IN THE COVER of darkness, Kyle parked the 280ZX at the end of the driveway, his usual spot, and skulked around to the back, guided by the beam of his flashlight. He opened the screen door, slipped his key in the rear door’s lock, gave it a twist. It wouldn’t turn. No matter how hard he tried, the thing wouldn’t budge. It took him longer than it should have to realize it wasn’t rust.
Sons of bitches. The bank had changed the locks.
His mother’s bank accounts and meager insurance had covered the cost of her funeral, with a little still left over for expenses. But after keeping his car filled and running, paying the cable bill and his phone and Internet bills, the electric bill, the water bill, his bar bills—especially his bar bills—after all that, the money from his mother and his wages from Bubba’s hadn’t been enough to allow him to keep paying the mortgage. He could have gotten a full-time job, sure, except then he’d have a full-time job. But even as he crumpled and tossed out the notices of delinquency as they came, first in the mail and then posted on the door, he didn’t think the bastards would actually have the gumption to foreclose on an orphan.
Which only showed just how much Kyle understood about the ways of the world.
So they had booted him out and then locked him from his house. Or they had tried to, in any event. But he had lived there all his life, including the difficult years of his adolescence after his father’s death, when adventure was somewhere, anywhere, beyond the walls of his mother’s house and curfews were set up only to be knocked down like bowling pins. He had learned to climb into that house half a dozen ways without his mother’s being the wiser, windows he unlocked before leaving, a rear door that could be jimmied open with his student ID.
He made a quick reconnoiter around the perimeter. The bankers had been pretty damn thorough for a pack of whiny money counters. All the windows had been locked tight with jamb locks added, and a dead bolt bolted onto the back door. But they had slipped up on the narrow window beside that door. The window was locked, but its sill had never been set right. Kyle’s mom had often complained about the water that would sometimes leak inside, but she had never done anything about it.
He pressed hard against the top of the sill with one hand while he gave the lower right corner a quick bang with the flat of his other hand, and the bottom of the window popped loose. A little bit of prying, working the window back and forth, and it pulled out of the frame like a giant puzzle piece.
The opening wasn’t big enough for any part of his body other than his arm to slip through, but that was enough to allow him to reach over and turn the knob of the newly installed dead bolt. With the bolt released, he again opened the screen door, put the butt of the flashlight in his mouth, took out his driver’s license, and jimmied the door open. Quick as that, he was inside his old house.
It smelled wrong, empty and old and devoid of life. He had thought he would still be able to smell something of her, her hair spray, her soap, the lotion she rubbed on her hands, knuckles red and cracked from gardening. Nothing. And even in the darkness, he could sense the vacancy, as the sounds of his footfalls echoed without obstruction. Just a dusty emptiness. Out of habit he turned on the kitchen light and then halted at the sight of nothing.
There was no kitchen table, no freestanding cabinet for his mother’s china, no table in the dining room or couch in the front parlor. Those sons of bitches had grabbed everything. A whole life, her whole life, gone, hocked to pay his debts. He had taken a few things of hers when he finally left, a scrapbook she had made, including a few photographs of her and his father, a painting she had done when she was a girl, just a scant few things that could fit in the small space beneath the hatchback of the Datsun along with his clothes and his laptop and his softball bat. He assumed he would come back for the rest, but he had never gotten around to it, and now those bastards had shipped it all off to be sold for mere pennies. While staring at the emptiness of his house and trying not to draw the connection with the emptiness of his life, he suddenly thought about the file cabinet and felt a jolt of desperation.
Damn, the bastards must have sold that, too.
He rushed for the basement stairs, flicked on the light, charged down. The basement was a dismal place beneath the old fluorescent lights that hummed and skittered to no great effect. The floor was cracked and damp, mold rising like a plague on the scuffed bare walls. Pipes and wires sagged sadly from the open ceiling rafters, the outdated circuit box dangled loosely off the wall. And it was empty. As cleaned out as a bank in the path of Bonnie and Clyde.
