Moving Day: A Thriller (18 page)

He watches both intently.

A minute or so into the meal, one of the dogs looks up at Peke dumbly. Sated. Satisfied. And something more than that.

The dog blinks repeatedly.

Now the other dog is blinking, too.

Before either can finish its feast, they have rolled to their sides, slumbering.

In the woods of Poland, they made the compound from mushrooms and bark. Here in America, it was simpler. He knows what medications to buy at the pharmacy to grind up together. Ingredients he has disguised with a much broader pharmacy shopping list.

These are descendants, spiritual cousins, of the officer dogs—those shadow-colored hell-beasts.

Descendants that were bred mean. But not mean enough.

“Hello?” he calls out, as flatly American as he can.

He walks up to the farmhouse. “Hello?” His voice made minuscule, swallowed up in the landscape. “Hello?”

Is someone feeding the dogs? Or are they living off the wildlife that is bound to be plentiful within the borders of the big property? It’s an important point, because it leads to the next question: How long until the thieves return?

“Hello?”

No response.

Surely the commotion of the dogs would have brought someone out. Or barricaded them in. Let them prepare. “Hello?”

He crosses the dusty front yard, climbs the gray steps to the front porch, stands on the small farmhouse porch a moment, the floor planks painted gray. He tries the front door, already knowing. Locked. He looks in the front-door window. A living room with large stereo speakers, a big-screen television, a beaten-up couch and shredded rug, and not much else. Temporary. Transitory. A room of men passing time. He can’t see the cases of beer, both full and empty, but imagines they’re there.

He steps down off the gray-planked porch.

The wind. The sun. An old man in a wide-brimmed Western hat, wandering alone. He has entered an American landscape. He is in a painting.

He walks around the side of the farmhouse, then the hundred yards or so back to the barn. He sees that truck tire tracks—lots of tire tracks—crisscross everywhere.

But the truck is not here. He feels himself relax a little. Hears his own breathing become steadier with relief.

He stands in front of the big barn. Looks up at the ancient, wide planks of its vast skin. “Hello? Anybody here? Anybody?” His voice vibrates oddly against the flank of the enormous building.

He steps up to the barn’s side door, pulls at it. Solid. Locked.

He looks at the keyhole of the heavy door’s handle.

Again looks up the side of the giant barn. There’s a ridge of slatted opening at the crease of the tin roof and sides. To let the hot air inside escape. Nothing more.

He looks again at the keyhole in the door handle.

Peke heads now to the back of the farmhouse. Walks through the dust and dry dirt, up the steps of the exposed landing, presses his face against one of the glass panes of the farmhouse’s back door.

He sees no wires crossing the glass inside. No wires running along the door frame, at least not visible from here.

Peke steps off the landing, stoops, and picks up a rock about the size of a fist.

He steps back up onto the landing, looks once more, then covers his fist with the sleeve of his barn coat, and taps the rock firmly through the door’s lowest pane of glass. Three quick punches clear the pane out.

He waits. Waits to hear something. Anything. An alarm. Another dog. A shout from someone roused from a nap.

Nothing.

He reaches his wrist in carefully to the inside door handle, turns it. The back door opens into the kitchen.

Peke glides through the ancient room, its black-and-white tile floor heavily cracked, its cabinets deeply scarred, thin and slapdash
to begin with, hanging crooked, having suffered fists and blows and recklessness. He passes through the living room with the big television and stereo speakers. He can feel it is a world of men—transitory, haphazard, rough—a barracks, stale and ramshackle. A house in such contrast with his own, where everything was considered, thought out, to add to the warmth, to the sense of peace and charm. Peke moves lightly, invisible, ghostly. He steps into the office, hardly pausing, settles down at the oddly ornate desk as if it were his own.

Picture books, price guides, auction catalogs, fill two walls. Catalog consumerism gone beyond itself in this farmhouse hideout, a dark inversion of the cheerful missives of American plenty that flooded his mailbox.

The computer sits on a metal stand to the left. He stares at its mute green screen. He is tempted to start it. But no. Not now.

He opens the desk’s top drawer. Black ledgers, spiral-ringed notebooks. He leafs idly through the top ones randomly, discovers immediately that they are neatly kept lists, itemizations of objects.

He sits there. A thief at a thief’s desk.

He opens a second drawer. He sees Rose’s necklace immediately. Finds the two ruby earrings next to it, hers also. He puts them into the velvet sack still in there with them, stuffs the sack into his front pants pocket.

He finds next to the sack—not so surprisingly—his own safe-deposit box key.

He stuffs that into his pants pocket, too.

It occurs to him: it is a precisely parallel action. A swift, perfect justice. Finding the safe-deposit box key in the thief’s desk, after the thief found it in Peke’s. He’s rifling through the thief’s desk as the thief rifled through his.

He pulls a couple more drawers, soon finds the old bonds, the old wills, and, in a quick inventory in his head, realizes he has
everything. Everything, that is, except what he came inside hoping to find.

