Karen Olson - Driven to Ink

I was thinking about a smart retort when I spotted the address we had for Dan Franklin. I pointed. “That one, there.”

Jeff eased the Pontiac against the curb across the street and a couple of houses down. But it wasn’t exactly as if we were incognito. It was a bright gold car. Sort of like how Starsky and Hutch were driving around undercover in that bright red Gran Torino with the white stripe. Stick out much?

An old blue Ford Taurus sat in the driveway.

“Looks like someone’s home,” Jeff said, indicating the car.

“I don’t think so.” The house was closed up: shutters drawn; the mailbox hanging open, leaking envelopes and advertisements; three newspapers on the front step.

I climbed out of the car and walked up to the driveway and around the Taurus, peering into the windows. It was immaculate inside, no litter of any sort. There was a university parking sticker stuck to the back bumper.

“Kavanaugh,” Jeff hissed behind me. “What are you doing?”

I waved him off and went to the mailbox, reaching in and pulling out the mail. I leafed through it. Electric bill, a couple of credit card bills, junk mail. Jeff peered around my shoulder-I was a couple inches taller than him-and stuck out his hand, grabbing one of the envelopes.

“Hey,” I said, twirling around, trying to get it back.

Jeff grinned and waved it around. “What? You’re going to take the stolen mail from me?”

His words stopped me, and I realized what I was doing. Right. I was messing with the U.S. mail. I could get thrown in jail for this.

“Let’s leave it,” I said.

“Now you want to leave it,” Jeff said. “You wouldn’t want to if you saw what it was.”

Against my better judgment, he’d piqued my interest. “Okay, I’ll give. What is it?”

He stuffed it in his back pocket and took the rest of the mail from me, shoving it back into the mailbox. “This way,” he said, going up to the front steps and actually ringing the doorbell.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just in case the neighbors are watching.”

Okay, that was a good idea.

We stood a few seconds, and Jeff punched at the doorbell a couple more times. He leaned around and tried to look in the windows, but the shutters were closed tight. “Let’s go around back,” he said.

I looked up and down the street, because now I worried we’d be perceived as burglars and the cops would show up any second. But nothing. Maybe the neighbors were all at work.

The back was as deserted as the front. A stone patio, a small grill perched at the corner, stuck off the back of the house as if it were unfinished. I thought about Dan Franklin, living alone and grilling his little piece of steak on it. And then I had a vision of myself doing the same thing. I shuddered as I checked out the steps that went up to a back door. A curtain hung over the window, but Jeff indicated a window to the left of it and just out of reach for him. “Can you see in there?” he asked me.

Nice to know he didn’t have any sort of Napoleon issues when it came to my height.

I got on the top step, stood on my tiptoes, leaned over, and looked into a kitchen. No dirty dishes, nothing out of place, like that car. “It seems fine,” I said.

“But what about this?”

Jeff was no longer standing right behind me. I spun around to see him bending over, picking something up.

When he stood and turned around to face me, I caught my breath.

He was holding what looked like an empty animal cage.

“That doesn’t prove anything,”I said.“It’s an empty cage.

Could’ve been a cat or a small dog in there.”

Jeff brought it over and we studied it a minute.

“You’re right,” he admitted, “but it does seem a little suspicious.”

“The man works with lab animals,” I said. “Of course he might have cages and critters around. We don’t know for sure that the dead rat belonged to him.”

“Who else would have a rat?” Jeff asked.

I sighed. He was probably right. It was possible that rat had lived in this very cage while he was alive. “I wonder why he put the cage out here,” I said, stepping around Jeff and around the side of the house where he’d found it. A trash can was shoved up against the side of the garage.

“It was right next to the trash can,” Jeff said, putting the cage back down. He leaned over and wiped the handle with the tail of his shirt. “Fingerprints,” he said when he saw me watching.

Oh, right. We were trespassing. If Flanigan ever found out we were poking around Dan Franklin’s rat cage, he might have issues with that.

“When you looked inside, did you see any sort of security keypad?” Jeff asked.

I shook my head. “No. What-” I stopped. “You want to get into the house, don’t you? Like you got into my house last night?”

“You really need to talk to Tim about better security,” he said as he walked past me and up the steps to the door. “You might not want to watch.”

I turned my back and looked out over Dan Franklin’s small patch of yard and into the backyard of the house on the next street over. A flutter in a window caught my eye.

“Jeff,” I hissed. “Jeff!”

“It’s open.”

I swung around and saw Jeff in the doorway.

“We have to leave,” I said as I hurried over to him. I indicated the house where I’d seen the curtain move. “Someone’s watching us. The cops could be on their way.”

Disappointment crossed Jeff’s face, but he closed the door with his hand over the tail of his shirt to get rid of those pesky fingerprints, and we ran back around the house to the Pontiac. Jeff had just started the engine when I glimpsed a cruiser coming down the opposite street.

“Get going!” I said, and the car shot forward, the tires screeching across the pavement.

I caught the cop car in the side-view mirror as we turned the corner.

I took a deep breath and leaned back in my seat. “That was close.”

Jeff grinned. “Don’t you like living on the fast side, Kavanaugh?”

“I could live without it,” I said.

“But you got your rocks off going through that guy’s mail, all right, didn’t you?”

I rolled my eyes and stared out the window.

“Hey, Kavanaugh, can you get it out?”

I turned back to see Jeff shifting up in his seat, his butt facing me, the white envelope he’d taken from Dan Franklin’s mailbox flapping against the back of his seat.

I didn’t really want to be that close to Jeff Coleman’s butt, but I reached over and snatched it out.

It was a bank statement.

“We really shouldn’t open this,” I said, but my fingers were itching to.

Sister Mary Eucharista would have slapped those fingers with a ruler if she could.

What was wrong with me? Was being with Jeff Coleman turning me into a felon? We pretend to be getting married to get information; we steal mail; we almost break into a man’s house. What else? Oh, right, I looked into a man’s locker at That’s Amore. But I couldn’t exactly blame Jeff for that. I was alone at the time. But it was his influence, for sure.

Jeff Coleman wasn’t good for me.

He was grinning. “Oh, go ahead,” he egged me on. “Everyone does their banking online anyway now. Don’t you throw those mailed statements in a box and not even look at them?”

How did he know what I did with my bank statements?

He was still talking. “Dan Franklin might not even realize that he didn’t get a statement this month.”

I sighed and tossed the envelope on the dashboard. “I can’t do it,” I said. “It’s bad enough we took it.”

We were stopped at a light at the Home Depot. Jeff grabbed the envelope, slid his finger into the crease, and opened it. He pulled out a couple of sheets of paper with Dan Franklin’s personal business on them.