47
The patio door opened into the kitchen. Dexter closed the door behind him and brandished the Glock.
The little dog was nowhere to be found. It had gotten the hell out of the way, apparently. Smart mutt.
He stood on the threshold for a moment. Trembling with a degree of excitement that he rarely felt.
Four years of thinking about his wife. Four years of imagining how it would feel to get his hands on her again. Four years of fantasizing about the terror he’d see in her big, pretty eyes as he choked the life out of her.
His wife and his money were so close his anticipation was almost painful.
He walked deeper into the house. Thick shadows lay everywhere around him. Rain drummed on the roof, tapped the windows like insistent fingers.
It was a roomy home. Big kitchen with Corian countertops, stainless steel appliances, an island, and a large eating area. Hardwood floors in the entry hall. Dining room and living room furnished with nice pieces. Laundry room with washer and dryer. A home office with a desk, comfortable chair, computer, and filing cabinet.
A tray of business cards on the desk read
MOORE DESIGNS
,
LLC
. Was hubby self-employed, too?
The two-story family room was furnished with microfiber sofas and chairs, and a large, flat-screen television bracketed by shelves full of DVDs like
The Color Purple, Love and Basketball,
and
Friday.
The rooms were painted an array of colors, soft reds and greens and earth tones. There was no clutter. The place was as clean as if a crew of maids had visited that morning.
The lessons he had taught her about keeping a proper home had remained with her.
There were pictures everywhere, too. Photos of his wife. Photos of her posing at her wedding with her pussy husband. Photos of people that he took as their family and friends. A photo of a beach somewhere.
She’d taken the pictures after she divorced him. They were a literal shrine to the deceitful life she’d built.
There were no recent pictures of her family, which supported her aunt’s claim that she didn’t know where her niece had gone. Looked like his wife had relocated and hadn’t told her new man anything about her true, scandalous past.
Dexter would be happy to give him the 411.
The two-car garage was empty. It contained the standard implements of suburban living: lawn mower, weed trimmer, edger, rake, shovel.
After checking the bathrooms and closets, he ascended the staircase, and entered the room on the left.
A study with a desk, a bookcase displaying dog figurines and more pictures. This had to be his wife’s area.
He flipped through the file cabinet, but found nothing of interest.
DON’T EVER TELL 253
The study opened into a sparsely decorated jack-and-jill bathroom. The bathroom led to another room that had a futon and a small television: a guest bedroom.
He reentered the hallway and headed toward the doorway at the end.
It was the master suite. King-size bed draped in winecolored sheets, and a thick, matching comforter. Classic, cherry wood furniture: nightstands, armoire, wide dresser with an oval mirror. More goddamned photos.
He checked the bathroom—it had a dual-sink vanity, garden tub, and glass-fronted shower stall—and the walk-in closet, too. All clear.
He was not only habitually securing the scene. He was seeking clues to where she had gone—and the most likely hiding place for a safe.
She would have stored his money in a safe. She couldn’t have deposited one point seven million in a bank account without having to face a lot of questions she would have been unprepared to answer.
He returned to the kitchen. It had a tile floor. Holstering the pistol in his waistband, he approached the refrigerator.
He pulled it out of its niche.
No mat underneath. He knelt, and did not feel any loose grooves between the tiles, either.
He’d been half-hoping for an ironic conclusion, that she would have hid his money in the same place he’d stashed his. No luck. Devising his hiding place, after all, had required a level of intelligence and cunning that she didn’t possess.
He had to think like her. Dumb it down several notches. Look in obvious places.
He moved to the cabinets and began to fling open doors. Dishes, glassware, canned goods, containers of seasonings and spices. No coffee cans full of cash.
In the dining room, he tore open the china cabinet doors, but they contained only dishes, place settings, and tablecloths.
Catching sight of a painting, he grabbed the frame and ripped it off the wall. No safe behind it.
