by Ann Aguirre
As we completed the loop and wound up back by the Forester, Chance gave us something else to think about. “We should be looking near the tracks. Right here, in fact.”
I agreed with that. Unless we were totally off target, one of these ramshackle tract houses held something we needed to know. Talk about an exercise in frustration. Only Miss Minnie’s rambling had guided us here, and maybe we were crazy for putting any stock in it at all. It was unlikely that Curtis Farrell had lived anywhere near here.
We paced up and down the street four times before Shannon said, “That one has a red front door. I mean, it’s painted—badly, too.”
I saw what she meant. It looked as though someone had slung a paint can to cover up some ugly graffiti. From some angles, it also looked like splattered blood.
Chance saw it too. “Red as blood,” he noted as we approached the broken cement driveway.
Butch came around the corner of the house, wagging his tail fiercely. He yapped at me to tell me he’d found the house. I stared in astonishment.
“Here? The gas station guy’s been here?”
The dog barked in confirmation, and I gave him a rub. He leaped into my arms, and I stowed him away safely in my bag.
We proceeded with caution. After all, it was early; we were strangers, and most people around here had never heard of gun control. Nothing stirred behind the curtains. While the others made their way toward the house, I paused at the mailbox, hoping to find out who lived here.
Jackpot. I found a couple of utility bills for Curtis Farrell. I hadn’t dared hope we would be this lucky. It would have been simpler to locate him in the directory, assuming he was listed, but this confluence of events suggested Miss Minnie knew something, layered beneath bits of old Bible verse. I wished we could talk to her again, but I was afraid of what more questions would do to her. I didn’t want to hurt anyone while I was here. Well, nobody who was innocent , anyway.
But how brilliant. We needed to search his house, and here we were.
When I caught up to the others, I found them studying the front door. Jesse was asking, “Can you make out what it says underneath the paint?”
Chance leaned in for a better look. “Mar . . . and some numbers. Eight-three-six, I think.”
“March?” I offered. “Is it a date, you think? Or a time?”
The others shrugged.
Shannon stepped to the side and peered through the window between the gap in the ragged sheers. “I don’t think anyone’s here. Are we going in?”
Since the guy was dead, it didn’t seem likely anybody was home, unless Curtis had a roommate.
I cleared my throat. “I’m taking Jesse around back. Chance, if the door happens to pop open while we’re gone, give us a holler.” I thought that was better than making Jesse watch him pick the lock. Even if he was suspended and well outside his jurisdiction, I figured he probably didn’t want to see active lawbreaking.
Rummaging in his pockets, Chance didn’t acknowledge me as Jesse and I rounded the house. Shannon stayed with him to watch him work.
“So your ex is a house-breaker too,” Jesse said, sounding amused. “As I’ve said before, you have the most interesting friends, Corine.”
I thought about Chuch, the ex-arms dealer, married to Eva, the forger, and grinned. “Yeah. They sure come in handy, don’t they?”
He smiled back, bitter chocolate eyes roving my face in an appreciative manner. “I don’t think I should comment.”
“That’s probably wise.”
We circled the house and found a bunch of disgusting garbage cans that should have been set out weeks ago. If I were truly devoted, I would have suggested going through them for clues, but you couldn’t have paid me enough to touch one.
Instead of calling to us, Chance opened the back door and waved us in. “The front was open,” he said mildly.
Jesse raised a brow. “Fancy that.”
“Small town,” I said. “People just don’t see the need to lock up.”
I climbed two steps and crossed the sagging porch, stepping into Farrell’s house. We’d gotten there before the police, assuming the sheriff would even bother. The place looked like a cyclone had hit it, though; clothes everywhere and dirty dishes piled in the sink. Added to the trash in the back, it seemed as if Curtis hadn’t been home in a while—at least, I couldn’t imagine a human being living like that.
