was cold and dark and damp and the traffic was bad. There was
congestion everywhere. Long lines of red brake lights streamed
ahead of them, long lines of bright white headlights streamed
towards them. They drove south across the 11th Street Bridge
and fought through a maze of streets to Froelich’s house.
She double-parked with the motor running and fiddled behind
the steering wheel and took her door key off its ring. Handed it
to him.
‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ she said. ‘Make yourself at
home.’
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He took his bag and got out and watched her drive off. She
made a right to loop back north over a different bridge and
disappeared from sight. He crossed the sidewalk and unlocked
her front door. The house was dark and warm. It had her
perfume in it. He closed the door behind him and fumbled for a
light switch. A low-wattage bulb came on inside a yellow shade
on a lamp on a small chest of drawers. It gave a soft, muted
light. He put the key down next to it and dropped his bag at the
foot of the stairs and stepped into the living room. Switched on
the light. Walked on into the kitchen. Looked around.
There were basement stairs in there, behind a door. He stood
still for a second with his ritual curiosity nagging at him. It was
an ingrained reflex, like breathing. But was it polite to search
your host’s house? Just out of habit? Of course not. But he
couldn’t resist. He walked down the stairs, switching lights on
as he went. The basement itself was a dark space walled with
smooth old concrete. It had a furnace and a water softener in it.
A washing machine and an electric dryer. Shelving units. Old
suitcases. Plenty of miscellaneous junk stacked all around, but
nothing of any great significance. He walked back up. Turned
off the lights. Opposite the head of the stairs was an enclosed
space right next to the kitchen. It was larger than a closet,
smaller than a room. Maybe a pantry, originally. It had been
fitted out as a tiny home office. There was a rolling chair and a
desk and shelves, all of them a few years old. They looked like
chain store versions of real office furniture, with plenty of wear
and tear on them. Maybe they were secondhand. There was a
computer, fairly old. An inkjet printer connected to it with a fat
cable. He moved back into the kitchen.
He looked at all the usual places women hide things in
kitchens and found five hundred dollars in mixed bills inside
an earthenware casserole on a high shelf inside a cupboard.
Emergency cash. Maybe an old Y2K precaution that she
decided to stick with afterwards. He found an M9 Beretta
nine-millimetre sidearm in a drawer, carefully hidden under
a stack of place mats. It was old and scratched and stained
with dried oil in random patches. Probably army surplus,
redistributed to another government department. Last
generation Secret Service issue, without a doubt. It was
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unloaded. The magazine was missing. He opened the next
drawer to the left and put his hand on four spares laid out in a
line under an oven glove. They were all loaded with standard
jacketed cartridges. Good news and bad news. The layout
was smart. Pick up the gun with your right hand, access the
magazines with your left. Sound ergonomics. But storing
magazines full of bullets was a bad idea. Leave them long
enough, the spring in the magazine learns its compressed
shape and won’t function right. More jams are caused by tired
magazine springs than any other single reason. Better to keep
the gun with a single shell locked in the chamber and all the
other bullets loose. You can fire once right-handed while you
thumb loose shells into an empty magazine with your left.
Slower than the ideal, but a lot better than pulling the trigger
and hearing nothing at all except a dull click.
He closed the kitchen drawers and moved back into the
living room. Nothing there, except a hollowed-out book on the
shelves, and it was empty. He turned on the TV, and it worked.