His mother had once envisioned a playroom for her boisterous young son and had the basement framed out with drywall. But before carpet could be laid and a ceiling hung, the remains of a hurricane had climbed up the East Coast, flooding the neighborhood and sending a slurry of water and mud through fractures in the walls and the cement floor. Soon the idea of a playroom was abandoned, and the basement instead became a storage bin for all manner of junk: old furniture from Kyle’s grandmother’s house, gardening paraphernalia, rolls of corroded metal fencing and stakes for the tomatoes. Kyle had figured the file cabinet would be somewhere hidden among or behind all the refuse. But the refuse now was gone—only the washer and dryer with their rusted bases remained—and the file cabinet was apparently gone with it.
He spun around in despair. They had taken it, those bastards. They didn’t even know what they had, and they had taken it. He had a sudden vision of a brown file cabinet tumbling off a truck onto a pile of scrap metal, its files flipping madly as they fluttered into the wind.
But as he calmed, he considered. He’d been in this basement hundreds of times, and he had never seen the thing, had never even caught a glimpse. Had he simply not noticed it? Possibly. Or maybe it hadn’t been hidden among the refuse where he could easily have spied it. Maybe it had been so well hidden that it eluded even the maniacal grasp of the money-mad bankers.
He began to pace the edge of the moldy drywall. It seemed to track quite closely the contours of the basement. From an opening for the radiator, he could see that the framer had left only a small space between the wood and the flaking stone walls to maximize the size of the playroom. But there was something about the wall on the opposite side of the radiator that bothered him.
He walked up to it. At this point on the floor above, the living room zagged a bit for an open window well with a bench seat that his mother had upholstered in purple paisley. But this part of the dry wall was simply straight. And there was something about the mold. On the space right where that window well should have been, it was spottier than on the other sections, as if the paint that was used was somehow of a different quality than that on the rest of the walls and the mold couldn’t get a purchase here. Or maybe the drywall was simply farther away from the damp stone.
He stepped forward and tapped the wall gently, listening for the hollow sound. The register went up and the echo died when he reached the stud, then lowered and hollowed again when he passed it.
Tap tap. Tap tap. Tap tap tap.
CRASH.
His fist ripped through the drywall. When he pulled his hand back, grabbing hold of the now-jagged edge while jerking hard with his shoulders, a piece the size of a small dog pulled off. Behind that newly formed hole, blackness. He pulled away more of the drywall, tugging and yanking as it came off in his two large hands.
When the space was big enough, he leaned in with the flashlight and turned on the beam.
His shout echoed like a shot through the empty house.
For there it stood, caught in the flashlight’s stare, still as death and glowing dully in the surrounding darkness like a dimly lit sarcophagus in some long-buried crypt.
IT DIDN’T TAKE much time for Kyle to clear out the drywall from stud to stud and gain access to the damp and closed-in alcove behind the wall. The file cabinet was big and brown, with the fake wood grain and stainless-steel handles on the four drawers, just like the other three he had seen in his father’s office.
And it was locked. As he assumed it would be. The locking mechanism in the top corner was pressed in, and no matter how hard he yanked, the drawers wouldn’t budge.
Kyle stared at it for a moment and then took out a key.
“I swiped this sucker from one of the other file cabinets in your father’s office,” Skitch had said when he gave the key to Kyle.
“What the hell good is that?” Kyle had said.
“Look at it. See the way I filed it down?”
“So?”
“So? What am I good at, Kyle?”
“It’s not hitting a softball, that’s for sure.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. I pretty much suck at everything except for drinking, sex—”
“Not what I heard.”
Pause. “What did you hear? Have you been talking to Allison? Because I was drinking tequila that night, and you know what happens when—”
“Skitch.”
“Okay, look, the only things I know are drinking, sex when I’m somewhat sober, stealing cable, and picking locks. So when I’m talking about locks, you should be listening. This is a bump key. When you bump, all you’re doing is setting the lock’s pins into their proper places with a little pop.”
“A pop?”
“That’s it. Just a little pop. Nice and easy. Pop.”
Now, in his old basement, with the flashlight in his mouth, Kyle slipped the key into the lock, pressed the key all the way in before pulling it out slightly, exactly as Skitch had shown him. Then he took a small rubber hammer out of his pocket. He twisted the key in the lock with just the slightest of pressure, popped the key lightly with the hammer, and at right that moment twisted the key a little harder.
The key turned, the lock jumped out.
