Hellbent (6 page)

As if there was anything I could do about it from Portland, if it did.

But I like to pretend that I’m covering my tracks, bracing for any contingency. Ready for the worst, and all that jazz. I always feel better if there’s a plan in place. And in this case, the plan was, “Leave the blind guy in charge of the juvenile delinquents and everything will be just fine. Probably.”

I exited quietly, or as quietly as I could, given the clanking gate on the old elevator.

Outside, Seattle was in rare form.

It was raining just barely hard enough to say “it’s raining” not “it’s drizzling”—and the wind off Puget Sound was blowing in sideways, drilling all those nasty little drops right into the cracks of everything I was wearing. I understand the whole idea of spring showers and I can even get behind them with a little cheer, but I could live without the wind, and I could also live with a little lightening of the chill, seeing as it’s April and all. I’d be dumbfounded and delighted to see it crest sixty degrees.

Goddamn, I mean
seriously
.

My car was parked in a private garage two blocks away. I hiked toward it with a glum sort of resignation, all my glee from the
snikt
of the luggage drained right out of me by the weather. I don’t usually mind it, so I’m not sure what my problem was that particular evening. Maybe I took it as a sign—a sign that this was not going to be easy or pleasant after all. A sign that I was in for a good soaking.

Or I was just pissy about being wet.

After snagging the right wheel of my roller in a metal gutter grate and generally getting soaked right to the bone, I reached the parking garage and crammed all my stuff into the trunk. I let myself inside the silver Taurus and pulled out of the garage, into the street. Then I began the roundabout route to the interstate.

Yes, the Princess of the Night drives a Taurus. At the moment.

I don’t go for flashy cars because I don’t want anyone to look at me. Usually I drive something five or ten years old and as utterly bland as I can arrange.
Voilà
, Taurus. And to clarify the other half of that whiny paragraph about getting out of the city, let me be clear: At no point, anywhere in Seattle, is there a clear and obvious route to an interstate. And, if you find yourself magically right beside an interstate on-ramp, you can safely assume that it’s leading the wrong direction. You might say to yourself, “Self, if I’ve found the on-ramp going
this
direction, surely the on-ramp going the
other
direction must be right nearby!” But you’d be wrong. This place was designed by crack addicts, I’m convinced of it.

Eventually I made it onto the main drag and out down I-5, headed south. It’s not a particularly pleasant or unpleasant drive to Portland—not at night, anyway. You can’t see Mount Ranier or any of the other mountains, and mostly you spend all your time squinting at headlights as they glare up at you from the darkness. But the path is straight even if the road is potholed and crooked. It’s an easy shot, all in a row: Tacoma, Olympia, Vancouver (the Washington one, not the one in Canada), Longview.

Portland.

You cross a big bridge on the way into town, driving over the Willamette River and down into a sprawling, industrial sort of place that was once called “Stumptown” because they’d cut down all the trees as far as the eye could see.

Once I’d made it into town, it was first things first. I got myself a hotel room down by the river, which put me a little outside the city center, but was worth it for the nicer accommodations. Then I hunkered down, unpacked my stuff, made myself comfortable, and commandeered the television remote because it was MINE ALL MINE and no one was going to fight me for it.

I also took a few minutes shortly before dawn to fool around online and get a better feel for the address I was about to breach.

Using Google Maps and other assorted search-engine explorations, I examined Joseph Harvey’s house, his neighborhood, his nearest restaurants, gas stations, and easiest routes of exit from that little shred of sparsely built semi-suburbia. If I’d had a printer handy I would’ve printed everything I found, but I didn’t, and I kicked myself. It’s always the one thing you forget to pack, you know?

Realistically speaking, I could find my way over there without any real trouble. I memorized the streets and counted the number of houses in every direction. But I love having paper backups, if only because of the joy I get from shredding or burning them when I’m finished. It’s like crossing something off a list in a violent, warm fashion.

Paper backups are psychological bread-crumb trails, or that’s how I like to think of it. But I didn’t have them, so I was on my own with only my neuroses to keep me company. Just like the good old days!

