A chronicle of the imperfect history of Mike Doe.
A flood of nostalgia almost choked him. Here, before him, was everything that remained of his former self.
He dug through the contents, his fingers striking something hard and buried. He lifted it carefully to the light. A Smith & Wesson.357. Straightforward and easy to handle, it was the only make of gun he’d ever been comfortable with. Shep had given it to him for home protection when Mike had first gotten his own place. Mike had kept it in his nightstand drawer for years, finally moving it here at Annabel’s behest when Kat was born. He’d never fired it away from a shooting range and hoped he never would. The heft of it in his hand felt familiar and dangerous.
He set it gently on the counter.
He pulled the empty plastic liner from the trash can beneath the counter and dumped the box’s contents into it. Bag slung over his shoulder, he stared down at the revolver for a beat.
He pocketed it on the way out.
Mike crouched in a deserted alley, the shadows stretching dusk-long, the whine of traffic thrumming off the brick walls. The door to his Ford stood open, casting a triangle of light onto the ground. He leaned forward, broken glass crunching beneath his shoes, and touched the end of a lit match to a corner of the trash bag. His eyes glassy, he watched the flames catch and flare, peeling away the plastic and eating through all those photographs and documents.
There is no past.
And yet, clearly, there was.
It ended with a sad little pile of ash, which he kicked to the dead air, scattering it. He stamped out the embers, climbed into his truck, and drove away.
Dinner preparation on pause, Annabel sat on the kitchen counter and stared down at the.357 clutched nervously in her lap.
‘It’s a revolver,’ Mike said. ‘Easy to handle.’
She spoke in a hushed voice so Kat, busy with homework in her room, wouldn’t hear. ‘I’m worried about having it around her.’
‘Let me show you how to use it.’ As the pasta water boiled, he positioned his wife’s slender hands around the grip, but she pulled back, leaving him with the revolver.
‘It makes me uncomfortable.’
‘We’re past comfort now.’
Kat trudged in, eyeing her workbook. ‘How annoying is long division? I mean, if they’re teaching us to be smart, wouldn’t smart people just use a calculat-’ She looked up, her eyes pronounced behind the red frames of her glasses. ‘Why do you have a gun? That’s a gun, right? I mean, a gun in our kitchen? Is something wrong? Have you ever shot it? Can I hold it?’
‘Go back to your room,’ Annabel managed. ‘Give us a moment here.’
Kat backed away, eyes on the Smith & Wesson.
Annabel turned to Mike. ‘And there you have it.’ She slid off the counter, turned down the stovetop heat, and eyed the lesson plan splayed in the cookbook stand, her feminine scrawl brightening the page margins. She was the only person he knew who could study and prep puttanesca simultaneously.
The phone rang. Mike snatched up the cordless.
Hank sounded burned out. ‘I can’t get anything on a Dodge or a William being at the award ceremony, but that’s to be expected.’ He cleared his throat, which turned into a coughing fit. ‘Now, listen, there’s something I gotta lay out for you here.’
Mike found the pause as unnerving as the tension in Hank’s voice. ‘What?’
Annabel turned, and he drew her toward him, turning the phone so they could both hear.
‘Well, I don’t know what,’ Hank said. ‘Yet. I called my hook at the sheriff’s, and it seems there’s some kind of alert out on you.’
‘Alert? What does that mean?’
‘Don’t know. But your name’s been flagged.’
‘Flagged for what?’ Mike’s voice was rising.
‘I already told you. I don’t have those answers.’ A deep rasp of a breath. ‘Look, this could be local, limited to L.A. County Sheriff’s. Or it could be some other agency that’s monitoring anything around your name, that wants to be informed if you have any run-ins.’
Mike thought of Elzey and Markovic’s hushed conversation in the back office after she’d gotten off the phone, and how they’d come back out gunning for him.
‘Like who? The FBI? CIA?’ Mike choked out a laugh. ‘How widespread is it? I mean, every station?’
‘I can’t get more just yet,’ Hank said. ‘Everyone’s being a bit coy. Obviously, it’s classified. I gotta massage this thing, nibble at the edges, come in at the right angle. Gimme a day or two.’
‘Is there any agency that doesn’t have me flagged?’ Mike asked.
‘I’m sure there are plenty. Agencies – and individual stations within agencies – are understaffed and overworked. So unless you went to sleepaway camp in the rugged northwest of Pakistan, it’s not like you’re at the top of morning roll call. We don’t know the extent of this thing, but there’s no reason to assume you’ve become public enemy numero uno.’
‘What if we need help?’
‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Until we determine how widespread the alert is and who put it out, how can you know who to trust?’
Mike swallowed dryly. ‘And if Dodge and William make another move in the meantime?’
‘From what I can read at this point, I wouldn’t count on the authorities lending you a friendly ear.’
He signed off, and Mike and Annabel stared at each other.
Annabel reached down, took the revolver from Mike’s hand. She raised it clumsily, waiting, her gaze steady. He exhaled a heavy breath, moved forward, and shaped her hands properly around the grip.
Chapter 18
The laundry room’s back door had the weakest exterior lock, a dated Schlage that required only a half-diamond pick, a medium-torsion wrench, and a ninety-second attention span. With gloved hands, Dodge jiggled at it quietly. It yielded, and he stepped from night into the dull glow of the house. The old-fashioned wall clock above the dryer showed 9:27. Pocketing the tools, he moved forward into the kitchen, his size-fourteen feet surprisingly silent across the linoleum.
Mike Wingate’s head and upper torso were tucked under the sink, tools spread out on a grease-stained bath mat beside his sprawling legs. He was banging away at the U-pipe with a hammer. Dodge glided past him, drifting within a yard or so of his bare feet. Without breaking stride, he plucked a flat, magnetized digital recorder from the top of the refrigerator, where he’d hidden it days earlier. Continuing into the hall, he passed the girl in her room, her back to the open door. She was hunched over her desk, chewing a pencil, and said, ‘Mom, long division sucks,’ to him without glancing up from her work.
He ducked into the bathroom farther up the hall and locked the door. From the back pocket of his cargo pants, he withdrew a Fujitsu tablet computer, a Japan-only model the size of a checkbook; Boss Man spared no expense when it came to matters such as these. Ducking to accommodate the sloped ceiling, Dodge set up the miniature laptop at the edge of the square pedestal sink and plugged the digital recorder into a port. Within seconds the download was complete.
The doorknob behind him twisted, the jangle pronounced in the small space. Then the wife said, ‘Oh, you’re in there. Sorry, honey. Brush your teeth and get ready for bed.’
Dodge didn’t tense. His broad, flat features betrayed nothing. He kept on with his preparations.
As the footsteps padded away, Dodge tugged on a pair of clamp headphones and clicked ‘play.’ A sound graph came up on screen, charting every noise with a green flare, stretched out like a spiky caterpillar. He nudged the tracking button along a little ways to test sound.
Katherine’s voice: ‘Don’t be mad at me. It’s not like I said, “What can I do to bug Mom today? Oh – I know. I’ll get head lice.”’