Raphino drove and I directed him. We had, I estimated, forty-five minutes until we were there. I hoped he was home. I hoped more he was not.
I didn’t even say “yes.” I just nodded my head finally and got in the car. The first five minutes were silent, then he began with instructions.
“Surprise will be important,” he said. “We can’t just bust in the front door.”
“No shit,” I said.
“We’ll park far enough away they won’t see us coming,” he said. “We’ll case the place, then find a weak point of entry.”
“Don’t we need a warrant for that?” I asked.
His head bobbed from side to side. “Technically. Don’t worry about that.”
My mind skipped back to Dartmouth, sitting in an angular wooden desk in a cold lecture hall. The hardest class I took was a pre-law course my junior year. I was completely out of place; wedged between the finance and econ courses I breezed through was this single class focusing on the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments. I knew little about the constitution and even less about law, and I struggled mightily. How did I even end up there? I must have needed another political science credit.
The professor was a tall, thin woman with some sort of walking impediment. She was a monster. Socratic method, each student badgered on a daily basis, nowhere to hide. It was the only class I got nervous about attending. By the end of the semester, the student roster had been cut in half due to drops.
My fear of being exposed made me prepare for each class diligently, and as a result I retained the information well into my adult life. So I knew something about search and seizure, warrants, and what is admissible in court. And I knew going into a house to make a warrantless arrest was generally frowned upon. I tried to explain this to Raphino.
“You’re right,” he said, “when it comes to evidence being admissible in court. We’re not worried about gathering evidence. We just want Decierdo. Murray.”
“Can we arrest him in his home without a warrant?”
He was driving faster now. “When I put the cuffs on him and throw him in the back of the car, there’s not going to be a lawyer there to tell me I can’t. So yeah, I can arrest him. Technically correct or not, when they see what he’s done, he’ll be charged.”
“Okay,” I said. Pine trees rushed past the window. “I just think…maybe it would be better to do this by the letter of the law.”
“The letter of the law is how criminals get off,” he said. “We turn in the evidence we have, they spend six months building a case, and someone tips him off. By the time they’re ready to move on him, he’s buried somewhere in South America drinking margaritas. Long gone.”
I motioned where to turn. The car braked hard and started up the hill.
“How many rounds you got?” Raphino asked.
It hadn’t dawned on me until then that the box of hollow points was still tucked under my bed, in my apartment. I had only what was in the magazine; eight or twelve or something.
Raphino frowned. “Okay.”
“If we get to the point where I have to shoot, we’re screwed anyway,” I said.
I tried to think back to times in my life when I’d killed things. Bugs, spiders in the house, a few frogs one summer with those asshole neighbor kids. There had to be a mammal in there somewhere. Mice in mousetraps, of course. I handled that fine. Anything bigger than a mouse? I was fairly certain I’d taken a squirrel or bird at some point, but I couldn’t place it. The men in my family weren’t hunters.
The radio quietly hummed a country song. Raphino maneuvered the car up the winding mountain road, quickly and skillfully. In town and on the interstate, the street surfaces were cleared of snow and ice, but the farther away from civilization, the less they were maintained. Here there were patches of packed snow in some places. Raphino managed to miss the bad spots and whip us around corners. The speed felt unsafe for a mountain road, but the car remained in control. More than once it felt to me like we were headed off the road, before he jerked the wheel and set us straight. There was a reckless order to it.
We turned off on the long, narrow road to Ben Murray’s chateau. Raphino killed the headlights and slowed down. The car crawled now, guided by the dim light of the moon and stars reflecting off the snow. It was enough.
“Park it about a mile up,” I said. “That should be enough space.”
I wiped my palms on my jeans and felt for the pistol. It felt different now that it had been fired. Warm, alive. I held it differently, touched it differently.
The road was familiar. We saw no other cars, no other houses. I practiced breathing and tried to calm my mind. I closed my eyes and focused on something, anything in the blackness, and I saw Megan. Right there in front of me, for the first time in a long time. I saw her face, relaxed in a gentle smile, her black hair falling down to the sides. I saw her the way she was before all of it. It was good to see her.
I missed her the most right then. Good God, I missed her.
He stopped the car and killed the engine. We whispered for a minute, and I told him what I knew about the layout of the house. There was a basement door around the back; I’d never seen it, but knew it was there. Party guests used it to smoke cigarettes. If we could get in through that door, we could reach the stairs to take us to the main level, where—if he was in the house at all—Ben Murray would most likely be.
“Just pay attention to what I say,” Raphino said. “I’ll be using hand signals. Follow my instructions, we’ll be fine.”
We exited the car and carefully pressed the doors closed. I mirrored Raphino’s movements, tiptoeing just behind him on the edge of the road, where the snow was packed down and didn’t make noise under footsteps. He went into a half crouch and so did I. We skirted the road until the winter air began to freeze my fingers, and the outline of the house came into view. The windows were dark, the porch light was off. The driveway was empty.
55
Raphino slowed as we approached the house. I looked for the soft glow of a light or lamp, but saw none. We were in front of the house now, close enough to take a few steps up the front stairs and enter the door. We turned left and followed a crude path leading around the side. The snow was chopped up from footsteps, only partially packed now but manageable. We took care with our feet, conscious of the crunch from the snow’s top crust. As we moved around the side, there were still no lights; we made our way by the dim reflection off the snow. On the backside of the house we found the door, Raphino moving slowly toward it and motioning for me to follow. Silence enveloped us, and we had not broken it.
The door was locked, of course. I was, at this point, in favor of our excursion ending here. Had we been able to speak, I would have voiced this opinion. But we were not, and thus I was at his mercy. Raphino produced a small metal object from his pocket, resembling in the moonlight a tradesman’s multi-tool, and went to work on the lock. There were small nicks and clicks, each sound amplified in the winter stillness, but nothing inside the house stirred.
A minute passed, then two. The back door sat beneath a large wooden deck that shot off the main level. It was darker beneath the deck. Raphino worked on the lock and I stood watch, eyes darting from the house to the yard behind us, hand on my pistol. My fingers slowly went numb from the cold. There was a louder click, a push, and the back door creaked open. We were in.
We both knew the creak of the door was too loud. I took extra care when stepping inside the dark basement, and left the door cracked open behind me to eliminate the noise of the latch, but closed enough to keep the draft out. Once we were both inside, he held up his hand and we observed the basement, crouched on the floor. It was dark and smelled damp. Two or three different hums came from corners of the darkness. Raphino drew his pistol, and I did the same.