I went to sleep sometime around dawn and woke up roughly
when the moon began to rise, which meant I was out of bed around nine o’clock and out of the hotel about half an hour later—when it was good and dark, and I was good and ready.

Harvey’s house was eighteen point two miles south from my present position, outside the main chunk of town, and outside most of the better-planned ’burbs. It took me over half an hour to find the general location, and another five minutes to pinpoint my target. This is partly because I’d misjudged the satellite photos, thinking that Harvey lived in some kind of neighborhood. He didn’t, not really. He lived in the woods, with next-door neighbors who were half a city block’s length away from him on either side and across the street.

I chalked this up in the “win” column. Distant neighbors meant no one would be listening for trouble at his place. Then I wondered if there would be dogs. Horace had called Harvey a redneck, and rednecks—in my limited experience—were like dogs.

I don’t like dogs, and dogs don’t like me, but that’s what the knockout powder was for, wasn’t it? I saw no sense in killing somebody’s pets in the course of robbing his house. That would be bad form. And it would also be risky. Dogs are shifty fuckers—faster than they look, louder than hell, and all kinds of nosy. Dogs also smell me, right away—which is to say, they smell that something is wrong with me. Some instinctive bit of their wee, primitive brains tells them that I’m trouble. Wee, primitive brains have their uses, but I’d rather not be called out by a Doberman, if at all possible.

On my first drive-by, I suspected someone was home at the Harvey residence. None of the lights closest to the front of the house was on, but a glow from deeper within suggested someone watching television, or possibly sitting up reading. By now it was coming up on ten thirty, so it wasn’t atrociously late for your average law-abiding mortal, and this was fine. I was patient. I’d
just wait for everyone to turn in for the night, then let myself inside for a look around.

After doing some initial scouting, I parked my car at the bottom of the hill upon which Mr. Harvey’s neighborhood sat. As far as I could tell, it was really just one long road running the length of a ridge, with houses plopped along it and not much else worth noting. I made sure the car was inconspicuously stashed (it was, behind a closed and abandoned gas station), and started to hike toward my goal.

It was a nicer night in Portland than Seattle. Not quite as windy, and not quite as cold. I’m led to understand that this is typical, and I’m sure it has something to do with complicated jet streams and weather patterns, but I don’t really give a shit about any of it. The point is, the night was cold, but not cold enough to be brittle. And it was breezy, just breezy enough for the rustle of trees and bushes to hide the sound of my footsteps.

I spent fifteen minutes poking through the woods, squinting to catch every splinter of moonlight and praying I wouldn’t encounter any raccoons or anything.

I don’t like raccoons. They look … 
shifty
, with their little burglar masks and everything. Also, they carry rabies. Can I catch rabies? Probably not. All the same, it sounds gruesome—and I think we all know that cute, fuzzy woodland creatures are not to be trusted on general principle.

I crunched through the dark in my boots that were frankly too expensive for this sort of thing, and I counted the backyards I passed until I knew for a fact—even before I made my way around to the front of the house—that I’d found Joseph Harvey’s place.

Uninspiring from all angles, the Harvey place was a fifties ranch house too mundane to achieve the descriptor of “midcentury.” It was in relatively good repair, but it was also accessorized
with an aboveground swimming pool full of slimy leaves, an ATV up on cement blocks, and a long front porch that had a motorcycle parked on it.

Ugh. The things some people spend their money on.

The interior glow I’d witnessed during my drive-by was still the only sign of life within, but something was bugging me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I just had a weird, intense feeling that something was wrong, and I haven’t survived this long by ignoring those feelings.

I stood still, up against a side wall of the house, hoping I blended into the shadows and listening for all I was worth. I detected a steady drip, like water off a rain gutter. I heard canned applause, and what was either a baby crying a long way away, or a kitten crying much closer. Hard to tell, but I was leaning toward a kitten.

I didn’t smell any dogs, and I didn’t see any sign of dogs, either—no water bowls, leashes, or coiled piles of crap to be avoided.

