Authors: Thomas Perry
The steel door that Holcomb had installed was still there, the dead bolt locked. He kept walking to the second building, and found that door locked too. There was one more way. When Holcomb had put up these buildings he had dug tunnels. There was one going from under the floor in the main house to the windowless storehouse and workshop. There was also one running from the workshop to the brush at the base of the hillside. Holcomb had said he’d used his small Caterpillar tractor to dig them as three straight trenches seven feet deep. Then he had cut four-by-four braces and set them in concrete every eight feet. Next he’d nailed a layer of four-by eight-foot plywood to roof in the tunnels, covered it with tarpaper, and then pushed the dirt back over the roof. Holcomb said he had put about three feet of dirt over each tunnel.
Moreland walked to the big tangle of brush under the hill, found the area where he had remembered the end of the tunnel; then, using his knife blade, he found the trapdoor. He used his hands and feet to uncover it. He opened it and walked down the incline into the tunnel. He took out the pocket flashlight he had brought and then closed the trapdoor behind him. He had to crouch and walk bent over for about a hundred feet before he came to the ladder. He climbed it and pushed up on the trapdoor. It was heavy, but he wasn’t surprised, because they had always hidden the trapdoor by putting the rug and then the big table over it. It was meant to be an escape route, not a way in. He pushed harder, got the rug to bunch upward into a ridge, and then pushed some more so he could crawl out under it. He slithered out of the rug, and then crawled to the wall and stood up.
In the dim round beam of his flashlight he could see that the police had been thorough. They’d broken open cupboards and toolboxes and gun cabinets and taken everything. He didn’t know why, exactly, except that they had searched for anything that might explain Holcomb’s shooting death, and they had been required by their own policies not to leave guns and boxes of ammunition unguarded. Holcomb had maintained a full arsenal, including pistols, a few assault rifles, and a lot of parts that hadn’t seemed to pertain to any weapon Moreland could see.
Guns weren’t what he had come to find. Somewhere there had to be a piece of paper that Holcomb had intended not to be read by anyone. Holcomb had written things down, even if he had them memorized. There had been padlock combinations, phone numbers, names, addresses. But Moreland knew that finding the piece of paper would not be easy.
Holcomb had been aware that he was exactly the kind of man the authorities most wanted off the streets. He had lived with the possibility that he might be the target of surprise raids, or even an unexplained disappearance, so he had not made either event an easy matter. He’d built his escape tunnels before he’d built his house. He had one steel door on each building, and no windows. He’d had a series of surveillance cameras around the place so he could see what was outside, but those were gone now.
Moreland went over every inch of the storage building and workshop. If there had ever been a piece of paper here the police had taken it. Moreland was beginning to feel hot and sticky. When Holcomb had been here there had always been a ventilation fan running, and most of the time there had been air-conditioning. The power had undoubtedly been turned off after he died.
He wanted to go outside, but he wouldn’t be able to get into the other building from there. The steel doors were locked. He lowered himself back down into the tunnel, pulled the rug to roughly where it had been, and closed the trapdoor. He made his way to the main tunnel that ran past the storage building to the main house. It was only about fifty feet away. As he went he ran his flashlight along the four-by-four braces and the corrugated steel ceilings to be sure they were all still in plumb, and didn’t look as though they might collapse.
He climbed the second ladder and lifted the trapdoor. This one was not as heavy as the first, because all that was over it was the rug. Holcomb had wanted to get out fast if something happened while he was asleep. Moreland searched. He could see that the cops had taken all the paper that they could find in the house. But Holcomb would never put anything this important where cops could find it.
Holcomb had told him, “Keep your biggest secrets in your head. But make sure you also have a place where the little ones are written down—the account numbers, passwords, addresses, and phone numbers of the people you’ll need on the worst day of your life. Because sure as shit, that day is going to come. It’ll only be your last day if you didn’t prepare for it.” He had taught Moreland to keep plenty of cash around, but store the big money in banks in other states under false names. Moreland still had a piece of paper with the little things written on it—account numbers; names he had used; the addresses and phone numbers of people he would want if he was on the run. He had a second copy in a safe-deposit box in a Texas bank.