“Yo, Skitch,” said Kyle aloud after dropping the flashlight into his hand, “three out of four’s not too shabby.”
Then he yanked open the top drawer and discovered a lost world.
The cabinet was filled with the leavings of Liam Byrne’s legal career, dusty old files from long-dead disputes, wills for long-dead clients, contracts no longer valid, letters referencing matters no longer mattering, useless notes on lifeless cases in handwriting barely legible. And as he quickly rifled through these files, thick with aged documents, each carefully named with a typewritten label—
Loughlin v. Ginsberg, Parvin v. United Amalgamated, In re Arco Industries, Doddson v. Fogg
—Kyle felt a wave of sadness. His father’s life had been consumed by one after another of these fights between aggrieved souls over nothing more than money. These were the vital matters that kept Liam Byrne from his son’s baseball games, band concerts, class shows. He had come in second to
Doddson v. Fogg,
and if his father had lived, he always would.
Among the files in the first three drawers, there was nothing that had O’Malley on the label, and in the letters he had checked in the midst of his rifling, he had seen nothing addressed to or referencing any O’Malley at all. With each failure his frustration grew. In the bottom drawer was a group of expanding files with their flaps sealed, each labeled with a different tax year. Kyle couldn’t help himself. He knelt down plucked out one,
Taxes: 1990,
opened the top, gave it a quick search. Among the receipts and canceled checks he found the 1990 Form 1040 for Liam Byrne and Cecile Byrne. It wasn’t the business income he was interested in—although it was less than he would have expected—or the total income, or the adjusted gross income, or the taxes due or the taxes paid. Instead the first thing he checked was the exemptions. And smack there, in carefully typed text, was his own name, Kyle Byrne, with his own Social Security number and the word “son” under the heading “Dependent’s relationship to you.” Well, then, at least he wasn’t illegitimate in the eyes of the IRS, which meant something, he supposed. But it ticked him off that he was claimed as a dependent on the French wife’s taxes. If Kyle’s father was taking the exemption, it meant his mother wasn’t able to. Screwing her again? So many mysteries in that relationship, it was impossible to unbind them all.
There were tax files going all the way to 1994, the year Liam Byrne died. Feeling a great wave of disappointment, Kyle was about to close the final drawer and start looking through the first three for anything O’Malley when he realized that the 1994 taxes wouldn’t have been filed until 1995, in which case the file, along with all the receipts and canceled checks, should have been somewhere at the widow’s house. So what was this file doing there?
He pulled the binder out, opened it, and there it was, as simple as that, sitting among a host of Double Eye binders. A black file with a pile of documents fastened between the two covers.
In re O’Malley.
He grunted in pain from his cracked ribs as he sat down on the cement floor and opened the file, rifling through the pages as fast as he could to get some idea of what the whole thing was about. The file was arranged in reverse chronological order, with each document fastened on top of the documents that preceded it.
The most recent documents were a series of letters dated in the fall of 1979 from Liam Byrne, Esq., to a Robert Spangler, Esq., referencing the O’Malley matter and discussing, in quite formal tones, an apparently delicate negotiation. From the careful language of the letters, Kyle sensed that the terms being exchanged involved silence and money. Kyle paged quickly through the rest of the file until he stopped at a name. Colleen O’Malley.
So she was the O’Malley of the O’Malley file. He had guessed that the creepy old man was a fraud, and now this confirmed it. If the file was to be turned over to anyone, he would find this Colleen and turn it over to her. If there was money to be made, he’d let her make it.
He kept paging back until he found, at the bottom of the document stack, an affidavit from one Colleen O’Malley. It was browned with age, and it had the caption of a lawsuit,
O’Malley v. Truscott,
with a heading claiming the case was brought in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, but there was no case number on the document, or anywhere else in the file, as if the lawsuit were contemplated but never brought. The affidavit trembled a bit in Kyle’s hands, and it felt to him like the key to some ancient puzzle. Kyle started reading with a hunger that surprised him.
Colleen was young, sixteen at the time, a student at a local Catholic high school. The affidavit painted a picture of innocence, a girl who entered adolescence shy and sheltered by her loving family. And then another name emerged. Francis Truscott IV, aged eighteen.