He snatched all of the other painting and photographs off the walls, too, tossing them to the floor, their protective glass fronts shattering. Nothing.
Sofas. Rip those cushions off and look underneath.
Nothing.
You fucking bitch, where the hell did you hide my goddamned money?
Chest heaving, he withdrew his knife and hammer.
And got down to serious work.
48
A freezing downpour bombarded the city. In typical Atlanta fashion, that meant everyone, from natives to area transplants to visitors, suddenly forgot how to drive. Joshua found himself mired in traffic on I-75/I-85 South barely a mile removed from downtown, an ocean of red taillights surrounding him.
He swore under his breath. A traffic update on the radio told of a major accident a couple of miles ahead that had resulted in the closure of three out of the six interstate highway lanes. He could try to take surface streets to bypass the wreck, but in circumstances like this, about a thousand other drivers usually had the same notion, guaranteeing gridlock at every turn.
He was going to be stuck on the road for a while. As he inched forward, windshield wipers ticking across the glass, he reflected on his conversation with LaVosha.
I can tell you that Rachel loves her property dearly. It’s been . . . a part of her for a very long time.
A profound remark, yet he had no idea what she could be talking about. He felt that he should, however. It was as though the gears of his brain had locked up, preventing him from reaching a revelation that danced around the edge of his thoughts.
Maybe the answer would pop into his mind later that day. As an artist, he’d learned that inspiration could be cajoled and encouraged, but never forced. He had to give his subconscious a chance to work out the solution.
But he was eager to get to the bottom of things. He felt as if time were running out.
To distract himself, he switched to an R&B music station. “This Christmas,” by Donnie Hathaway, was playing. It was Rachel’s favorite holiday song. Such a hard knot formed in his throat that he had to change the channel to talk radio.
Almost an hour later, he finally turned into their subdivision. Although it was only a few minutes past noon, the storm had brought a premature twilight, which normally triggered the community’s street lamps. But the lights were dead. A power line must have been down somewhere in the vicinity.
He pulled into his driveway. The rain was coming down in sheets. He hit the remote control button to open the garage door, but nothing happened.
His home was without power, too. He would have to go inside through the front door.
Cold rain beating onto his head, he raced from his truck to the door, unlocked it, and stepped into the foyer, dripping wet.
He had activated the alarm system when he’d left, but the system did not beep when he’d opened the door. Probably due to the loss of power.
Droplets had spattered the lenses of his glasses, blurring his vision. He took off the spectacles to take them to the bathroom and wipe them dry with a tissue.
DON’T EVER TELL 257
Without benefit of glasses, his surroundings were a colorful blur.
Walking through the foyer of his shadowy home, he did not immediately sense that anything was wrong. The house was quiet; the only sound was the driving rain. Coco usually greeted him at the door, but she might have been asleep upstairs.
He turned to the left, where the powder room was located. His shoulder thumped against the wall. He was even clumsier than usual without his glasses.
When he walked into the bathroom, his boot crunched across something scattered on the tile floor. It sounded and felt like glass shards.
He looked down. Squinting, he could make out pieces of broken glass.
Still squinting, he looked up at the mirror above the vanity.
It had been smashed.
Someone broke inside our house,
he thought, with sudden clarity. And in the next breath:
Bates.
The sound of a shoe squeaking against hardwood made him spin around in the bathroom doorway.
Just in time to see the fist crash into his jaw.
49
His head snapped sideways. He stumbled and banged against the wall, and his mouth lolled open.
In his dazed state, he could think only that he had never been hit so hard in his life.
He had dropped his glasses while reeling from the blow. But he didn’t need them to see that Bates was close, looming near him.
“Welcome home, punk motherfucker,” Bates said. He had a deep, sandpaper-rough voice.
Glass crunched. He realized that Bates was grinding his spectacles under his heel. He had a backup pair in the bedroom, but Bates was blocking the hallway.
The gun was in the bedroom, too.
