Snowblind(38)

Now his worry had grown.

"Jake!" he called, knocking harder. "You home? Open the door, man."

You're overreacting, Harley.

Maybe he was, but he had only seen all the shades drawn on a house like this once before-drawn all the way down, so that nobody could get a look inside-and that had been at the LaValle murder house. The previous summer, a twenty-year-old college kid named Martin LaValle had come home from a night of partying with friends, taken his father's shotgun, and murdered his little sister in her bed. When his parents had come running, woken by the gunshot, he had blown them all over the faded floral wallpaper in the hall.

Harley didn't like those drawn shades.

"Jake, answer the door, goddammit!" he snapped, slapping his palm against the wood, shaking the door in its frame.

Fuck it.

He tried the knob but found the door locked. After staring at it for a moment, as if his scrutiny alone might open it, he rang the bell one last time and then pressed his ear to the wood, listening to it echo inside and hoping to hear movement. It seemed to Harley that he did hear something, a kind of rustle or whisper.

He flinched away from the thunk of the dead bolt being drawn back.

"Jake?"

The door opened ten or twelve inches and Jake Schapiro's face appeared in the gap, unshaven and smiling uneasily. He looked unkempt, hair mussed, wearing a T-shirt and old, baggy jeans. The way he stood reminded Harley of the times he'd come back to his dorm room in college only to have his roommate shoo him away because he had a girl in his bed.

"Hey," Jake said. "Sorry I haven't gotten back. I'm in the middle of a project. You know how I get."

Harley stared at him. "What kind of project?"

"Finishing the back bedroom upstairs. Gonna make it a library, I think."

"Cool," Harley replied.

He tilted his head to get a look inside the house but Jake shifted his body and narrowed the gap a little and there could be no question that he did not want Harley to see within.

"Look, I-"

"I have some time tomorrow," Harley interrupted. "I could give you a hand."

"No, no, that's okay. It's been weighing on me, y'know? All the stuff I planned to do to fix the place up that I've just never gotten around to. I'm determined now, and I'd kind of like to accomplish that myself. No offense."

Harley nodded, taking a step back. "None taken."

As Jake's friend, he wanted to force the issue, to give the door a shove. As a police officer, there were rules about entering a private residence uninvited and without a warrant.

Warrant? What are you thinking, that he's got somebody tied up in there?

Harley exhaled, smiling at himself. Yes, Jake had gone all twitchy for some reason. Maybe he did have a girl inside and just wanted Harley to get the hell away from there so he could close the deal. Or maybe the story about the home improvements was the truth; Jake had an artist's ability to immerse himself in something and forget that the rest of the world existed. Harley had seen that part of him before.

"Tell me the truth," he said. "You got a girl in there?"

Jake rolled his eyes, his grin clearly forced. "I wish. Look, I'll call you tomorrow, okay? We need a night out."

"Atomic Wings," Harley said.

Jake brightened. "Exactly!"

"Tomorrow, then."

Harley began to turn to go. As he did, he saw Jake edge back from the door. In the moment before it closed, Harley spotted something in his right hand-a fan of what appeared to be playing cards, although the yellow edges of the cards niggled at his memory, as if he ought to have recognized the design. Had they had illustrations on them? Harley thought they had.

Whomever Jake had been playing cards with, he clearly didn't want Harley to know about it. Strip poker? Always a possibility. Maybe the girl had been half naked already, sitting in the living room and waiting for him to depart. Harley figured it had to be someone he knew or Jake would've admitted he had someone inside.

You dog, Harley thought, smiling as it all began to make sense to him.

He climbed into his cruiser and started it up, trying to figure out whom Jake might be hooking up with. Someone from the ME's office, maybe, or a crime-scene tech. Though given the effort Jake had made to keep him out, Harley wondered if maybe it was actually one of the women on the Coventry PD. There were several Harley wouldn't have minded seeing out of their uniforms.

Tomorrow he would pin Jake down.

Curiosity killing him, Harley backed out of the driveway and headed toward Carpenter Road, turning on his headlights as the twilight deepened around him.