“Have a look around.” Jesse took charge as if this were his crime scene. “I’ll take the kitchen. Corine, you search the bathroom. Chance, take the bedroom, and Shannon, check out the living room, please. I guarantee we don’t have to worry about leaving DNA on the scene, but don’t touch anything with your bare hands. They probably have a fingerprint kit even out here in Hooterville.”
Shannon snickered, but she took his advice and pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down past her hands as she headed for the living room. Once in the bathroom, I did the same with my sweater. Ew. I really had to search in there? It smelled like something had died, and green fuzzy stuff grew in the grout between the tiles. Man, I thought Jesse liked me better than that.
From within my handbag, Butch whined. The smell was getting to him too. “There’s no help for it,” I told the dog. “We have to be brave.”
I heard a thunk from the bedroom and peered out. Using a broom handle, Chance poked gingerly at the piles of clothing spread across the floor. He flashed me a wry smile. “I think Shannon got the best deal in this division of labor.”
“Well, she’s young. He didn’t want to traumatize her—oh dear God.” I caught my breath at the sight of a dead rat in the cupboard beneath the sink.
It was going to be a long day.
Unearthed Secrets
In the end, Shannon found what we were looking for.
“Mark 8:36,” she called, excitement thrumming in her voice. When we gathered in the living room, she read from the book in her hands. “ ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ This passage is highlighted.” She showed us the Bible, where someone, probably Curtis Farrell, had marked the verse scrawled on his door.
“Sounds like a threat,” Chance said quietly.
“Somebody knew something,” Jesse agreed. “But were they blackmailing Farrell or trying to get him to stop?”
An excellent question. Farrell hadn’t displayed the confidence of a career criminal. He’d seemed hesitant, like he didn’t know what to do when confronted with resistance. His job had been spelled out for him—and I still wasn’t sure what he’d intended to do to Miss Minnie—and once things went wrong, he didn’t know how to respond.
“Is this a religious thing?” I asked. “Or someone just using the Bible for a convenient code?”
“Impossible to say.” Jesse took the Bible from Shannon and flipped through it. As he gave the book a last shake, a scrap of paper tumbled toward the floor.
With his preternatural reflexes, Chance snatched it before it touched. He scanned it and then looked at me with a half frown. “Robert Frost? It’s that ‘Two roads diverged in a wood’ poem.”
“ ‘The Road Not Taken’?” I took the torn yellow sheet from Chance; it looked as if it had been pulled from a legal pad. “Wish we had a sample of Farrell’s handwriting. Then we’d know whether he wrote this down himself or someone else gave it to him.”
“Can I?” At Shannon’s question, I passed it along. Her eyes widened. “This is John McGee’s writing. I’d recognize the crabby little letters anywhere.”
“So Farrell had been talking to McGee,” Jesse mused. “And they both ended up dead.”
I wondered aloud, “Could that have been the point? Someone may have sent Farrell to Miss Minnie’s house right then, knowing we were there.”
A thundercloud frown knit Chance’s brow. “Knowing we wouldn’t react well to a robber threatening an old lady.”
“If that’s the case,” Shannon said, “then the guy on the roof wasn’t working with Farrell. He was there
to keep us pinned down until we noticed something was wrong inside.”
Jesse gave her an approving nod. “Good thinking, Shannon.”
She flushed with pleasure. “Just makes sense, right? He didn’t try too hard to hit us. He might’ve been trying to drive us back inside the house, and then Butch heard the intruder.”
It would’ve taken a dog’s hearing to notice someone jimmying the back door with the varmint rifle pinging away. But then, everyone in town knew I took Butch everywhere. As theories went, this one seemed to make sense.
That put a scowl on Saldana’s face. “If that’s true, it makes it even more embarrassing that he got me.”
I didn’t look at him. He’d been shot trying to protect me. I couldn’t make light of that, even if it hadn’t been strictly necessary, but there was no evidence to support any of our hypotheses, anyway.
“We sound like crazed conspiracy theorists,” I said in disgust. “It was this; it was that; it was—”
“Bigfoot,” Chance said, deadpan.
He startled a laugh out of me. “Definitely.”