Holcomb hadn’t needed to do that. His crib sheet would be here on his ranch. Moreland crawled around the floor to look under pieces of furniture, then used the round dining table as a scaffold to stand on. He reached up above the rafters to feel for the paper. Then he climbed down, moved all the furniture back, and went down the trapdoor. He moved along the tunnel back past the ladder to the storage building. Then he imagined the emergency Holcomb was preparing for.
Holcomb would have just been awakened by the sounds outside. Maybe he had even seen the lights under the steel door. He had been too smart to expect to have any hope of defending his little fortress against cops. They never had to give up and go away, and he could never kill them all. He would have taken a wallet, water, and a gun, and gone down into his tunnel.
He imagined Holcomb scuttling along the escape tunnel. He wouldn’t have hesitated or stopped to collect things. He would go straight down the tunnel to the end, as Moreland was doing now.
Moreland reached the end of the tunnel, the place where he had come in. He stopped at the foot of the incline where it bent upward. He took out his lock-blade knife, opened it, stared at the walls and the ceiling, and then knelt on the floor. It would be buried under the ground.
He stabbed the dirt again and again. Every six inches he stuck the blade all the way into the ground, then moved deeper into the tunnel and tried again. When he hit something solid below the surface he pulled the knife out and used it to dig. There was a white PVC pipe, about five inches in diameter. He dug it up. There were caps on both ends. He was able to unscrew one end and take off the cap. Inside were a tight roll of cash in hundreds, a compact .45 ACP pistol, a loaded magazine, a knife, and a folded sheet of lined paper.
Moreland carefully unfolded the paper and held his flashlight close to it. There was a list of account numbers, the false names connected with them, some computer passwords, addresses, phone numbers. And there was the phone number he had been looking for. He recognized it as the phone number of the Broker. It was an 800 number, so he had never known where it was located. But beside it was the name Daniel Cowper, and an address in San Mateo, California.
He was grateful to Holcomb for the stack of hundred-dollar bills. After he had killed Kelly in Boston, he had not had a chance to drive back and search her apartment for whatever cash she hadn’t taken with her, so he had arrived in California nearly broke. He put the money in his pockets. He took the .45 pistol and the magazine as keepsakes, and the paper because it was what he had come for. He restored the cap to the PVC pipe and buried it again.
He ducked up through the trapdoor, closed it again, and then pushed the dirt and rocks back over it to hide it. He could feel the fresh air wafting across his face, breathed it in, and tasted it happily. His legs had some spring as he walked back to his car under the oak trees. He was going to meet the Broker.
Except for his two months with Catherine Hamilton, Moreland had been away from Southern California for two years. He had lived in a succession of small apartments with women whose closets smelled like stale perfume, and who seemed to be unable to get everything picked up off the floor at one time. Driving up the coast with the car window open let him smell the Pacific air.
He had begun this drive at Holcomb’s ranch in the red rocky badlands north and east of Los Angeles. He had driven farther north and west, and when he reached Valencia, the world had begun to change. Soon he was on the Santa Paula freeway to Ventura and the ocean. He stayed beside the Pacific to Santa Barbara and beyond it, and soon there were big stretches of land without buildings, grassy hillsides above the ocean that had never been ruined by developers.
He wished he could stop the car in Santa Maria or San Luis Obispo or one of the other pleasant cities along the way; buy a small, neat house a half mile from the ocean; and never leave. But he kept going, past Pismo Beach, Cambria, Morro Bay. He kept driving until he was tired, stopped at a restaurant where he could look out the window at the endless blue of water and sky, and then bought gas and got on the road again.
It was evening when he reached Santa Cruz, and he decided it was time to sleep. He was a bit older than college age now, twenty-eight, but he could still rent a room not far from the college and look enough like a student to be unremarkable. He could stay until school let out next spring, but he knew he wouldn’t do it. He checked into a small hotel and slept.