FOURTEEN





The surface of Kenoza Lake had iced over by the turn of the year and wouldn't melt for another month at least. The weekend's snowstorm had left inches of fresh snow on top of the ice, and as the sun slid down behind the tops of the trees, the snowmobile tracks left behind that day looked like deep scars, carved in shadow.

"Where the hell are we going?" Baxter asked, glancing back at the small public lot in the lakeside park.

There were four cars there, one of them an old Chevy Monte Carlo that Doug had been restoring and one an Audi that he figured Franco had borrowed without permission from an unsuspecting customer at Harpwell's Garage. Doug had arrived first and waited in his car, chewing gum to fight the urge to smoke-a habit he'd given up two years before. He had been early on purpose and instantly regretted it, but he sat and watched the sun drift lower in the sky, people returning to their cars, couples and dog owners who'd been walking in the woods around the lake.
     
 

     

Franco had shown up ten minutes late with Baxter in the passenger seat. But now they were all here, and it felt like the beginning of something. Doug could feel the tension in the air and wasn't sure if it was the pressure pushing ahead of the huge storm on the way or just the animosity burning off Baxter.

Doug kept walking, leading the way along a path that vanished into the thick woods around the lake. When they plunged into the trees, the last of the daylight abandoned them, as if night had abruptly conquered the sun.

"I asked you where we're going," Baxter said, an edge of danger and just a trace of nerves in his voice.

"Take a breath, man," Doug said. He pulled a flashlight from his coat and clicked it on, throwing a strong, bright splash of illumination onto the path ahead.

Franco gave Doug a hard shove and he stumbled a bit, caught his toe on a rock jutting from the path, and nearly fell. Doug spun around and shone the flashlight in Franco's face, Baxter like an angry ghost hovering just outside their pool of light.

"What?" Franco demanded, grinning, eyes lit up with the violence that his kind of man always used to bludgeon the unknown.

Doug knew that his growing assertiveness was making Franco nervous and didn't give a damn.

"You've got a decision to make," Doug said, shining his light first on Franco and then on Baxter. "Are you going to shoot me? I'm not armed, boys. You want to put a bullet in me and leave me for the dogs back here, then do it."

Franco looked like he might.

Doug glanced at Baxter, whose eyes were calmer. Baxter had his left hand stuffed in his jacket pocket but the right hand hung free, open but poised, ready to grab the gun that Doug had seen him jam into his rear waistband when he got out of the borrowed Audi back in the lot.

"Ease up, D," Baxter said. He gave a little sniff of amusement as if to suggest he was above it all. "If you're gonna be this wound up, man, there's no point in doing this job. Being with you is gonna be like walking through a mine field. We're gonna be trying not to get arrested; we can't be worrying about whether or not we put a foot wrong and you go off."

Doug nodded slowly, lowering the flashlight. All their faces were in shadow, now. The slivers of sky visible through the branches overhead had turned to indigo, except to the west, where striations of pink and orange were visible but fading fast.

"Understood. But I can't be worried about you two, either," he said, glancing pointedly at Franco. "This is huge for me. For all of us. Huge risks along with huge rewards if we don't fuck it up. I have a plan. I'm going to explain that plan to you. If you're with me-"

"With you?" Franco sneered.

Baxter shot him a hard look. "Shut it."

"If you're with me," Doug went on, focusing on Baxter, who had been transformed by the deepening darkness into a creature of shadows, "then we do this thing together on Wednesday night. I've spent hours thinking about the angles of this thing, all the ways it could go wrong, and if we have the balls and a little luck, we'll all be happy as pigs in shit come Thursday morning. On the other hand, if you don't like my plan then you're welcome to go your own way."

Baxter stepped nearer to him, close enough that the glow from the flashlight, which Doug still held pointed at the ground, gave strange contours to his face.

"You're saying we don't like your plan then you're out?"

"That's the way it's gotta be."

"You think you know this shit better than me?" Baxter said, eyes narrowing. "You're an amateur. You know how many houses I've robbed?"

Doug did not flinch. Instead, he thought of Cherie and of Angie, and of the new life he wanted for himself. The life he deserved.

"You know how many times I've been in prison?" he asked, chin high, close enough to smell the garlic on Baxter's breath. "None."