“Nothing else was underlined,” Jesse murmured, getting us back on track. “I think it’s safe to say our guy isn’t a scholar or a church-goer.”
Shannon nodded. “No shit. I expect to find a closet weed farm somewhere in here. But if you want to scope out the church scene, there’s a potluck dinner every Saturday night.”
“That’s your grandfather’s territory,” Chance pointed out. “Is that going to be a problem for you?”
She shrugged. “Up until we leave, everything here is going to cause problems for me. I’m just waiting for it to hit the fan.”
At that point, Butch jumped out of my bag into her arms. She caught him with a startled laugh. He was simply the best dog ever; he seemed to sense that she would derive comfort from snuggling him instead of thinking about her troubles.
I rubbed my hands against my denim-clad thighs, trying to scrub away the residual filth of poking around that bathroom. To me, Farrell’s home hygiene suggested he didn’t believe he had long to live, and thus, saw no point in keeping up the place. But I wasn’t sure I could profile someone, based on slovenly ways.
“Then I’d say a church social is what we need to scope out the local color.”
“This won’t end well,” Jesse predicted.
We didn’t find anything else of interest, not even that closet weed farm Shannon expected. I was starting to get frustrated with all the separate pieces not coalescing into a recognizable shape. There’s a reason I hate jigsaw puzzles. I don’t have the patience to find all the border pieces, especially when they’re all the same shade of gray.
When we left Farrell’s house, we took the Bible. I’d handle it later, but it didn’t seem wise to hang around Farrell’s place longer than necessary. If Sheriff Robinson found us here, the consequences would be unpleasant.
“Let’s take one last look around,” Jesse said.
Shannon cocked a brow. “What’re we looking for?”
“Anything that offers a hint at who’s been hanging around,” he answered. “Corine learned a lot from a button, as I recall.”
That much was true. Any small object that might’ve dropped when people were coming and going might tell us something. Right now we had no clue why Curtis Farrell had decided to trade a life of petty drugs and making change for one big felony.
Chance nodded. “Better to be sure we don’t miss anything. Somebody will be along to shovel this place out, so we probably won’t have another shot at this. Corine, you want to take a look around back?”
I nodded as they divided up the rest of the small yard. Shannon kept Butch, and he showed no signs of minding the attention. I circled the house. Near the back door, I found some weird impressions in the dirt behind Farrell’s garage. It would take a tracker to make anything of the morass of churned mud, unless—
I’d never have attempted, or even considered anything like this in the past, but since dying, my gift seemed to have stretched into unknown dimensions. Before, I wouldn’t have tried to read a whole house. I knelt, studying the ground: torn earth and grass pulled up by the roots. I wouldn’t be able to do anything with the plants, but what about dirt?
The others were searching the front and sides. If Chance or Jesse had been there, they probably would have tried to talk me out of it. I gazed at the new brand on my palm, the smooth, unscarred skin around it, and felt a cold, eerie certainty. I could do this. I didn’t know what the mark portended, but it signified change. Though I had no way to prove it, I suspected I’d received more of my mother’s power. Instead of passing to me cleanly during her spell, something must have gone wrong and it had wound up in the necklace instead. Now that I’d touched it, I’d absorbed the rest, but there was no way to know how it would affect me down the road.
But it had made me a more powerful handler, no question.
Without hesitation, I sank my fingers into the dirt. It felt like bathing my hand in chemical fire, but I gritted my teeth and held on. Nobody died here; it wasn’t that bad, but it was awful enough.
I became two men at once, locked in a life-or-death struggle. That had never happened to me before because objects belonged to one person. Not dirt—it belonged to everyone, no one, or whoever trod upon it.
Their conflicting emotions swamped me: greed, anger, terror, exhilaration, desperation. I seesawed between the apogee and the abyss while they grappled and tore the earth. I’d have given a lot to hear what they were saying, but it never worked like that for me. I imagined the grunts and gasps of breath while pain washed over me in waves of red fire. Though I tried, I couldn’t jerk my hand out of the soil until the vision ended. Immersion, immolation; I hovered but a half step away from one or the other.
