No Safe House

Fifty-two Terry

Vince took less convincing than I might have thought. Cynthia showed him her Milford Department of Public Health ID, with photo. “This’ll persuade a home owner to let us into the attic without you having to threaten to blow their brains out.”

“I guess that’s better,” he said. The man seemed to be in a fog. He had to be thinking about Jane. I knew I was.

I went to the garage and returned with a stepladder and four short bungee cords with hooks at each end. I tipped my head back, as though looking through the ceiling to our own attic, and said to him, “We’ll start here?”

Vince hesitated. “No. I haven’t got much time, and the other houses have more cash in them.”

So I carried the ladder outside and strapped it to the roof rack of the Escape with the bungee cords. It made sense that we all go in one car, and that included Grace. We didn’t have anyone to leave her with, and we certainly weren’t going to leave her at home after the terrifying events of this morning.

Once we were all in the car — Cynthia offered Vince the front seat next to me, not so much out of courtesy, I figured, but because she didn’t want him sitting in the back with Grace — we had to first go by Vince’s body shop headquarters. He had to collect any keys he’d need, plus a small notebook with addresses and security codes, that would get us into any house where no one was home. Also, he had to pick up what Bert and Gordie had already retrieved from their various hiding places around Milford. He’d stuffed it all into a couple of reusable eco shopping bags from Walgreens.

“We’ll — actually, Cynthia — will do the talking,” I said to him, glancing in the mirror in time to see him scowl. “And if you can tell me where exactly the money is in each house, I can scramble up there and get it.”

“You better not be thinking of ripping me off,” he said.

I was about to go after him for that, but held back, figuring Cynthia would tear a strip off him.

But it was Grace who said, “Wow, what a totally asshole-ish thing to say.”

Vince shifted in his seat to get a look at her.

“Yeah, that was me,” she said. “Look at all the shit your problems have put me and my parents through since last night — and yeah, okay, I screwed up big-time, too — but this was your bright idea to hide money in people’s homes and it’s all gone to shit and now my mom and dad are trying to save your ass and Jane’s, and you accuse them of trying to rip you off? Excuse me and all, but if that isn’t being a dick, I don’t know what is.”

Vince turned his eyes on me and said, “How long’s she been hanging out with Jane?”

“Long enough to learn how to talk to you, evidently,” I said.

He turned his head, stared straight ahead through the windshield. Without looking at any of us, he said, “Just what I need. Two kids busting my balls.”

At the first house on the list, we got off easy. The driveway ran all the way to a two-car garage that sat behind the house. We parked alongside it; then Cynthia and I walked around front to ring the bell. When no one came, we went back and told Vince, who got out, key in hand, and went around to the back door. The property was well shielded with trees and tall bushes along the property line, so we felt reasonably confident we could get in the house unseen.

Vince opened the place up and approached the beeping security pad. He entered a four-digit code and the beeping ceased.

“Teresa work here?” Cynthia asked, with just a hint of a sneer.

He shook his head. “We got it from the babysitter.”

Cynthia opted to stay by the car with Grace and keep watch. She’d phone me in the event of trouble. I got the ladder off the roof and followed Vince up to the second floor, careful not to bang the legs of the ladder into the walls.

“Easy one,” he said, pointing to the attic access, a panel in the ceiling in the upstairs hallway.

I opened up the ladder, pushed aside the panel when I’d reached the top step, and hauled myself up into the attic, where it was hot as hell. If it was eighty degrees outside, it had to be a hundred or more in here.

It was dark, too. Some ventilation slits built into the wall at one end cast a few pale slivers of light, and the opening I’d come up through provided more, but it still wasn’t easy to see.

“Coulda used a flashlight,” I said. “Or a fucking miner’s hat.”

“Next time,” Vince said, standing at the base of the ladder. “Not sure where exactly the stuff is. Gordie handled this place. We usually don’t like to put it too close to the opening. Go toward a corner.”

Getting around was no picnic. There was no floor. Just studs, with paper-backed insulation stuffed between them. There was just enough height for me to stand, and I angled my feet on the studs, straddling them so I wouldn’t slip through and possibly put a hole in the ceiling underfoot. I took out my phone and once again used it for a flashlight.