He rises from the desk, heads to the back door. But he stops first at another doorway—almost involuntarily—when he sees it is a bedroom. Better furnished, more serene, more finished, than the brusque, dilapidated, untended other rooms he has hurried through. It has the feel of a sanctuary in the chaotic, ramshackle ranch house.

He looks inside and is momentarily disoriented by seeing it at the bedside. Gaudy, gold, sparkling in the low light.

The watch. Peke knows that the thief, though he might cherish it, can’t wear it on a job. It’s too distinctive. Not what the foreman of a moving crew would be wearing. It’s why the red light has continued to blink, unchanging, these last few days, frustrating Peke, testing his patience.

The watch that guided Peke here.

If the thief had kept it on, of course, Peke would still know his whereabouts. It would take some of the tenseness, some of the risk, away right now. He presumes they’re away on another job. But he has no idea how far away or for how long, nor even exactly when they left. It creates a low-grade, continual anxiety to Peke’s presence here. A thief doesn’t belong in your house, but you certainly don’t belong in a thief’s. If the thief would at some point put the watch back on, Peke thinks, it might still have its uses.

Wouldn’t it now be too suspicious to leave the watch here and take back everything else that was his?

He could pry open its back, leave it open-backed on the desk—show the thief how it was done. Show him how he was followed and found.

Or he could leave it here by the bed, and the thief might presume Peke simply did not see it, if everything else was gone.

Peke picks up the watch, looks at it one last time, sets it down on the bedside table exactly as it was before. His gift to the thief.

He is nervous, jumpy, being in here. He’s suddenly aware of needing to relieve himself. He steps carefully into the bathroom. It’s a narrow L, he sees. As he urinates, he inspects the toiletries on the low plastic shelf to the side of the toilet. It is neat, well organized, like the bedroom. He thinks, for the first time, with surprise, about the possibilities of the thief’s sexual orientation. His wife is fascinated by the family cabin they are staying in. By the family’s life. Peke is as fascinated by this den of thieves. By the thief’s life.

He still has not found what he is looking for. He exits the bathroom and scans the beat-up, worn-down farmhouse interior once more, futilely, and turns to leave.

Then smiles. Because it’s in the act of leaving that he sees it. Right where he should have looked first. A small key ring hanging on a nail by the door. It might as well have been labeled
BARN
or
SHED
. Peke obviously doesn’t see as well as he once did, but he sees well enough.

First, though, to a small moving job that, unfortunately, can’t wait for Daniel’s crew. That has to be done before they get here.

There is a wheelbarrow upside down, ten yards away from the back door. He rights it, wheels it briskly across the muddy field to the comatose dogs. He turns the wheelbarrow on its side against one dog’s torso, pushes the animal against the wheelbarrow’s edge, and rights the wheelbarrow with the dog in it. The sleek, fierce animal is surprisingly light in the wheelbarrow. There is a dog pen around the side of the house. He wheels it up to the dog pen, opens the gate, wheels it in.

He dumps the sleeping dog gently onto the dirt inside.

He had expected the effort to wear him out, but he feels invigorated. Feels reserves of energy.

He repeats the process for the second dog.

For all their snarling, outsize fury, he’s surprised again by the lightness. As if docility makes them lighter.

When both are in the pen, their forms still splayed out, oblivious, he pulls their rusty water trough inside the pen with them, careful not to spill any liquid. They’ll have water. They’ll be OK. He shuts the sturdy pen door. Checks it to assure that it will stay shut.

Peke stands at the door of the barn, the key ring glistening in the sun, and tries the few keys systematically, until one turns in the lock.

He pulls down the handle, pushes open the heavy door, ducks into the darkness.

It takes a few moments for his seventy-two-year-old eyes to adjust from the bright, brutal Montana daylight to the low light inside—light coming mainly in a sharp path from the door he’s just opened.

When he can see, he looks around him.

Paintings stacked out from the walls. Some still in their expensive gilt frames, others simply pinned against unpainted wooden ones. Beautiful, ornate pieces of furniture piled high: desks, highboys, dressers, chests of drawers, Chinese vases, rolled Oriental and Turkish rugs, Mediterranean amphorae. A warehouse agglomeration of art and civilization, heaped high, here in a barn on an overgrown lot in the Montana woods. European craftsmen, salon painters, artisans from across centuries, in their final home in the off-the-grid American backwoods. In a benighted gallery. In an unknown museum.

He sees the outline of the inside of the locked overhead doors toward the far end of the barn. He moves toward them. As he gets closer to them, they loom up surprisingly large. Twin, mammoth entrances.

And there, piled just inside the doors, are the Pekes’ belongings.

Even the Mercedes convertible is there, tucked to the side.

He steps over, looks more closely at it. Runs his eyes sternly, appraisingly, down its flanks. Unbruised. None the worse for wear.

He steps to the overhead door of the left bay garage, throws the lock, struggles a little at first, then succeeds, in lifting the huge door.