm going to jam it. What'd you get in the kitchen?" He ripped a square of material out of the underpants.
"There were some phone numbers on papers around the phone. I got them."
"Look in all the drawers."
"I did. Paged through the calendar, looked through a kind of general catchall basket and drawer full of junk. Went through the phone book. There was a number written in the back with a red pen and there was a red pen right next to the book, so it might be recent…" She glanced at a piece of paper in her hand. "It has a six-one-four area code. That's the Twin Cities, right? Maybe…"
"No, we're six-one-two," Lucas said. "I don't know where six-one-four is. Sure it was six-one-four?"
"Yeah…" She disappeared and Lucas made a tight little ball of the underpants material and pushed it down the muzzle with a ballpoint. The material was tightly packed, and after two or three inches, he couldn't force it down any farther. Satisfied, he put the rifle back in the closet and closed the door.
"That six-one-four code is southwestern Ohio," Lily said from the doorway. She was looking at a phone book.
"He could be coming back that way," Lucas said.
"I'll get somebody to run down the number," Lily said. She closed the phone book. "What else?"
"Check the front-room closets. I gotta finish here."
There was a box under Hood's bed. Lucas pulled it out. A photo album, apparently some years old, covered with dust. He glanced through it, then pushed it back under the bed. A moment later, Lily called, "Shotgun." Lucas stepped into the living room just as she cracked open an old single-shot twelve-gauge.
"Shit," Lucas said. "No point in trying to jam that. He'll be looking right through the barrel when he puts a shell in."
"Don't see any shells," Lily said. "Should we take it?"
"Better not. If his roommates are involved, we don't want anything missing…"
Lucas went back to the bedroom and looked through the other man's boxes. There was nothing of interest, no letters or notes that might tie the others more intimately to Hood. He went back into the living room. "Lily?"
"I'm in the bathroom," she called. "Find anything else?"
"No. How about you?" He poked his head into the bathroom and found her carefully going through the medicine cabinet.
"Nothing serious." She took a prescription-drug bottle out of the cabinet and looked at it, her forehead wrinkling. "There's a prescription here for Hood. Strong stuff, but I don't see how you could abuse it."
"What is it?"
"An antihistamine. The label says it's for bee stings. My father used it. He was allergic to bees and fire ants. If he got stung, his whole body would swell up. It used to scare the shit out of him; he'd think he was smothering. And he might have too, if he didn't have his medicine around. The swelling can pinch off your windpipe…"
Lucas shrugged. "No use to us."
Lily put the plastic bottle of pills back in the cabinet, closed it and followed him into the living room. "Anything else?"
"I guess not," Lucas said. "We fucked up a gun; I hope there aren't any shells for the shotgun."
"Didn't see any. Are you going to do any pictures?"
"Yeah. Just a few views." Lucas took a half-dozen Polaroid photos of the rooms and paced off the main room's dimensions, which he dictated into the tape recorder.