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Daniel narrowed his eyes, noting the cardigan, the reading glasses on the end of the nose, the salt-and-pepper gray hair trimmedFather Knows Bestfifties style. For a split second, he almost asked whether the guy had seen anything suspicious around Gus’s place. But then he thought of Lydia, and decided the well-preserved grandpa was a gossip grenade best kept with the pin in.
“Thanks for checking on us,” Daniel said. Then in a lower tone, he muttered, “And if we need a hostage, I’m volunteering you.”
Raising his hand in a little wave, he started off in the direction Lydia had gone—and holy fuck, he felt like he was dragging the Harley behind him: He was out of energy, a marathoner who had pushed too hard and was collapsing right before the finish line.
“Why don’t I have a gun,” he mumbled as he shambled his way along, batting away the gnat-like flakes. “Why am I unarmed…”
As he emerged onto the quilt-sized grass patch that passed for the backyard, he answered himself:“Because you’d been about to pop the question. And who brings a—wait for me! Christ!”
Lydia was at the back sliding glass door and in the process of opening things. “This glass door is unlocked—”
No shit.“Hold on.”
As she looked back at him, he grabbed the railing and hauled himself up onto the postage-stamp porch. He wanted to stop for a second to try to breathe again, but he knew her halt had a timer on it—
Bingo. She launched herself into the condo without him.
“Sonofabitch.”
On his own entry, Daniel tripped the tip of his boot on the lip of the slider, and as he pitched forward into thin air, he had a quick impression of a messy, nothing-special kitchen: clutter on the granite counter, trash bin overflowing with crumpled take-out bags, a GE stove with the Home Depot plastic sticker on the front like the oven part had never been used—
He caught himself on an Ikea-like table, and the thing screeched over the tiled floor, his forward momentum transferring to the inanimate object and making it live for a good yard or so. After the bumpy ride, he stayed where he was, draped as a human doily, grunting through his open mouth.
“Be careful…” he said weakly. “Lydia, you gotta… be… careful.”
Out in the front of the condo, she was racing from room to room, and he pictured her, so graceful, so strong, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she went around.
Holy hell, he loved her. With everything that he was, all that he had… and what little time he had left.
“There’s blood here on the carpet…” she said off in the distance. “Here where the mail is. Oh,God…”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“Where is he?” More footsteps. “I’m going upstairs.”
He opened his mouth to throw anotherwait-stop-slow-downonto the bonfire of good advice she was ignoring. But she was already halfway to the second floor—and with the drumbeat of her boots ascending, he followed her vertical example, pushing his chest up off the table. Getting to his full height was a process, and to give himself something to focus on other than how dizzy he was, he assessed the empty take-out containers and packets of sauce over by the refrigerator, and the empty Coke cans that were, well, everywhere.
Like Gus St. Claire had a breeding program for the damn things.
He glanced back at the four-top. Yes, the chairs were out of place, but he was the one who hadmessed them up—so this was normal living chaos he was looking at, not ransacked shit. And as he one-foot-after-the-other’d out toward the open living space, that opinion didn’t change. The colorful collection of psychedelic concert posters from the late sixties and seventies were on the walls in their frames at right angles, none of the glass broken, nothing off-kilter. The TV was set properly on a low-slung table, the couch cushions were undisturbed—
As he tripped on something, he managed to catch his balance by flapping his arms, and when he saw what had caught his boot, he cut the bird stuff and frowned.
The stack of paperwork was fanned out around its staple, as if it had been dropped or thrown. And he might have ignored whatever it was except for the fact that he recognized one of the signatures on the last page with all the notary stuff.
His own.
As Lydia strode through the upper level, he gingerly lowered himself down to his knees. His hand was shaking as he reached out, and he made a mess of the pickup, the papers flip-flopping, fluttering, justifying their need for that staple.
As he started to go through the document, he couldn’t believe what he was reading. So he went back to the beginning and gave it another shot. Because surely this wasn’t what it looked like—
WHEREBY the party of the first part, Catherine Phillips Phalen, does intend to transfer the ownership of the compound “Vita-12b,” its predecessors in development, and all relevant data to Dr. Augustus St. Claire…
“What thefuck…” His eyes continued to sift through the words, the operant meaning refusing to process. “What did you do, Phalen.”
Was this what Gus had been taken for?
As if the condo itself could answer that question, he looked around—and saw what had caught Lydia’s attention. In the midst of a messy pile of unopened mail on the floor by the front door, there was a pattern of dig-deeps in the wall-to-wall carpet and some bloodstains that were turning brown. So whatever had happened had gone down some time before. Like maybe twelve hours ago?
