Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“Maybe you’re taking too long of a shower.”

“Fuck you.”

“Someone is going to go with you while you put some clothes on, then we’re going to ask you to wait out here in the living room.”

Bailey let his towel drop and looked at Roberts and Shauf.

“One of you ladies want to come with me? My clothes are in the bathroom.”

They started in the kitchen and there was almost nothing in the cabinets, a few liquor bottles, soy sauce, a lot of empty shelf space, three Coors cans in the refrigerator, milk, soft drinks, moldy cheese, a package of English muffins, and then something that caught Marquez’s eye, three Dannon yogurts. Bailey wasn’t a yogurt eater. He’d been there for a couple of Bailey’s breakfasts, pre-packaged Danish, or donuts from the convenience store, a couple of cigarettes and coffee. In the freezer was a bag of ice, two frozen TV dinners, a salmon tail, and two abalone steaks wrapped in white butcher paper. The pale meat had been in there long enough to have ice crystals. In this context it didn’t mean anything and he rewrapped it and put it back in the freezer.

“Anything, Lieutenant?” Cairo asked, and Marquez glanced over him.

“A little bit of abalone, but it’s old.”

Bailey wanted to call his lawyer, kept asking to every minute, or so. It was Marquez’s habit not to let suspects make any calls until after the team had completed a search. There was always a chance they’d make a call and tip someone else off before key evi-dence was found.

Cairo was in the living room, emptying out a TV cabinet filled primarily with old magazines. Bailey sat on the couch near him making his request every few minutes, Cairo in flip-flops and shorts, but wearing a tactical jacket. He looked like an armed junkie root-ing through Bailey’s stuff.

Marquez thumbed the liquor bottles. Gin, vodka, cheap scotch, Jim Beam. Bailey had flipped the lawyer’s card at Marquez. Alberto Cruz, a name that was vaguely familiar, though he didn’t read anything into it. He wished he could confront Bailey this morn-ing with Heinemann’s confession, but it would have to wait. He let the liquor cabinet door fall shut and Cairo came slowly over. The house smelled like dust and cat piss. The carpet was probably original.

“He occupies this place, but he doesn’t live here,” Cairo said. “This isn’t a home.”

He turned to Shauf’s footsteps. “One of the bedrooms is locked,” she said. “We need him to open it unless we’re going to use the Turbo again.”

“Jimmy, there’s a locked bedroom. Have you got a key for it?”

Bailey didn’t answer and Shauf went down the hall to the bathroom. Marquez walked down, tried the bedroom and then leaned in the bathroom where Shauf had lifted the tank lid off the toilet, looking for drugs.

“There’s yogurt in the refrigerator,” Marquez said. “Yogurt isn’t his style, but we haven’t seen anybody else staying here.”

“Back home we’d run him in for yogurt.” She was Texan. “But out here I think it’s legal.” She clicked open the door of the shower and he smelled the draft of mildew. She reached for a shampoo bottle. “Look at this. Did you know he washes his hair?” She picked up a blue disposable razor, turned it in her hand and asked, “What do you think?”

He opened the medicine cabinet. Aspirin, Advil, Band-Aids, strictly ordinary stuff until he emptied the rest of the medicine cabinet and found two prescription labels that were for people named Crawford and Ulrich. When he set these aside the cabinet was empty. The mirrored door swung loosely, too loosely, and he looked at the screws holding the cabinet to the studs, but they were secure and rust had bled from one.

He walked to the end of the hall now, opened the garage door and stepped into the cold darkness, fumbled for the switch, found it, and clicked on a four-foot fluorescent hanging from rusted chains. He hit the button for the garage door opener and it banged into the front of Bailey’s Suburban after rising three or four feet. It slapped against the bumper, came back down, and he hit the but-ton again, heard Bailey’s muffled yelling from the living room where he must have seen the door hitting his car.

“You fucking Nazis.”

A disassembled car motor sat on yellowed newspapers in one corner of the garage, looking like it had for years. He saw dive equipment and moved toward it, knelt to examine the scuba gear. A yellow wetsuit, flippers, a mask, gloves, booties, and scuba tanks. They lacked the dust of everything else in here. He picked up an underwater dive light and tested it, shining the light on the back wall where an old workbench, stained with oil and with an iron vise mounted on one end, stood on wooden 2 x4’s. Above it were shelves, paint cans, jars of screws, relics of the landlord he guessed. A few suitcases were stacked in a corner. He looked at the rafters, the weak light, and walked back out to the living room. He needed better light.

“Jimmy, I need you to back your truck up. Do you mind doing that or do you want me to?”

They let him back the truck up, then Marquez asked him to come into the garage and over to the dive equipment. He picked up a wetsuit and turned to face Bailey.

“How’s that eardrum of yours, Jimmy?” Bailey claimed he couldn’t dive anymore because of a blown eardrum. “This is yours?”

Bailey shook his head.

“You’re storing it for somebody?”

“I sold it to a guy. I’m letting him store it here with his motor.”

“What’s his name?”

“Shit, I don’t remember.”

“You’ve grown some balls, Jimmy. You don’t even seem like the same guy.”

“You seem like the same asshole, dude.”

Overhead in the gap between ceiling joist and roof rafters were pieces of lumber, mostly long pieces of trim, warped and checked and dried too long. There were pieces of copper pipe, heating duct, and angle iron. He scanned the workbench, then pulled the ply-wood away from the wall to see what was behind it, and now was looking at unfolded white waxed boxes with a Mexican label for abalone. He counted, turned to Bailey.

“Forty. When did you go into the shipping business?”

“Excuse me? My lawyer says you’re going to pay for every lost day while I don’t have my boat.”

“You tell him next time you talk to him that all his hard work has paid off. You’re getting your boat back and he ought to send you a bill. We’re going to have to open that bedroom door now. Do you want to do it for us or do you want to ask whoever is in there to open it?”

Marquez could see he’d guessed correctly, though Bailey didn’t say anything until they’d walked down the hallway and Bailey had leaned against the door. Then he spoke quietly, “Hey, it’s me,” he said, “you gotta open up.” He turned back to Marquez. “She must have split.”

“I’ll go around,” Cairo said. Bailey didn’t know it, but they’d had the perimeter covered since getting here. That was another old habit carried from his DEA time. No one had gone out the window, but a few minutes later they heard Cairo’s feet land on the bed-room floor. He opened the door and a shade sucked tight against the window as the draft blew in. “The window was wide open,” Cairo said.

Marquez turned. “Who was in here, Jimmy?”

Bailey was too quick to answer.

“A chick I met last night. She freaked when you started knock-ing and I told her just to stay in here.”

“Where’s her car?”

“She rode with me.”

“She walking down the street, right now?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“She’s got her phone. She might have called a ride.”

“What’s her name?”

“Karen.”

“Karen what?”