I squatted down, reached between the studs, and lifted up chunks of insulation. When I didn’t find anything, I moved over to the next set of joists.

It didn’t take long to find something that caught my eye.

The light from the phone bounced off the shiny plastic of a dark green garbage bag. “I think I got it,” I said. I tucked my phone back into my pocket, pulled the insulation out, shoved it aside, grabbed hold of the bag, and lifted.

It was heavy with cash.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath. Like a tightrope walker moving from one wire to another, I stepped across the joists until I was over the opening.

“Look out below,” I said, and dropped the bag down alongside the ladder into Vince’s arms. “I gotta go back and replace the insulation.” No sense leaving evidence that we were here. I continued my high-wire act, moving from joist to joist with only limited ambient light.

My foot slipped.

My right shoe rode over the edge of the stud, down through the insulation, then hit something moderately solid, but not solid enough. My whole body dropped and my arms went out, my hands scrambling to catch nearby studs.

There was a loud crunching sound.

“What the hell was that?” Vince shouted.

“My foot,” I said. “I put a hole in the ceiling.”

I managed to work my foot back up, ragged drywall edges cutting into my ankle as I freed it. When I peered down where my foot had been, all I saw was darkness.

But then, suddenly, there was light, and Vince’s face looking up at me.

“It’s a closet,” he said. “You fuckin’ incompetent.”

“I’m fine, thanks for asking. So what the hell are we going to do?”

“Nothin’,” he said. “Nothin’ we can do. Let ’em think it was raccoons.” Any raccoon that could have done this could star in its own horror movie.

I still threw the other insulation back into place, although I don’t know what point there was in doing it, and maneuvered my way back to the opening. I dangled my legs down through the hole until I felt the ladder under my feet, took a couple of steps down, got the panel back in position. Vince was standing at the top of the stairs, bag in hand, looking at me impatiently as I folded the ladder.

“How many places did we hide money in, and we never went through the ceiling?” he said.

“No,” I said. “You just lost the money.”

As we emerged from the back door, Cynthia ran over from the car, saw the green bag hanging from Vince’s hand.

“Mission accomplished?” she asked.

We both nodded but neither of us spoke. Now that we had what we’d come for, we wanted to get the hell out of there. Vince reset the alarm, locked up, and got into the car as I was securing the ladder with the bungee cords.

As I got behind the wheel, I said, “Next?”

“Viscount Drive,” he said.

I backed out of the driveway and headed for the next house. From the backseat, Grace said, “Do you think, if you give them everything they want, all the money, they’ll let Jane go?”

Cynthia whispered something to our daughter, probably along the lines of, “Let’s not talk about that.”

But Vince answered anyway. “Probably not.”

“Why?” Grace asked.

“They’ll kill her, and me, too, because I’m not the kind of person to let this go.”

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the AC. “Then is there a point to this?” I asked. “Emptying out these houses.”

Vince kept staring straight ahead. “Oh yeah.”

“What? What’s the plan? If you figure they’re going to take the money and kill you and Jane anyway, what’s the plan?”

“I’m working on it,” Vince said.

“Would you like to let us in on it?” I asked.

“Make a left up here,” he said.

The house on Viscount was another two-story. A modest home, white siding, no garage.

“Cleaning lady? Nanny? Furnace repairman? Who you got on the inside here?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Vince said.

We pulled into the driveway. There was an old faded red Pontiac Firebird parked there, had to be more than thirty years old. Cynthia was out of the Escape first. As she got to the door and was ringing the bell, I was three steps behind her.

Ten seconds later, the door opened. A man in his early seventies, I guessed. Neatly dressed, shirt buttoned at the collar. Thin and tall, with a few straggly gray hairs atop his head.

“Yes?” he said.

Cynthia apologized for disturbing him, flashed her creds, and went into her spiel.

“We’ve had a disturbing increase in reports of household mold,” Cynthia said. “Perhaps you saw something about this in the paper or on the news?”

“Uh, the wife might have,” he said, angling his head back into the house. “Gwen!”

Seconds later, a silver-haired woman of similar age appeared, crowding the doorway. “Yes?”

“These people here are from the health department asking about mold.”

“Oh my,” she said. “We don’t have any of that.”

