The Devil's bounty

Fifteen

Bail-bond offices were generally grim, and Joe Brady’s was no exception. The final unit in a greying strip mall off a narrow two-lane road, its dirt-streaked windows were covered with metal bars, and there was a dent in the front door where someone had kicked it. A sign announced the nature of the business conducted within.

Lock fumbled with the keys until he found the one that fitted. He opened the door, and stepped inside. The alarm panel was to his right. He plugged in the code written on the key fob and the box chirped briefly, then deactivated. The interior consisted of a small reception area and a larger back office, a toilet and a small kitchen.

Posters adorned Reception, including one advertising the company’s services — ‘Brady Bail Bonds — Because Jail Sucks.’ A pen set, like the kind you find in banks, was secured to the long wooden reception desk with a couple of bolts, a reflection perhaps of the business’s client base.

In the main office there was a desk, a leather swivel chair and two regular chairs on the other side. A smaller table stood to one side with a PC and a printer underneath. Both pieces of equipment were secured to the wall with thick metal ties. Brady might have bailed criminals but he sure as hell didn’t trust them so he couldn’t have been entirely stupid. Three four-drawer filing cabinets sat against the far wall.

Lock checked the toilet (‘Employees Only ’), then the kitchen. A solitary Brady Bail Bonds coffee mug stood next to the sink. There were more mugs in the cupboard, and a pint of milk had soured in the small refrigerator. He held his breath as he took it out, poured it into the sink and rinsed it away.

Back in the main office, he found the key to the filing cabinet and started sorting through the drawers. Clients’ records were filed alphabetically. He flicked through a few, closed the cabinets and sat down on the swivel chair. On the desk in front of him he found a half-dozen glossy brochures, including one for a new housing development, Woodland Oaks. It showed large detached McMansions with dramatic entryways and sweeping staircases inhabited by the kind of smiling automatons only ever glimpsed in real-estate literature. He didn’t see any woodland. Or any oaks. Presumably they’d all been chopped down to make way for the houses.

The other brochures on the desk were split between cars (Mercedes and BMW) and boats. Rather than focus on the task in hand, Brady’d been spending the money before he had left his office. It was an approach to life that all but guaranteed disappointment. Do the job, then worry about the pay-off, was how Lock approached his work, and it had served him well.

He put the brochures to one side and sorted through the other papers on the desk. There were bills and invoices. Nothing leaped out as significant. He eased back in the chair and closed his eyes. Surely Brady wouldn’t have set off into the heart of narco-territory to find Mendez without some clue as to where the man was. For there to be nothing in the office relating to either Melissa or Mendez seemed remarkable.

The bills.

Opening his eyes, Lock grabbed the stack of papers and thumbed through them again. He looked for a phone bill but there was none. The most recent piece of paperwork dated back to a few weeks before Brady had left his office for the last time. There was no recent mail.

He got up from the desk and went to the front door. There was no mail slot and no mailbox immediately outside. There had been no fresh mail inside the door when he had walked in and none anywhere else.

Back in the office, he lifted the phone. Dial tone. It was still connected, and there was power, so the utilities hadn’t been cancelled.

Something else on the desk caught his eye. Lying under the brochures was a faux — leather desk pad. He slid it out. The top sheet of white paper was a mass of doodles. Long, curving lines swooped down and around the edge of the paper where they settled into a series of maze-like lines. There were faces too: a line drawing of a young woman Lock recognized as Melissa Warner, and a black-ink rendering of Charlie Mendez. Settled between them was another face, a caricatured devil’s face, complete with horns, demonic eyes and a neatly pointed goatee beard. Beneath the three faces inscribed in the centre of the paper there were three words. The handwriting matched Brady’s signature on the couple of invoices Lock had glanced at.

THE DEVIL’S BOUNTY?

That was it. Lock used his fingernail to lift out the piece of paper from the pad, folded it and jammed it into his back pocket. Then he checked the paper underneath. It was blank.

Back outside, he stood on the narrow concrete walkway and looked around. The next unit housed a dry cleaner’s. He pushed open the door and went in. A woman with grey hair and spectacles was sorting through a pile of freshly laundered shirts.

‘Excuse me, ma’am?’

She looked up.

He thumbed in the direction of the bail-bond office. ‘I’m helping Joe’s wife Sarah tidy out his office and I was wondering if you knew where his mail had gone. I don’t see a mailbox.’

‘The mailboxes are out back,’ she said, then shook her head. ‘You know who’s going to move into his office?’

‘No idea. Like I said, I’m just clearing it out.’

‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘he was a nice man but I hope it’s not another bond company. Draws the wrong kind of people, if you know what I mean.’

Lock did. If he had been in her position he wouldn’t have wanted a bail-bond company next door either. ‘Did you know him well?’ he asked.

‘Just to say hello to. He never used us,’ she said, a little sourly. ‘Guess his wife took care of his laundry for him.’

‘You haven’t seen anyone else around his place over the past few weeks, have you?’

‘Not apart from you,’ she said, turning back to the shirts, the conversation apparently over.

Lock walked around the side of the unit. Next to an air-conditioner vent, he found a mailbox with ‘Brady Bail Bonds’ stencilled on it. He sifted through the keys and found a small one, which looked like it might open the box. It did. He grabbed the stack of envelopes and a couple of flyers, and quickly sorted through them. There were two letters from the phone company, thick enough to be bills. He put them on top of the stack, went back into the unit, reactivated the alarm, locked the door, got into his car and drove back to Sarah Brady’s apartment.

She and her daughter had gone so he left the keys and the mail with a neighbour, who swallowed a full half-hour commiserating with him about Mrs Brady’s predicament. He kept the phone bills.

Sitting inside the Audi, he switched on the engine, turned up the air-con to maximum, and ripped them open. He scanned the numbers Brady had called. Halfway down the second bill, he found what he was looking for: a number in Mexico. He used the browser on his cell phone to search the area code. It was for a city just over the border: Santa Maria.

Lock scrolled through the menus on his cell phone and selected the option to withhold his number. He keyed in the Santa Maria number and listened to the foreign pulse of the ring tone.