In the morning he got up and lingered, walking to a restaurant for breakfast and reading the newspaper while he ate. Holcomb had taught him to travel the way he lived: “Stick to places where there are lots of people just like you.” He looked young, so he spent as much time as he could in college towns. Boston had been good. The city had a college population of two hundred fifty thousand, and at least that many young people who had graduated or dropped out and stayed.
Holcomb had died before Moreland had invented the method of living with working girls. Since then it had kept him invisible for periods of a month to five months at a time. But now there was a man hunting him, turning up in each place where he stopped. The man had destroyed forever his way of staying invisible. He didn’t dare go near an escort again. He knew that he was going to have to be visible for long enough to deal with the Broker, but as soon as he had his money, he would find a new way to get invisible again.
He drove on to San Mateo and began to search for the right house. He had considered checking into a hotel first, but he had decided to put that off. It was still early in the day. He might be able to finish whatever his business with the Broker might turn out to be, and then drive a distance from here before he stopped for the night.
He found the address and studied the house as he drove past. It was the right sort of house for the Broker. It was a medium-size one-story ranch house in a neighborhood of medium-size one-story ranch houses. It had a black iron fence in front surmounted with spearheads that were ornamental but also sharp. He noticed that the mailbox was at the sidewalk, built into one of the two brick stanchions on the sides of the gate. There was an alarm company’s sign on the lawn, and a BEWARE OF DOGS sign on the fence.
Moreland parked his car around the corner from the house two hours after dark. As he walked past the houses on the street, he noticed that many of them had windows opened to the mild summer night. He could hear the local newscasters talking in one house and a televised gunfight in another.
He didn’t stop or let himself appear to be studying the area as he walked. Uncertainty and hesitation triggered suspicion. At the Broker’s house he reached in, opened the front gate, went up the walk, and kept going to the back, where he was out of sight from the street. After he got there he sat on the back steps, listening. All he could hear was the air-conditioning unit churning away. If anybody had noticed him and called the police, they would arrive shortly. If the Broker had seen him, he would hear the back door open behind him.
After ten minutes he stood and walked along the back of the house, looking in each window as he passed it. There were no lights on, but in the kitchen he could see the small green light on the refrigerator’s water dispenser and the red clock on the microwave oven’s controls. He stopped by the dining room window, where he could see the control pad for the alarm system. It had a couple of green dots to show the power was on, but the red display said RDY, meaning it was not engaged.
He formed a theory that was a simple preference, a hope. The alarm was off. If a person went out, or to bed, he would turn the alarm on. But if he were wide awake and watching television or reading, he might have left it off. Moreland walked to the kitchen door, turned the knob, and opened it. He stepped in and closed the door behind him.
Something was wrong. The air-conditioning was on too high. He listened without moving. The only sound was the steady hum of the central air-conditioning chilling the house to something like the temperature of a refrigerator. Even though he was wearing a jacket to cover his gun he felt uncomfortable. After a minute the air conditioner stopped blowing. Immediately he noticed that the air had a faint ugly smell, the coppery aftertaste of blood. Something in his line of work had happened here.
He moved to the bottommost kitchen drawer and pulled it wide open. He felt duct tape, a hammer, a screwdriver, a box of nails, a flashlight. He turned the flashlight on. The beam was weak, but the first thing it showed him was a bubble pack of batteries. He replaced the old ones, being careful not to leave prints on the batteries, wiped off the package, and advanced into the house.
In the living room he stopped. The man on the floor was about Holcomb’s age, late forties or fifty, with a shaved head and a tangle of tattoos encircling his right arm like tropical foliage. He’d had a pierced left ear, but whatever he’d had in it had been torn out. Someone had run a straight razor or box cutter from his sternum to his belly and let him bleed out on the floor. Moreland could see that the blood was mostly coagulated around the edges and the surface, but there was still quite a bit of liquid. The man had probably been dead an hour or two.