Seventy-Six

My apartment door hung open. Crowbar bites ran down the doorframe, showing where someone had worked my door open. I stood at the door, revolver in hand, listening for someone in the apartment. My finger rested on the trigger. I moved it out along the side of the revolver. Never too late to implement gun safety.

Silence. Nobody was moving in my apartment. I considered calling Jael, but my cell phone was lying in a street somewhere, probably shattered. I placed my finger back on the trigger and pushed the door open with my foot. No sound. No movement.

I peeked through the doorway, looking down the hallway to my living room. My big black leather sofa was splashed across the living room, its cushions gutted. My flat panel TV lay on top of it. It had been ripped from the wall over the fireplace.

“That was unnecessary,” I muttered.

I stepped into the condo, peering around the door. The mess got worse. Pans, spices, dishes, paper towels, bottles of Scotch, and the contents of the refrigerator were thrown across the floor. Bags of my mother’s mail had been ripped open and spread everywhere. The countertop was covered with cereal boxes.

My thoughts turned to Click and Clack. I dug through the crap on the counter and found them under a torn plastic bag. They were unaffected by the maelstrom around them.

“Did you guys do this?”

They rested on their log.

“Because I told you no parties. I told you the tough kids would show up and ruin everything.”

Their sponge was dry. I took it out of the terrarium, stepped across the former contents of my cabinets, turned on the water with my revolver hand, and wet the sponge. Tucked it back into the terrarium, sprinkled food on it, and replaced the lid.

“I don’t know when I’ll be seeing you guys,” I said. “I’ll make sure someone checks in on you.”

The search had destroyed my office. All the drawers were pulled out, their contents dumped. The books had been ripped off the shelves and chucked onto the floor. My computer monitor had been smashed. That was just mean. You can’t hide notebooks in an LCD computer monitor.

My bedroom had gotten the same treatment: shredded mattress, strewn clothes, posters torn off the walls. Clearly Talevi killing me would not have saved the person who trashed my apartment looking for notebooks full of damning evidence, evidence that should have been destroyed in my mother’s house fire.

I had lied about having the notebooks. Jael had been right: you can’t tell what will happen when you improvise. You can’t even know whom to trust.