I yawned. About fifty yards away, traffic streamed east and west, going in and out of New Hampshire, and the bulk of the traffic was semi-trailers, secretly bringing food, drink, and fuel to the demanding stores of the region. Felix said, "Looks quiet."
"Unh-hunh."
"Thought we'd wait for a bit, see if anything's going on."
"Like the cops, for example? Keeping surveillance?"
Felix said, "Got a contact with the city. She tells me that the cops are busy elsewhere. Don't know where, but she does know there's no surveillance on the place."
"Sounds like a good contact."
I could just make out his smile. "Oh, she's got a couple of contacts herself that can brighten up one's day."
I yawned again, managed this time to raise a hand to my face.
"Any idea of what you might be looking for once we get in?"
Felix said, "If I do, I'll let you know."
More traffic went by and I thought about getting another cup of coffee, decided not to. I didn't want to be in the store with a desperate need to release water, and fumble around, looking for a restroom. Felix shifted in his seat and said, "Okay, let's go."
I got out with him and he said, "Don't bother locking the door."
"I know," I said. "If we need to get going in a hurry."
We walked across the cracked pavement of the parking lot, the humming noise of the traffic growing louder. Felix made a motion with his hands in his coat pocket and then passed over a pair of latex gloves, which I snapped on. We reached the rear door, and he said in a low voice, "Another reason this place seems so off to me. Came by earlier today, no alarm system."
I didn't say anything. The whole past few days had seemed off.
Felix lit off a tiny flashlight, handed it over to me, and I flashed the beam on the doorknob of the rear door. Back into his coat pocket he went, and then started working with a set of tools. He whispered something to himself in Italian, and then reached up and spun the doorknob. It clicked open with a satisfying noise, and then we were in, having just committed the crime of breaking and entering.
I felt pretty good.
We were in a cluttered hallway, Felix keeping the light low to the ground. Cardboard boxes were piled on either side, and we had to walk sideways to make our way to the main store. Felix switched off the light and we came out into a display area. Curtains had been closed on the windows and the front door, but there was enough light from the streetlights out on the highway to illuminate the interior. Felix stood next to me and I could sense his quiet gaze, as he looked around the store.
"A mess," he said.
"You got it," I said. My hands were warm and moist inside the latex gloves, but I tried not to pay it any mind. Small price to pay for leaving no fingerprints behind.
There were shelves against the walls and low tables in the center of the room, and even in the dim light, I could see there was no reason, no sense of order to the old belongings here. Piles of books were stacked next to some vases, next to clear plastic bags of silverware, to more books and little statuettes, to more glassware and some cutting knives. There was a smell of damp decay, of old things not kept well over the years. I had been in a number of antique stores in New England over the years, searching for old books, magazines, and small souvenirs, but I had never been in a store that seemed so distressed. Felix gently grasped my arm and said, "There's a set of stairways over there, by the store counter. Why don't you look about the countertop, see if you can find an address book, ledger book. I'll take a run upstairs to the apartment."
"Why don't we both run up to the apartment?" I asked.
"Time, my friend," he said. 'We're burning it up, and we can't waste anymore."
Good point. "All right, go to it."
He went up the stairs and I swear, he moved like a cat for I heard not a sound. I went over to a waist-high counter with a silent cash register, and not much else. There was a shelf behind the counter with stacks of newspapers, which I flipped through and found nothing of interest. It was tight quarters back there and I was surprised at what wasn't there: any kind of ledger, any kind of filing cabinets, anything at all that marked a business. Just the cash register and some old newspapers. I went back out to the store interior, looked around again. A thought was forming in my mind of what had been going on here, what Jon's younger brother had been up to, and why the store seemed so wrong. The thought was coming together when I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me, turned, and was going to ask Felix what he had learned, when somebody came forward and knocked me down with a blow to the chest.
I fell back against one of the tables, things falling off and clattering. There was a whispered exclamation from my assailant and I could feel a boot barely brush my left ear as it hammered into a desk leg. I rolled and my hand went against a burst plastic bag, felt something sharp, grabbed a knife, and rolled again back toward my assailant, stabbed upward. There was a gasp of pain and then there was another noise, the sound of feet coming down the stairs, and then the guy I had just stabbed in the leg picked up a chair and threw it through the front window.
It made a loud and satisfying smash and Felix was there, grabbing me up under my arms, saying, "You okay?" just as the shape leapt through the window, through the curtains, out to the front, and then went out of sight.
"Yeah." It was all I could say through the dense sensation in my chest, which felt like wet cement was suddenly surrounding my heart. Felix grabbed an arm and said, "Come on, let's get the hell out of here."
We went back the way we came, through the rear corridor and outside into the cold air. Felix made a point of glancing around the empty lot, to make sure my assailant wasn't out there, waiting for us. In a matter of moments we were back in the Lexus, and Felix started it up and drove slowly out of the parking lot, and I took a breath and it hurt, and was going to tell Felix to step on it, to punch out that accelerator, but I left him to his business. He knew what he was doing, and then, so did 1. A vehicle slowly moving away from a parking lot meant nothing. A vehicle moving quickly, laying down rubber with a loud screech, garnered attention. And attention was something we desperately wanted to avoid.
About fifteen minutes later we were at an International House of Pancakes in Lewington, a town right next to the city of Porter, and home to heavy traffic, two large malls, a number of chain stores, a variety of shipping terminals, and the McIntosh Air Force Base. The residents of Lewington enjoy one of the lowest property taxes in the state in exchange for putting up with the heavy traffic and the possibility that the air force base may be a target one of these days, and most seemed happy with the exchange.