Cynthia nodded. “You’re probably right. The trouble with mold, of course, is that often you’re suffering the effects of it before you actually see it in your home. Mold grows most often in damp places, often behind walls or furniture, and more often than not in attics, maybe as a result of a leaky roof.”

“Oh my,” the woman said. “That sounds awful.”

“Which is why,” Cynthia said, motioning to me and the car with the ladder still attached to the roof, “we are making random attic inspections to check for any mold infestation.”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “I really don’t think that’s necessary.”

Cynthia said, “As you may know, mold presents a greater threat to infants and children, as well as individuals who may already have a compromised immune system. That would be people with, for example, HIV, or who have breathing difficulties associated with allergies or asthma, and of course the elderly are also more prone to infection as a result of mold spores. Can you tell me whether you’ve had any headaches or skin irritations, perhaps dizziness or itchy eyes, even a dry hacking cough?”

I could see worry working its way across their faces. Even I was feeling a little concerned. I’d had all those symptoms at one time or another in the last few months.

“Harold,” the woman said, “if we’ve got mold growing in the attic, we need to know about it.”

“They’re just trying to sell us on some expensive repair job,” he said.

“Not at all,” Cynthia said, handing them an official pamphlet. “We’re not in the business of doing that. If we do see mold, we have a list of bonded companies we can refer you to. Garber Contracting is one that comes to mind off the top of my head, but there are many more. We don’t do the work ourselves.”

I was starting to wonder whether it wouldn’t be faster to do this Vince’s way. Just shoot them.

“Well, okay, then,” the man said, at which point I walked back to the car to take off the ladder.

Vince powered down the window and said, “Try not to go through the ceiling this time.”

“Where should I look?” I asked.

“Along the east wall.”

As I was coming back into the house, I heard the woman ask Cynthia, “Who’s that in the car?”

“It’s Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” she said.

“But school’s out.”

“True,” Cynthia said slowly. I could almost hear the wheels turning. “But it’s a Chamber of Commerce thing, not school related. But I can’t bring her into the house because health regulations stipulate we can’t expose her to the kinds of contaminants that may exist in your home. And that gentleman in the car is a city health department supervisor.”

“He just gets paid to sit on his ass?” the man asked.

Cynthia did a minor eye roll and said, “Your tax dollars at work. But really, if we find a problem, he’s the one who puts the hazmat suit on and goes inside.”

The man paled at the word “hazmat.”

The wife led me to the second floor and into a bedroom that had been turned into a sewing and crafts room. She opened the closet door and pointed to the hatch in the ceiling. This was going to be a tight one.

I set up the ladder as Cynthia entered. The wife was standing nervously in the middle of the room, and the last thing we wanted was her hanging around when I dropped wads of cash down from the attic.

Cynthia, who had clearly thought this scam through, pulled two surgical masks from her pocket. She handed one to me and slipped the other one on over her face, looping the small straps over her ears.

“I wish I had a third one for you,” she said to the woman, who then decided to wait downstairs.

I stuffed mine into my pocket as I moved the hatch aside. I hoisted myself up into the attic, yet another sweltering environment awash in the musty smells of stale air, wood, and what I thought might be mouse droppings. I directed the flashlight to the east wall.

There wasn’t enough room to stand upright, so I moved bent at the waist. My eye caught something on one of the ceiling planks. Something dark and, well, yucky.

“Cyn, can you hear me?”

I heard the ladder rattling, turned, and saw her head poke up into the attic. “Yeah, I’m here,” she said.

“I think they’ve got mold,” I said.

She went back down the ladder.

When I got to the east wall, I started lifting up insulation. In a couple of minutes, I found what I was looking for. A clear plastic bag, about the size of a thick binder, sealed with duct tape and stuffed with neat stacks of bills held together with rubber bands.

I also found something else.

Several small freezer bags, tucked into a larger clear bag, filled with what appeared to be splinters of broken glass, or ice. Except it couldn’t be ice, given how hot it was up here. There were hundreds of these crystal-like pieces, some very small, some as big as the tip of my finger.

“What in the hell is—?”

Then it hit me. It was crystal meth.

When Vince said he was stashing stuff besides money, he wasn’t kidding.