The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

3

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN I PULLED UP IN FRONT OF Harvey’s house. I went up the front steps juggling two cups of hot brew from Tealuxe and searching for the front door key. But I didn’t need a key. I didn’t even need to twist the knob, because the door was closed but not latched. I cursed Rachel for her careless indifference. She had to have been the one to leave it open, because Harvey never would.

Another thing he never did was listen to music, but when I pushed the door open, instead of the usual hospital-grade silence, I was greeted with a big, muscular blast of Motown. The music was loud but distant, echoing through the halls and around the corners of the old house. It was so jarring and unexpected I just stood in the foyer and listened. It was the Temptations singing “Since I Lost My Baby,” and it was coming from upstairs, the part of the house Harvey didn’t occupy. The part of the house no one occupied.

“Harvey?”

I pulled the door halfway closed and strained to hear his voice or his cough or the sound of his wheels rolling across hardwood. I got nothing but big horns, lush violins, and immaculate backup vocals. I didn’t like the feeling.

“Harvey, are you here?”

The last time Harvey had failed to answer my call was the day he fell down in the shower. I found him there, staring straight ahead, with blood and cold water dribbling down his face. He had hit his head in the fall. After being briefly unconscious, he had come to, but without the strength to get up, or even to turn off the water. It had run so long the hot water had run out. That was the day he quit flirting with the wheelchair and surrendered for good. This felt different.

I set the tea on the floor in the foyer, slipped the Glock out, and did a press check. I didn’t like pulling the thing out-ever-but nothing about the day had turned out the way I’d expected, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Rachel had opened the door and let something bad blow into the house. The music was giving it voice. A house filled with dance music was such a departure from the way Harvey usually lived. It gave me the feeling he was already gone. I put the thought aside, left the door open, and moved in, staying close to the walls.

David Ruffin’s voice, silky and forlorn, drifted through the house as a bead of sweat squeezed out from between my palm and the gun’s grip. It ran straight down the inside of my forearm as I got ready to make the corner into the living room.

The birds are singing and the children are playing,

There’s plenty of work and the bosses are paying

You looked at Harvey and thought polka. Maybe Perry Como if you wanted to stretch it. Not James Brown or Marvin Gaye or Curtis Mayfield, and certainly not Isaac Hayes. But that’s what I had found the day I’d come to help him move his life downstairs. I had sat on the floor, cross-legged, flipping through his LPs until he’d called me on my cell phone from downstairs. When I’d told him what I was doing, he didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he told me to put them back, to leave the records as I had found them. As far as I knew, that’s where they had stayed, and that’s where the music was coming from now-what was supposed to be an empty room upstairs.

I turned into the doorway, trying to stay under control, and scanned the front room. It was a seldom-used space with blinds perpetually closed. Nothing was moving or out of place, so I kept going.

The kitchen gleamed in the bright light of the cheap old onion-shaped fixture that hung overhead. The frosted bowl had a couple of bug corpses lying inside. I’d never seen them because the single small bulb over the stove was what usually lit that room. Harvey wasn’t in there, either.

He wasn’t in the dining room or his office. I checked his downstairs bedroom suite last, hoping to find his bathroom door closed. It was open. The light was off.

I was coming down the hall toward the stairs when I spotted his wheelchair. It was at the bottom of the steps, and it was empty. The song finished, and the house went quiet. I stared up at the ceiling, listening for the sound of footsteps or voices, but everything I could hear was closer in: the dull, incessant drone of Harvey’s air purifier, the ticking of the old mantel clock, the one his great-grandfather had made in Poland. Harvey wound it every day. My own coils were wound pretty tight as I waited and listened.

The intro beat began, then the violins…and the voice again. I had no idea whether Harvey had a record player with automatic replay. If he didn’t, then someone had lifted the needle to start the song again, the same song, and it wasn’t Harvey. Harvey couldn’t make the stairs.

My heart felt massive. It was pumping hard, pushing me forward and back on alternate beats. The stairwell was empty as far as I could see, but that was only halfway up. I took the first step. My foot caught on the second, and I nearly pitched forward. The climb lacked grace, but it was fast as I made my way to the first landing. I stopped there. The music felt denser up there, and it was loud enough that I couldn’t hear anything else. All of my other senses went into overdrive, overcompensating for what the thick wall of sound took away. If someone came at me, I would have to see him or smell him. I wasn’t going to hear him.

I took the final flight two steps at a time. Once I started going again, I couldn’t stop. I reached the upstairs hallway and just kept moving. All the doors were closed except the one at the end. It was the room where I had left the boxes of albums.

I stopped short of the door and held with my back to the wall for maybe a second. Then I dropped into a low crouch and turned into the doorway. I was so wound up I almost hoped for a reason to fire, for something to empty the clip into. But there was nothing to shoot at in that bare space, just stacks of boxes along one beige wall and an empty canvas folding chair.

I took a couple of steps into the room. A few of the boxes had been pulled out into the middle of the floor. One had the lid off. The LPs inside were stacked neatly. Another served as a stand for the turntable. The needle was gliding across a 45. An extension cord snaked between two big speakers that, last I’d looked, had been gathering dust in a closet. Someone had obviously wired everything up. It could have been Harvey. Maybe Rachel had helped him up the stairs. She didn’t seem substantial enough to do it, but I was probably underestimating her.

When I reached down to lift the needle, I caught movement in the doorway to my left. I was hoping for Harvey but taking no chances. As I turned, I raised the Glock. The man coming through the door wasn’t Harvey. He had a handgun. That was what I noticed as he dropped to one knee and pointed it at me. He didn’t shoot, which was good. He yelled, which confused me. He pointed at me and then at the floor and yelled even louder. Another man came in right behind the first. He pointed his gun at me, and things started to slip out of control. I was sure he was about to put at least two rounds into my chest. But then I looked at what he was showing me with his other hand. Then I knew what they were yelling and why, and I couldn’t get my hands up fast enough.

The first man skittered in closer, dancing back and forth as if I were on fire. “Drop the weapon. Drop it! Put it down. Do it now. I will shoot you!”

He was so hyped I was surprised he hadn’t already. Very slowly, I got down on my knees and set my gun on the floor.

“Face on the floor.” He grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me forward. “Now. Right now!”

I went down flat on my belly with my arms out, mashed my cheek to the floor, and tried to figure out what the FBI was doing in Harvey’s house.