I made do with a glass of orange juice and two scrambled eggs, my chest aching something fierce and hard, while Felix dug into eggs Benedict, home fries, and toast. Most of the customers in the IHOP were either truck drivers or the young, out for a night of partying and Ecstasy-taking, and I think the hostess took one look at Felix and me and didn't know what the hell to make of us, so she sat us in a far corner in case we started speaking in tongues or something.
Felix said, "Sorry about that."
"Sorry about what?"
He shook his head. "I was a bit sloppy. Didn't think anybody was in the building when we got there. Somehow, the guy who tried to whack you one was hiding in the upstairs bathroom. I was in Ray's bedroom when the door opened up and I heard him thundering his way downstairs."
I ate some of the eggs, which were better than I expected. "No apologies necessary. I'm thinking, maybe that was Ray, coming back to the homestead to pick up something."
"Nope," Felix said.
"Well, you could at least give me the courtesy of pretending that I might be right."
"No point to it," he said. "First of all, it doesn't make sense for a guy to come back to his home turf. Too many chances of the cops keeping an eye on the place, of witnesses seeing him go in, of getting caught."
"All right," I said. "You said 'first.' Can I guess that there's a second to your theory?"
"Not a theory. Plain fact. You said this Ray character is bald, correct?"
"That's right."
Felix made a slicing motion into his eggs Benedict with a fork.
"Streetlight illuminated the back of our hero's head, just as he was bailing out of the broken window. Short but thick hair. It wasn't Ray."
I said, "You could have told me that first, instead of giving me that mini-lecture on criminals returning to their homes."
A smile. "I always enjoy teaching you something, Lewis. It makes my whole existence worthwhile. And I see you gave somebody something as well."
"I don't see what you mean."
He took his knife and touched the edge of my shirtsleeve, and I looked down and saw the brown stain there. A bit of the flesh on my wrist was flecked with brown as well. Felix said, his voice quieter, "That's somebody's blood, and I'm pretty sure it's not yours. What happened?"
I suppose I should have spat out the eggs I was eating, but instead I swallowed calmly and said, "I think I stabbed him. In the leg."
Felix raised an eyebrow, which for him is about one step below yelling. "Really?"
"Truly and honestly."
“With what?"
“When I got hammered in my chest, I fell over a table, knocking everything off. Part of the everything was a bag of silverware. I grabbed a dinner knife, and I'm glad it wasn't a butter knife, and poked him in the leg."
Felix said not a word. I looked at him and said, "Look, he plowed me over, was trying to kick my head in. Least I could do was return the favor."
His lips moved some, and it looked like he was trying to hold in either a smile or some laughter. He said, "Excuse me."
"Yes?"
"Who the hell are you, and what have you done with my friend, Lewis?”
It was my turn to smile. "Surprised?"
"Very. I know you and how you think. Times like those, your biggest problem is that you analyze too much, try to think through all of the options and repercussions. That was part of your innocent charm. Now, I don't know what the hell to think. Somebody attacks you and instead of engaging him or her in a thoughtful discussion of why they're being mean to you, you stab them. Maybe I've been a bad influence on you."
"Probably."
We ate some more and I said, "I was thinking of something back there, before that tire iron or baseball bat or whatever went sailing into my chest."
"What's that?"
"The whole store ... it didn't seem like a store at all. There were no records I could find, no sense of any kind of record keeping at all. It was like everything in that place was for show."
"Go on," Felix said.
"For lack of a better phrase, I think that place is a front for something. I don't know what for. But whatever is going on there, it doesn't involve selling antiques."
"Yeah. Which leads me to what I found upstairs, taped to the refrigerator, before our hidden friend bolted from the bathroom."
"And what's that?"
He reached into an inside pocket of his coat, pulled out a thin stack of postcards. He fanned them across the countertop and I gave them a look. There were six of them and all of them were advertising Florida. They were that hokey type that showed a rear shot of an attractive woman in a skimpy thong bikini at the beach, with the phrase, "Getting behind in our vacation!" That sort of thing. After I had given them a quick glance, Felix --- acting like a conjurer --- flipped them over. All were addressed to Ray Ericson at Seacoast Antiques, Route I-A, Porter, NH 03801, and I noted three interesting things: The postmark was from St. Petersburg, the dates on the postmark were about two weeks apart, and the message side of each card was blank.
"Well?" Felix asked.
"A code," I said.
"Go on."
"Ray getting this postcard meant he was supposed to do something. Pick somebody up at the airport, go on a trip somewhere, rob a bank, scratch his left buttock, I don't know. But that's what this tells me. A code."
"Very good. Your Pentagon training has served you well."
I didn't take the bait, which I think disappointed Felix some. He has always pressed me on my prior service at the Department of Defense, and I've never given in. He said, "Anybody or anything you know down in St. Petersburg?"
"Just that they have a hell of a nice newspaper, that's about it.
“You?
"A little more. Let's just say that St. Pete is a favorite for retirees from a variety of different occupations."
"Let's see, loansharking, knee breaking, bookmaking ... Leave anything out?"
"Cooking schools, of course," he said dryly. "What I mean is that I can make a few calls, see what I can find."
"Thanks."
We finished up our meal, which seemed too late for dinner and still too early for breakfast. While we were waiting for the check, Felix said, "All right, truth-telling time."
"Okay."
"What the hell is going on with you?"