Son of a bitch.
Suddenly Kyle understood the power and danger inherent in the file, why everyone was searching for it, how much damage could be done with it and how much profit could be made. Just a boy at the time of the affidavit’s telling, Francis Truscott IV was now the junior senator from Pennsylvania and one of the main Republican presidential hopefuls, with a great deal of money behind him.
Kyle slowed down and started reading more carefully. The affidavit told a classic story, as old as love itself and told with a certain panache, certainly not in the words of the sixteen-year-old who had affixed her signature to the back of the document. Kyle grew certain he was reading the words of his father, and it felt as if his father were somehow close to him now, as if he could feel Liam Byrne’s breath on the back of his neck as the old man stood over his shoulder, telling him the story of these star-crossed lovers.
The shy young girl from the city, the confident older suburban boy. A chance meeting while volunteering at a homeless shelter, a flirtation, a budding romance. Love wild and on the bloom until the families catch the sweet floral scent. The O’Malleys unhappy because Francis isn’t a Catholic. The Truscotts unhappy because Colleen is from a poor family with no social standing. Efforts by both families to come between them.
Romeo and Juliet
played out on a landscape of asphalt Catholic-school yards and lush suburban backyards, until the plot changes in one brutal turn and . . .
Above him Kyle heard the screen door bang shut and the creak of a floorboard. He froze, even as his heart started racing. Quietly he closed the file and clutched it to his chest as he rose from the cement floor.
Someone was in the house. How? Why? Damn it.
The why he knew already, from what he had gleaned in just a few moments with the O’Malley file. It didn’t take much imagination to rustle up the scores who would kill to get their hands on the thing— Truscott himself, of course, along with Truscott’s Republican rivals, Democratic operatives, tabloids looking to spike circulation. Not to mention the fake O’Malley, who was after the file for his own damn reasons, or that bastard Sorrentino, who just wanted the cash he could squeeze out in blackmail.
And the how was just as obvious. Kyle had driven here with more concern with what was on the radio than with who might be following him. He had parked right in the driveway. He had put the damn lights on in the kitchen and the basement. It was as if he had placed an announcement on the Internet. And after he had opened the door, he’d left the thing not only unlocked but also open, so that the bastards, whoever they were, could stroll right in.
How could he be so stupid? The answer to that was easy: When had he ever done anything smart?
He looked around in panic for a moment and then heard another f loorboard creak , t h is t ime closer to t he basement door. He lu nged for the circuit box, slammed it open, started smacking closed the circuits one after the other until he plunged the basement into darkness.
With the sputtering fluorescents silenced, he could hear footsteps above him. Slow and ominous. Coming ever closer to the basement door. And then reaching the steps. And then climbing down. Deliberately and unhurriedly. One step. Then the next. One at a time. Almost leisurely, as if unconcerned about the darkness or what might be waiting for him in the basement. The way an ogre would climb down to his lair, where a captive lay in chains, waiting for evisceration.
Kyle wouldn’t wait. As silently as possible, he moved toward the stairs, slinking his left side up against a wall, crouching down, flashlight at the ready. Whatever pain he was feeling from his injuries was blunted by adrenaline coursing through his body. When the bastard descended all the way into the darkness, Kyle would blind him with the flashlight and then charge, putting a shoulder into his chest and slamming him like a rag doll against the wall. It wouldn’t be so easy to get up from that, unless the bastard really was an ogre, in which case it wouldn’t matter.
Crouched down, the knuckles of his left hand still clutching the file, on the floor, like an offensive lineman waiting for the snap count, Kyle saw the merest shadow of a man, first his feet, then his legs, then his torso, thick and bent, then the round, bulbous head. Kyle lifted the flashlight and tensed his legs, preparing for the violent leap. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Click.
A glare of white and then that head coming clear. A mop of white hair. A gray, lined face. A tense, ironical smile with big yellow teeth.
Instead of leaping, Kyle stood up slowly and stared, slack-jawed and overcome.
“Hello, boyo,” said the man, in a soft, hoarse voice smoothed by tobacco and scotch. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Daddy?”
“You’re looking hardy, I must say. But not for long, with what I suspect you have in there in your fist. And I don’t mean the flashlight.”