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“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” Pete said. “The question is, are you dirty, Cooper? Would you really have let Mickey ride away with the money? You know, he was planning on taking Jimmy with him. But he hated this town so much, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to blow it up first.”
Pete looked past me. Bartlett was pulling up. He had a blue light flashing on the dash. One of those you can buy online that plugs into the cigarette lighter. Bartlett stopped outside the trio of bikers and got out.
“Cooper!” he yelled.
I turned and walked away. I didn’t look at Bartlett. I got in the Gladiator and cranked the engine and put it in drive. The Wolf parked in front of it looked at me through the windshield, quickly rolled his throttle, and got out of the way.
CHAPTER 17
When I got to Ken Porter’s real estate office, a pleasant middle-aged woman behind the front desk smiled at me and said, “How can we help you?”
I took a deep breath. “I might need a house. Maybe.”
“Well, this is the place to come for that,” she said and then Ken came out from the back of the office and said, “Liz?”
“Hi, Ken. I want a house,” I said again, more to reaffirm it to myself than to him. He probably heard that a lot, but I’d only said it twice in my whole life. “Something really small. Like a cottage. And ridiculously cheap. Because I can’t really afford a house.” Then I realized I was being rude to the nice woman. “Hello, my name is Liz.”
She laughed. “I’m Elena. Could you be more specific about this house you need?”
“One big room would do it as long as there’s also a bathroom with a door and possibly also a bedroom I can paint blue. Also, I’m very poor. I probably can’t do this. This is probably a bad idea.”
Elena looked at Ken. “The Evans house.” He hesitated, and Elena said, “You’ve been carrying that for a while, not showing it to anybody. Do you have plans for it?”
“No,” he said. “But I’m hesitant to sell it. Hell, I was hesitant to let Miss Evans live there.”
“Like you could have gotten her out.” Elena turned to a large case on the wall behind her, opened it, took out a key, and handed it to him. “Show it to Liz. And bring me a milkshake on your way back. Chocolate. No whipped cream.”
Ken sighed and took the key. “Come on, Liz. We’ll look at some real houses, and if none of them work, I’ll show you my dirty little secret.”
“Wait,” I said. “How much is this dirty little secret?”
“For you, sixty thousand.”
That was ridiculously cheap, plus I was twenty thousand short. Which Anemone would give me in a flash, but I couldn’t . . . maybe a loan from her. With real interest. “I could maybe pay cash for that.” Okay, just maybe, but still—
“No, you could not,” he said as Elena shook her head behind him, clearly horrified at the thought. “You will get a mortgage and build your credit rating. And protect your savings. We’ll talk in the car.”
He opened the door, and I thought about saying, “Wait, this is ridiculous, I can’t buy a house,” but I really wanted to know what Ken’s dirty little secret was because Ken Porter was the cleanest, most up-front guy I’d ever known, which was odd since his brother Cash was a cheating son of a bitch. Plus, I was now admitting I wanted a place of my own in Burney in public with witnesses, even though it was a pipe dream, so I followed him out to his Tesla. He paused, looking at it and shook his head.
“Clearance is too low.” He glanced at my Camry. “Do you mind? Your car should make it.”
I handed him the keys.
* * *
We drovethrough town and Ken showed me several small houses from the outside, but his idea of small was always two bedrooms and a dining room, something I didn’t want that was also more than I could afford, especially now that property values were rising in Burney and real estate was at a premium everywhere, so he finally gave up and drove down Rt. 52, heading toward Porter’s Garage, aka the place he grew up.
“Tell me the dirty little secret,” I said to him.
“It’s this tiny house I own.” He turned just past the garage and started the climb into the hills. “Margaret Evans was my kindergarten teacher. She retired the year I went to first grade and intended to live out her life in the little cottage she’d bought in the fifties. And then she got sick. You know what health insurance is like in this country, even with Medicare. She put a mortgage on the house, and her pension didn’t cover that along with meds and food and doctors, and the house went into foreclosure.”
“You foreclosed on your kindergarten teacher?” I said, appalled.
“No. Your mother put a hold on the foreclosure and told me what was going on, and I paid off the mortgage and went out to see Miss Evans, to tell her everything was going to be all right. I hadn’t seen her in thirty years, she was in her late eighties, and she was sick and old. . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “She’d worked hard all her life and ended up like that. The house was in bad shape. I told her I owned the house now, but it was hers for the rest of her life. Then I told her I needed to bring it up to code so I wouldn’t get arrested as a bad landlord, and I don’t think she bought that, she was a sharp old lady, but she agreed that new plumbing and electricity and HVAC would be a good idea, so I did all of that so she’d be safe and warm. She wouldn’t let me insulate it until I told her they could blow it in from the outside in an afternoon. I put on a new roof, and I also checked the pilings it’s built on—“
“Pilings?” I said.
“It’s on the side of a hill out here,” Ken said. “Twelve steps up to the front door, but on the back, it’s over a ravine and the whole thing is supported by pilings. The guys who worked on it told me that foundation was built to last, so it’s not going anywhere. The house is safe. But it’s also not anything you’d want to live in. It makes the Big Chef look like the Ritz.”
