I had no idea where Henry Grayson was. I thought I could take Big Lumpy at his word, but in light of the men on the street that Fi had dispatched, it seemed Henry had more people after him than could reasonably be accounted for, and that was a problem.
I took a sip of my beer. It was ice-cold. The logo on the side of the bottle showed a cresting wave and so for a moment I imagined what life would be like if I were one of those people who actually was able to spend the majority of their Miami time beachside covered in suntan lotion versus constantly running into and out of trouble, mine and other people’s, in well-ventilated homes, hotels and secure government locations.
And then it occurred to me: I was drinking an ice-cold beer in an air-conditioned home. A home that had been unoccupied for at least two months.
I grabbed the stack of mail from the coffee table and began sifting through the envelopes until I found what I was looking for: the electric bill. It had a credit balance of three thousand dollars. Why would a person disappear but keep his electricity on? Actually pay for it for months in advance?
I picked up the book on underground dwellings. If you want to find out what pages of a book have been read the most, you can do a simple fingerprint test using a variety of chemicals, but in a bind you can just use iodine and an oven. After the iodine is heated, the prints will be revealed, but only for a short period of time-just a matter of minutes. More effective is a brushing of silver nitrate followed by some good old-fashioned ultraviolet light, better known as black light to anyone who happens to watch too much television.
Or, if you simply don’t have the time to do a fingerprint test, you can figure it out the old-fashioned way: Look for the dog-eared corners, which, in this case, led me to page sixty-seven, a chapter titled “How to Build False Walls, Floors and Crawl Spaces.”
“Your dad do any redecorating, Brent?” I asked.
“His bedroom and his office used to be one big room,” Brent said.
“When was that?” I asked.
“A couple of months ago.”
“The bookshelves,” I said. “Those new?”
“Yeah,” Brent said. “He used to just stack his books up all around the house, but then he got those built-in shelves. He was pretty proud of them.”
“I’m sure he was,” I said. “Brent, would you mind getting me another beer?”
Brent, not surprisingly, shrugged and then headed off to the kitchen. I handed Fiona the open book and pointed at the photo of a small room built behind bookcases on page sixty-eight. Fiona made a grunting noise, as if viewing the page actually pained her-it had been a long day already for her, clearly-and then handed the book to Sam, who looked at the page with a slight air of bewilderment. “What am I looking at here?” he said.
“Henry’s in the house,” I said quietly.
“What’s our move?” Sam said.
“You and I are going to stay here,” I said. “Fi, I want you to take Brent back to my mother’s. Make sure no one tails you out of the neighborhood.”
“You’re aware that I’ve done this before?” Fiona said.
No one likes to be ordered around. Fiona likes it even less. “Yes, I know,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “And can I pick up your cleaning?”
Brent walked back into the living room, saving me from my own likely response. “Brent,” I said, “Fiona is going to take you back to my mother’s while we finish up here.”
“Can’t we just go back to my dorm?” Brent said.
“Your dorm isn’t safe,” I said. “I don’t think your vampire friend King Thomas will actually bite anyone if they come looking for you.”
“Your mom has a shotgun,” Brent said, but not in a positive way.
“I know,” I said. “But she knows how to use it.”
“I’ve got class at nine a.m. tomorrow,” he said. “I really can’t miss again.”
“Uncle Sammy will write you a note that says hired killers are looking for you,” Sam said.
“My professor said if I miss one more class I’ll get an F,” he said.
“Then tomorrow we’ll go to school,” I said.
“We?” Fiona said.
“You,” I said.
“Me?” Fiona said.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said.
After Fiona and Brent left, Sam and I stood in Henry’s office and examined his workmanship.
“Nice shelves,” Sam said. “Oak?”
“I believe it is,” I said.
“Be impossible to rip those out,” he said.
“It would,” I said. We examined the shelves closely and my assessment was correct: They’d been bolted into the wall and reinforced with steel cross-supports. The door that had been created by the shelf opened out, which meant that it locked from the inside, just as the handy guidebook had suggested.
We stepped out of the office and walked down the hall to the bedroom and examined the wall that Henry had erected. It was just plain old drywall. Wallpapered drywall, but drywall nonetheless.
Drywall comes in a standard size. Half an inch thick and four feet wide. You don’t need to be a spy to know this. You only need to spend half of your childhood kicking and punching walls out of frustration to learn specifically what home improvement stores keep in stock. You can get thicker drywall for soundproofing, or for fire retardation, but if you just want to build a wall and you have limited resources and ability, a nice ten-foot length of drywall can be turned into a very flimsy wall in a day.
You don’t need a battering ram to break down a wall made only of gypsum, which this one was. You just need a good pair of shoes and a strong side-leg kick to the weakest seam-which would be the first panel on a three-panel wall.
Neither Sam nor I was wearing particularly good shoes for the deed, so we went back to the office. I knocked on the wall.
“Henry,” I said, “my name is Michael Westen. I’m helping your son, Brent, out. I know you’ve heard us in here for the last hour, so you know it’s safe. I’d like to talk to you. I mean you no harm.”
When no answer came, I said, “Henry, either you come out or I’m leaving here with all of your Boba Fett dolls.”
That did the trick.
I heard three different sliding locks being moved, and then, oddly, both televisions in the office turned on and shortly thereafter I heard noise coming from the living room and from down the hall as well. The bookshelf made a creaking sound and then it popped open to reveal a small, well-appointed room with a single bed, a dresser, a recliner, a television and several framed family photos on the wall. Standing in the middle of the room was a man wearing white boxer shorts and a tank top that barely covered his potbelly. His hair was messed up and he had at least a three-day growth of beard, but otherwise he looked just like the photos of Henry Grayson that could be found around the house.
Really, if you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought Henry had just woken from a Sunday nap. Sure, he was a bit unkempt, and there was the fact that he was inside a hidden compartment inside his house, but he looked otherwise very normal if you were able to discount the fact that he was holding what looked like an ignition switch for a bomb in his hand. I now had a pretty good idea why he had so many plasma televisions in his house, too.
“I will blow up this entire house if you touch my son,” Henry Grayson said, “or any of my toys.”
“Your son isn’t here, Henry,” I said. “I just sent him somewhere safe. It’s okay.”
“Who are you?” he said to Sam.
“I’m Sam,” he said.
“Sam,” he said. “That’s a friendly name.”
“I’m a friendly guy,” Sam said.
“If you touch my toys,” Henry said to me, “I will blow up the entire house and Sam.”
“Actually,” I said, “you’d probably kill everyone in about a two-block radius.”