Using the wall for support, he forced himself to stand. Bates watched him as coolly as a tomcat watching a hobbled mouse.
Unlike his appearance in the mug shot, Bates was clean shaven. He wore a dark jacket, jeans, black leather boots.
He did not have a weapon, but with fists as powerful as his, he didn’t need any.
“Know who I am?” Bates asked. “You ought to, ’cause you’ve been fucking my wife.”
It took a moment for Joshua’s stupefied brain to process the man’s comment.
“S-she’s not your wife...any more.” Joshua’s jaw was swelling painfully; his voice sounded as if he had a mouthful of marbles. “Divorced ...you.”
Bates grunted, flashed a hard grin.
“So you know. Two questions I got for you, then. Where’s the bitch? And where’s my goddamn money?”
“M-money? What money?”
“Right,” Bates said, voice thick with disgust. “What money?”
Snarling, Bates came at him. Joshua lunged and threw a wild punch.
Bates nimbly evaded the blow, and Joshua’s miss left him exposed. Bates landed a punch to his gut that felt like a detonating bomb.
Joshua gasped, gagging on the pain. Bates grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and swung him around, slammed him against the wall hard enough to chip the plaster.
A quick uppercut to Joshua’s chin clapped his teeth together, made him bite his tongue. A jab to Joshua’s throat ripped a garbled scream out of him and sent him sliding to the floor on useless legs.
Tears wetted Joshua’s cheeks. His body was a symphony of agony. He had never been in so much agony in his life.
Bates stood over him. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
I can’t fight this guy. What the hell was I thinking?
It was tempting to lie there and take the beating. To give up. That was what he did in life when situations got difficult—gave up. He wasn’t a fighter, in spite of his tough talk to Eddie that morning. He was a big, clumsy guy with poor vision and untrained fists and instincts, and how could he ever stand up to a guy like Bates, a former cop, an ex-con?
It was hopeless.
Bates knelt. The inmate photo didn’t do him justice. Gazing into his dark eyes was like staring into the depths of the grave in which you would one day be buried.
“The bitch,” Bates said, “and the money. Where are they? Start talking, chief—else this only gets worse for you.”
“I don’t...know,” Joshua said in a ragged voice.
Bates seized Joshua’s ring finger on his left hand, adorned with the titanium wedding band. He savagely bent the finger back.
Joshua shouted, tried to pull away, but Bates didn’t relinquish his hold. Lips twisted, he only pushed back further.
Joshua’s finger snapped like a pencil. He howled. Wanted to black out. Blacking out would have been a blessing.
But he remained wide awake, his entire left hand feeling as if he had soaked it in a flesh-dissolving acid.
“Punk-ass,” Bates said.
In the act of breaking Joshua’s finger, he had removed his wedding band. He glanced at it with disdain and dropped it into his pocket.
Cradling his limp hand to his chest, Joshua scooted backward down the hall.
“The bitch,” Bates said. “The money. Where?”
Bates spoke in a flat tone, like a murderous robot programmed for a single brutal mission. The laundry room was at the end of the hall, behind Joshua. Joshua clambered to his feet and made a run for it.
Bates didn’t chase after him. He had a bemused expression, as if this were a game.
Joshua hustled into the laundry room, slammed the door behind him with his shoulder.
It was a small, shadowy room, the majority of the space taken up by the washing machine, electric dryer, wire shelving packed with detergents, laundry sheets, and cleaning agents, and a plastic basket on the floor heaped with towels that needed to be laundered.
Murky light sifted inside through a tiny window on the wall opposite the door. The window was much too small for Joshua to squeeze through.
He also might have pushed the washing machine against the door, to bar Bates from entering, but he needed the use of both hands to move the heavy machine, and with his broken finger, such a task was all but impossible.
He unclipped his cell phone from the holster. But when he saw the “Network Busy” signal on the display, he dropped the phone on top of the dryer. Bates was coming, and he couldn’t waste his precious time waiting to squeeze a 911 call through a network that was probably overloaded due to the inclement weather.
