We Know

I stuck my hand in my pocket, clenched it around Charlie's key. I'd checked it at the five closest post offices, starting with the one for the house's zip code. The key was appropriately sized for the P.O. box locks, giving me a stab of excitement each time it slid home, but it had refused to turn. Even if my locksmith bro had guessed right, there were countless other P.O. Box 229s in Los Angeles, let alone the country.

To figure out whatever Charlie wanted me to know, I wasn't sure what else I could do. Besides break into a crime scene.

Back in my hiding spot behind the van, I realized that I was balking because I was scared. This just wasn't the kind of thing a reasonable person did. But nothing about this situation felt reasonable.

I walked briskly up the sidewalk toward the house, timing my arrival with a break in traffic. I slipped through the crime-scene tape blocking the gaping hole the Jeep had made when it had blasted through the garage door, and I crouched in the silence, listening for shouts or approaching footsteps. I heard nothing but the drip of a faucet in the rust-stained sink, rats moving in the walls, the sound of my quickened breathing. By ducking under that tape, I'd crossed a line. In the dark quiet, the danger seemed suddenly more tangible.

After ten minutes, or twenty, I rose and poked around the garage, careful to keep back in the shadows. Several jars on a warped shelf held dried industrial glue. A jackhammer tilted in the corner, its red handle gleaming. A few oil-slick wrenches beneath a dusty workbench, a stack of National

Geographies near the step, a faded plastic sandbox on end. I knew it was a rental even before I pushed through the creaking door into the empty interior.

I stood in silence, listening to the sounds of the house. A groaning pipe, a tired floorboard, a loose shutter. There was literally no furniture. A plastic McDonald's cup in the sink. Grease-spotted wrappers in the tipped-over trash bucket. Empty drawers on top of the stove, refrigerator shoved out from the wall-the search had been thorough.

I stepped into the living room. Beams of yellow from the streetlights shot through countless bullet holes, skewering my body as I passed through.

In the tiny bathroom, the medicine cabinet had been torn from the wall and thrown into the tub, bits of mirror twinkling in the faint light like gems. The folding closet doors in the bedroom had been ripped back on their hinges, one of them snapped, and a few items of clothing dumped on the floor. An army-green sleeping bag lay bunched in the corner, as if to make as little an intrusion on the square of dusty carpet as possible. As if Charlie had wanted to curl up there and disappear.

I paused in the doorway, the loneliness of the life lived here settling into my bones. Even if the Service had cleared the place out, it was obvious that Charlie had lived like a squatter. Like someone biding time. Until what?

I walked over and straightened out Charlie's sleeping bag, then lay where he'd slept. A neighbor's porch light glowed through the vertical blinds. The low vantage and the room's bareness added to a feeling of purposeful desolation. As if he were punishing himself for something. As if he didn't believe he deserved more than this.

The tiny den across the hall was empty, the closet bare, save for an attic hatch. I pulled myself up and peered around the crawl space. I could see where numerous boots-law enforcement?-had stamped through the blanket of dust.

Dust.

I dropped down and hurried back into the garage, flattening against the wall to the side of the blown-out garage door. With a finger I drew a line in the dust on the lids of the glue jars. And again on the top cover of that stack of National Geographies. I forced myself to wait to see if there would be another police drive-by. It seemed an eternity, but finally the car materialized, slowed, drifted off.

Then I scurried past the gaping hole to the jack-hammer in the corner.

I touched that gleaming handle.

No dust.

I searched the slab for any signs of chiseling or new concrete. None. Back inside, moving quickly. A cockroach skittered across the worn-out linoleum, but there was no sign that the flooring had been peeled back.

I closed my eyes, running through possibilities. I thought about how Frank had installed that alarm monitor beside his bed so he could sleep knowing it was right there.

Racing back into the bedroom, I tugged the sleeping bag from the corner and ran my hands over the carpet, feeling for bumps in the concrete beneath. Perfectly smooth-it would have had to be or it would've been discovered in the search. In the stripes of light from the blinds, I noted how the carpet edges lifted ever so slightly from the walls in the corner. From this angle I could see that it had been pulled up for about three feet in either direction before being smoothed in place again.