Finally, the older man shoved the younger to his knees, both hands on his throat. He spoke, saying something I couldn’t hear. I strained to read his lips and failed, not for the first time. For a heartbreaking moment, the man on his knees clawed at his captor’s hands, desperate. His fear poured through me, sour and rancid. He didn’t want to acquiesce, but he’d die if he didn’t. He felt it, believed it, and so did I.
When the beaten man turned his face upward, I recognized him. Farrell. Whatever the old bastard wanted, Curtis had been forced to it—throttled into submission. He managed a nod, and the other man’s hands fell away just before Farrell blacked out. And I went with him.
I came to on my side, gasping for air. My throat burnt as if someone had been strangling me, and my right hand throbbed with an agonizing pulse. Jesus. Well, that’s new.
Through sparks in my vision that meant I was close to passing out again, I stared at my fingers, focused on wiggling them, and saw they were fire engine red but possessed no new marks. I lay there, breathing and reflecting. It was all I could do right then.
Dirt was less dangerous than metal. But no wonder the tracks didn’t look like much of anything. Two men fighting over the same space created the look of a monster rampage.
Jesse came upon me a few minutes later. “What the hell, Corine—did someone attack you? What happened? Can you talk, sugar?” He did a visual inspection of my injuries, lingering at my throat.
Christ, did I wear marks there too?
I managed to push to a sitting position, but standing was beyond me. Oxygen deprivation sent tremors through my limbs; I couldn’t seem to convince my body I hadn’t been choked. He swung me up into his arms before I could tell him not to, and my stomach whirled in response.
“Slowly,” I whispered, sounding hoarse to my own ears.
Jesse called to the others and carried me to the Forester, but he modulated his step so as not to jar me. He smelled of plain Ivory soap and a tangy citrus scent. I breathed him in, trying to identify the cologne, and then gave up, closing my eyes.
Jesse slid into the vehicle with me on his lap, and I didn’t try to get away. Then again, I wouldn’t have tried to escape unless a killer had a hold of me; I was that tap
ped out. Two doors slammed, and Shannon and Chance got in the front.
“Drive,” Jesse told Shannon, who started the engine on command.
She pulled out, gravel spinning beneath the tires. In making our getaway, we didn’t encounter any law enforcement types who’d ask awkward questions about why Chance was hanging around the house of the man he’d killed last night.
“What’s going on?” Chance asked.
Jesse answered, “At this point? I’m not sure. But take a look at this.”
I felt him angle my head, and then I did open my eyes. Chance swore in an entertaining mix of English and Korean. Mildly curious now that my nausea had started to subside, I lifted my left hand and touched my neck. Ouch.
I couldn’t remember ever taking an injury apart from my hands. Unless you count dying, a cynical voice said. My mother’s necklace might well have changed everything I thought I knew about my gift, both its boundaries and its dangers.
“Did someone attack you?” Chance demanded.
I shook my head slowly to make sure that much was clear. There would be no point in Shannon stopping the SUV so they could comb the area for someone long gone days before. Concentrating, I mimed writing.
Chance got it right away. He delved into Jesse’s glove box and found a pen and scrap of paper for me. I scrawled what I’d done, what I’d seen, and then passed it to my ex. His jaw tightened as he read, and he slanted a look over the seat that could’ve cut glass. Before he said a word, I could tell what he thought of my pushing my power.
“You’re out of your mind,” he bit out. “Are you determined to die here? Because I see you taking risk after risk and you don’t seem to—”
“Stop,” Jesse said quietly. “She’s been through enough at this point. She doesn’t need you yelling at her too.”
Chance’s eyes glittered like amber with ire frozen in their depths. “Don’t tell me what to do where Corine’s concerned.” He looked as if he would break Jesse’s fingers and pull them away from me by force.
“Every time I handle, it’s a risk.” I pushed the words through a raw throat. “I made the choice; I’ll live with the consequences.”
