The Dead Man

Chapter Six

The hooded light over my front door was on when I came home, bathing the snow that had fallen during the day and drifted onto the porch in soft yellow. More light shone through the curtains in the living room that fronted the house and around the edges of the blinds in the bedroom on the east end of the second floor. The bedroom window looked down on the driveway where I was parked.

The lights had been off when I left earlier in the day. I lived alone except for my dog, Ruby, who knew when it was time to eat but not how to flick a switch. Ruby is a cockapoo-half cocker spaniel, half poodle-a breed that dilutes the poodle's high canine IQ with the cocker spaniel's indiscriminate affection, the combination a perfect antiwatch dog. If someone were robbing me, Ruby would help him pack up my stuff.

I sat in the car, studying the front door and windows. No one peeked at me. It had stopped snowing. My headlights bounced off the white powder and ice crystals swirling in the wind like frozen dust mites.

I wondered who had been in my house and if they were still there; the effort stalled when the day caught up to me. No one knows what causes tics. In terms I can understand, there's a short somewhere in my brain's wiring that does more than kick me from the inside out as if something is trying to escape. At times, it blurs my brain, gumming up the neurons and hijacking the synapses, feeling like a burst of fever that slows me down to a crawl. I leaned back against the car seat, squeezing my eyes closed, waiting for the fog to lift, my body shuddering with aftershocks when it did a few minutes later.

I looked at the house again. Nothing had changed. I got out of the car, the cold air picking me up. There were footprints in the snow leading from the curb, through the front yard and to the door. The street was empty.

Lorraine Trent owned the house. She was a biology professor who was spending a year in Africa doing research. She had needed a tenant and I had needed a furnished place to live after my divorce. When I signed the lease, she gave me the only key. I doubted that she had come back eight months ahead of schedule.

The house is in Brookside, a friendly midtown neighborhood with well-kept houses built fifty years or more ago and shops and restaurants you can walk to, including a dime store with its original creaky wood plank floor. For all its charm, Brookside wasn't immune to crime.

Two kinds of thieves leave the front porch light on while they rob a house. The first kind wants the neighbors to think that nothing unusual is going on while they're in the house. Those thieves are smart enough to have transportation and there was none, unless the getaway driver was waiting to be summoned from around the corner. The second kind is too high to think straight, content to get out with whatever he can carry. Either way, I had to assume that the thief was armed.

I would have felt better if my gun was holstered against my back instead of locked in a case on a shelf in my bedroom closet. Both Kansas and Missouri allowed concealed carry and I had a permit. After I left the Bureau, I quit carrying unless I had a reason. Seemed like a good idea at the time. At the moment, it was a bad idea, increasing the odds that I might get shot with my own gun.

Part of being an FBI agent is having the balls to kick in the door even if it's your own door. Another part is having the sense to wait until someone can watch your back when you put your heel to the door jamb. Part of being an ex-FBI agent with a bad case of the jumping beans is missing kicking in doors so much that you decide not to wait for help.

It was my door and I missed it that much. I was standing on my driveway, ankle deep snow seeping into my shoes, calculating the odds that I could take whoever had invaded my house and not liking the numbers. My days were manageable, my nights not so much. I flipped open my cell phone to call the cops, hearing the conversation in my head before I dialed.

"You say the lights are on in your house?"

"Yes, Officer. Over the front door, in the living room, and one of the upstairs bedrooms."

"And you're afraid to go inside your house when the lights are on? Most people, it's the other way around."

I stuck the phone in my pocket, cut through the snow, and stopped at the front door, which was opened a crack, enough that I could hear a man and a woman shouting at each other. Another woman shrieked he's got a gun! I slammed my shoulder into the door. My momentum carried me inside, my snow-packed shoes flying out from under me as I slid across the hardwood floor into the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor.

A woman had been sitting on my landlady's couch, her feet on my landlady's coffee table, eating my popcorn and watching my landlady's television. The images on the screen were frozen, two women and a man struggling over a gun. She'd stopped the action with my landlady's remote control and bolted to her feet.

She looked to be in her early thirties, lean and muscled with light brown curly hair framing a round face, her eyes wide open and curious but not afraid, her arms hanging loose at her sides, a compact light featherweight. She shifted her weight, subtly setting herself for a confrontation. I recognized the automatic response of someone who been trained and under the gun.

"Who the hell are you?" she asked me.

Ruby sprang off the couch and into my lap, planted her front paws on my chest, and licked my face, cleaning my chin and both cheeks.

"I'm Jack Davis. I live here. Who the hell are you?"

"I'm Lucy Trent and this is my house."

"I don't think so. I mean you may be Lucy Trent but this isn't your house. I rented this place from Lorraine Trent."

"She's my stepmother."

I pulled myself off the floor, taking a breath and holding onto the stairway banister.

"She's my landlady."

Another burst of shakes whipped through me.

"Are you okay? Why are you shaking?"

"It's what I do."

"All the time?"

I walked into the living room. Lorraine Trent had called it the living den, the house not big enough for both a living room and a den. She'd bragged about the new hardwood floors, the fresh paint, and the new appliances that justified the rent she was charging me.

"No. Not all the time."

I was within arm's reach of her but Lucy didn't back up or relax, telling me with a wry smile that she didn't consider a middle-aged man with the shakes to be much of a threat.

"Well that's a relief. I'd hate to put someone on the street who shakes all the time."