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They were calling me back.
Or, more accurately, they thought they were calling Eddie back.
I thought about answering, but I knew I wouldn’t get a damn bit of info, and then they’d know I was onto them…
So I just let it ring and go silent.
Fuck. This entire thing has been pointless –
Ten seconds later, I heard a cell phone chime.
It was muted, but I heard it not ten feet away.
There was a kitchen closet. I opened it and looked inside. Cans of soup, bottles of soda, boxes of cereal and macaroni and cheese –
The cell phone chimed again.
Right under my feet.
I looked down at the hardwood floors. There were small gaps between the boards – and there was a slightly larger gap between a couple of them.
I knelt down, got out my switchblade from my boot – click – stuck the blade between the boards, and began to pry.
One board came up easy as you please.
Beneath the flooring was a shoebox. Inside were two cell phones.
One was several years old and had a cracked screen, like somebody had dropped it. The other one was brand new and plugged into a power strip that had been jury-rigged from somewhere under the house.
There were also a wad of hundreds big enough to choke a mule, and a small notebook. I flipped it open. There were dates and notes scrawled inside, though nothing I could figure out at first glance.
Nothing else, though.
I hit the menu button on the front of the cracked phone. Nothing – it was off.
Huh.
This looks like exactly the kind of piece of shit phone Roach might have.
I held down the power button on the side, and while I waited for it to boot up, I pressed the button on the plugged-in phone. The lock screen appeared with a notification:
JD 2m ago
iMessage
I had no idea who JD was, but I considered it a near impossible coincidence that I’d just phoned two DEA fronts, got called back on the same phone, and seconds later Eddie got a text on his mysterious hidden cell.
Damn thing had a code on it, so I couldn’t get in… but I knew how to get around that.
I unplugged the phone and put it inside my jacket pocket, along with the wad of money and the notebook.
The cracked phone finally booted up to a screen with a naked chick on it. It was lookin’ more and more like Roach’s cell by the second.
I hit the menu button and hoped for the best – and got it: there wasn’t a lock code on it.
Just like that shithead to not secure his goddamn phone, so any fuckin’ asshole could look at it. Of course, at the moment, I was eternally grateful for his carelessness.
I flicked through the Recent calls. There was mine from just a couple of hours before. And the one when I sent him over to the motel to bust Fiona, followed by the shitload of calls I’d made after he stopped answering.