From this train of thought came another: the idea that I shouldn’t be listening. I should be
smelling
. My nose isn’t as good as a dog’s, but it’s better than a person’s—and it was working overtime to tell me to be on guard. All around me was a prickly, sharp, electrical odor like the smell of cooked air right after a lightning strike. It insinuated itself slowly, but once I’d noticed it I couldn’t un-notice it.

I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but the skies were clear above and I could count the stars, so it wasn’t the smell of a storm. Something else, then.

The kitten (yes, I was sure now, a kitten) upped its caliber of wailing, hitting that pitch animals make when something is very truly wrong and they’re in no position to do anything about it. This kitten was inside the fifties ranch home of Joseph Harvey
who, if my ears could be believed, was inside watching television.

Or was he?

The longer I stood there, feeling my shoulder blades go numb from being pressed up against the chilly bricks, the more I thought this couldn’t be right. No one sits and watches television with a yowling animal—at least, not without telling it to shut up, or throwing a pillow at it or something. And I heard no signs of a serious deep sleeper. No snoring, no sounds of apnea horking through the bedroom or living room, or wherever the TV was located.

Of course, I told myself, if this guy can sleep through Mr. Bigglesworth’s serenade, he can sleep through a gentle home invasion.

Did I believe this? Only halfway. But the other half of me believed that no one was inside, and no one was asleep, and the smell was getting stronger, and I was getting tense, just hanging around outside like some common felon.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. This wasn’t a jewelry heist, or
Ocean’s Eleven
out in bumblefuck. This was some dude’s house, and he didn’t even have a cheesy
THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY
 … sign on any of his windows. He’d probably never considered the possibility than anyone would break in, not in a million years. This was most likely a guy who left his car unlocked.

I shimmied around to the back door—it was built into a screened-in porch—and gave it a tug. It opened with a soft squeak, stuck slightly, and the handle came off in my fingers. Ah. Not a door that saw a lot of action. I breached it, stepped lightly to the door that would actually let me into the house, and tried it. The knob swiveled without so much as a click of protest.

The kitten had stopped meowing. It’d heard me and was coming to investigate.

Before I could even get the door open enough to let myself inside, there it was, paws grasping out through the crack. I nudged it back inside with my foot and shut the door behind me, holding a finger up to my mouth as if any eight-week-old critter in the world knows what the universal gesture for “shush!” means. The kitten was gangly and gray, with a white smudge on its nose and murder in its eyes. Or it might’ve been peevishness. Hard to tell with those things.

It sat down at my feet and let out a silent meow that I would’ve mistaken for a yawn if it hadn’t been so insistent about it.

Believe it or not, I knew what it was trying to tell me. I’d have known even if I hadn’t seen that the creature’s paws were dipped in something red and delicious, and I’m not talking ketchup. I smelled blood. And I could tell, when I gave my rudimentary psychic senses a little stretch, that (the kitten notwithstanding) I was the only living person inside the house.

Throwing caution and quiet to the wind, I dashed away from the back door and toward the blood. It was easy to follow. The house wasn’t very big and there was a whole lot of it.

I found Joseph Harvey (I assume) lying facedown on a keyboard in front of a big, flat-screen monitor. The screen saver refused to yield what he might’ve been watching, but the rows upon rows of video game boxes told me this was a playroom, not a workroom.

Horace had been right. Joseph was a big son of a gun. His forehead had crushed the keyboard, sending keys flying all over the place, and his slashed throat had ruined everything within about six feet of the place where he still sat, having run out of extra lives for the final time.

Poetic, really.

Behind me the kitten squeaked. Trails of red paw-prints crisscrossed the room, and when the little bugger sat down, it left a
bloody butt-print, too. The poor thing had been climbing all over the dead guy, trying to wake him up. Or eat him, for all I know.

“Yeah, yeah,” I told it. “I see what you were hollering about. Um. Sorry about your owner.”

It narrowed its eyes and meowed again, with more vigor this time.

“What?” I asked it. “What do you want me to do? He’s already getting cold.” Then I muttered, “My advice is to pray that your next owner is richer.”