Bates’s footsteps creaked toward the door.
Squinting, Joshua surveyed the items on the shelves. He spotted a cleaning agent in a spray can; the formula contained ammonia. He twisted off the cap, nearly fumbled the can to the floor.
The door exploded inward.
Gripping the spray can in his good hand, Joshua surged toward Bates. He mashed the button.
The jet of spray found Bates’s eyes. He roared, raised his arms to shield his head.
Joshua charged through the doorway and smashed the blunt bottom edge of the can against the man’s skull. Bates sank to the floor, cursing, wounded and temporarily blinded, but not out of the fight. A guy like him would never give up.
Joshua raced past him, back into the main hallway.
Through squinted eyes, he could see that Bates had trashed the house. Broken glass was everywhere: ceramic figurines, framed photos and artwork, vases. Furniture was overturned. Ripped cushions spilled their stuffing like disemboweled corpses.
There was a landline in the kitchen, mounted on the wall beside a bank of cabinets. The cabinet doors had been flung open, and dishes and glasses and canned goods had been swept out and onto the floor.
Joshua avoided the broken glassware glittering on the floor, and grabbed the handset.
The line was dead.
Bates emerged from the hallway. His eyes were swelling, nostrils crusted with snot.
He now held a switchblade with a nasty, razor-sharp edge.
They circled slowly around the kitchen table, like boxers in a ring.
Joshua wanted to get upstairs, to get the gun and his backup pair of glasses. Bates seemed to intuitively sense Joshua’s goal, and barred the way.
“The bitch, and the money,” Bates said. He twirled the knife in his fingers.
“I don’t know where she is, and I don’t know anything about any money!”
“One point seven million,” Bates said. “She stole it from me, and don’t tell me you don’t know all about it. You married the bitch.”
“You’re crazy,” Joshua said, shakily.
Growling, Bates grabbed a chair and heaved it toward Joshua. Joshua moved to dodge the object, but as he did, Bates tossed another chair at him, heaving them as if they were as weightless as tennis balls, and the second chair hit Joshua in the chest. As he staggered backward across the kitchen, Bates came at him, murder in his eyes.
Joshua backed up against the refrigerator, which had been pulled out of its normal spot. He grabbed the door handle of the freezer and jerked it open.
The door smashed into Bates’s face. Bates bellowed and dropped down as swiftly as if a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet.
Joshua sidestepped to rush past him. On his knees, Bates swung the blade in a wide arc. The knife tore through Joshua’s calf.
Shouting, Joshua stumbled against the counter.
Behind him, Bates was getting up again.
Joshua lurched out of the kitchen and into the family room.
Bates had swept all of their wedding photographs off the walls and smashed them. He’d knocked over the Christmas tree by the fireplace, crushed all of the multicolored ornaments. They lay scattered across the carpet like broken eggs.
Why had he ransacked the house? Had he been looking for the money he claimed Rachel had stolen from him? One point seven million?
It was so unbelievable it was almost certainly true.
Joshua reached the staircase. In his pain-wracked condition, climbing the fifteen steps seemed as daunting a task as scaling the summit of a mountain.
Bates was stalking across the family room. Blood poured from his nose, which was probably broken, but he seemed oblivious to the pain.
Joshua grabbed the railing and started ascending the steps. He used his long legs to take them three at a time, risking a nasty fall if he lost his balance, but he didn’t slow, and, miraculously, didn’t fall.
He made it to the second floor. Bates had wrought destruction up here, too. Smashed photos and artwork covered the hallway carpet, and black smears and deep dents marred the walls.
Bates was halfway up the staircase. Coming fast. Knife gleaming.
Joshua ran into the master bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it. He braced his back against it.
He expected Bates to attempt to kick the door down, as he had done in the laundry room, but after a few seconds, nothing had happened.
Warily, Joshua moved away from the door.