John Sandford - The Devil's Code

The house behind Jack's, with the pool, showed a backyard light, and lights in the windows, but there was a croton hedge along the back fence, and it cast a shadow over us.

No sauntering, casual bullshit here. We duckwalked to the back porch, found the screen door locked, and the crack in the lock covered with a length of yellow plastic tape and a notice. I carefully peeled them off. The door wanted to rattle when I touched it: it was flimsy, meant to keep out nothing stronger than a blue-bottle fly. I unwrapped the towel, pulled out a short steel pry-bar, pried the door back enough that we could force the lock-tongue across the strike plate.

We eased the door open and slipped inside, crawling now. Listened again. Nothing at all: or almost nothing. Cars on a major street, three blocks away. A crazed bird somewhere, chirping into the dark. An air conditioner with a bad compressor "Hope the rest is this easy," Lane whispered.

"Shh." We pulled on thin vinyl cleaning gloves and I stood up to look at the porch. The porch had been framed with two-by-fours, and around the top, where the two-by-fours met the screen panels, there was an inch-wide ledge. If I was naive enough to try to hide a house key, that's where I would have hidden it

Hoping that reports of black widows and brown recluse spiders were exaggerated, I ran my fingers down the length of the two-by-fours until, in the second panel from the end of the porch, I knocked a key off. It tinkled onto the concrete floor and we stopped breathing for a moment; then I got down on a knee and groped around until I found it. The key still worked: it was a little corroded, but I polished it on my sweatpants, slipped it in and out of the door lock a few times, and we were in.

The interior of the house was almost dark, with some illumination leaking in from the front, from the streetlight, and through the back windows. The place smelled like carpet cleaner. We groped our way to a hall, and I switched on one of our flashlightsI'd taped the lens to get a single needle-thin beam of light.

"Remember," I said, "Never turn the flashlight up. Always keep it down. If you don't bounce it off a window, nobody'll see us."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. She headed for the bedroom-office, while I went to the living room. I knew exactly where I was going. Jack had met LuEllen in Redmond, and we'd had a couple of beers together at a motel bar. The conversation had drifted to burglary, which wasn't unusual, given the circumstances of our being in Redmond in the first place.

LuEllen had told Jack about a guy who lived in Grosse Point Farms, Michigan, and had a lockbox built into the floor of his fireplace. The fireplace was one of those remote-control gas things, and all the heat went straight upand the fireproof box under the fireplace was not only invisible, it was absolutely, completely counterintuitive: who'd put valuables where there was a fire?

LuEllen had said, "He thought it was the safest possible place. And it would have been, I'd never have found it in a million years, if his wife hadn't told me about it."

Jack had laughed about that: the safest possible place. Was the line in the letter just an easy clich‚? Maybe.

A few minutes later, I was ready to give up. This was an old, crappy concrete-with-steel firebox, one of the instant fireplaces installed by the millions in low-end ramblers. There was a flue, which could be opened, but I could neither see nor feel anything inside it. When I got down on my hands and knees for an inch-by-inch inspection with the flashlight, there was no sign of a crack, a seam, a false plate.

Lane came out just as I was backing away. "What are you doing?" she whispered.

"I thought he might have hidden it around the fireplace," I said.

"Why?"

I explained, quickly, and she said, "That should have worked." But it hadn't. "There is a crawl space up above, under the eaves," she said. "There's a hatch in the bathroom."

"The feds probably already looked," I said.

"We should take a peek, anyway."

The hatch was right in the middle of the bathroom ceiling. I stood on the toilet and pushed it up, and could just barely feel around the edges of the opening. All I could feel was insulation.

"Anything?" Lane asked.

"Can't reach far enough in," I grunted, stretching up as far as I could.

"Make me a step and boost me up," she said.

I hopped off the toilet, interlaced my fingers. She stepped into it, and I lifted her belly-high into the hole. She pushed herself the rest of the way up, and whispered down, "Give me a couple of minutes. There's a walk-board up here, but there's all this insulation."

I stepped out of the bathroom and tried to think. Might the fireplace have some kind of hatch in the back, to shovel out cinders? I'd seen those on other.

I stepped back into the bathroom. "I'll be right back," I said to Lane, keeping my voice low. "I want to look in the utility room."

"Okay."

I found my way back to the utility room, passed on the washer, dryer, and water heater, and went to the furnace. The furnace was one of those baby things you find in the south, no bigger than a twenty-gallon can, with a grill on the front and an access hatch on the back. The access hatch was crammed with switches and valves, with no space for anything else, so I pulled off the grill. Nothing. There was a dark space above the grill opening, small pipes twisting around some furnace apparatus I didn't know about. I couldn't see anything, and just reached inside. and felt something hard, square, and loose. I rattled it, and a taped bundle of Jaz-disk boxes almost fell on my feet.

I pushed the grill back in place and headed for the bathroom: and that involved moving slowly along the front-room wall. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see a little better in the gloom, especially with the front room curtains half open. As I moved along the front-room wall, my eye caught a movement in the yard. I froze, uncertain that I'd seen it. Then I saw it again, a man's shoulder on the sidewalk, apparently walking up to the house.

I continued back to the bedroom, almost tripped over the tool towel, picked it up, and hissed up at the hatch: "Lane."

"What?" A white patch, her face, hovered over the hatch.

"Somebody coming," I said. "I'm gonna hand you the towel."

As I said it, I heard a scratching at the front door. Somebody was peeling the police tape off the front, and taking care to be quiet about it. I stood on the toilet, handed her the tool towel. "Take the disks," I said.

"You found them!"

"Move back; I'm coming up."

I had to stand on my tiptoes to get my hands around the joists at the edge of the hatch. I heard the key in the lock, got a grip, and did a pull-up and then a push-up through the hatch. The door opened outside, and Lane whispered, "Now what?" and I whispered, "Shut up. Shine your light on the hatch."

She turned her light on the hatch board. I picked it up, and carefully settled it back into its slot. As long as nobody was doing a thorough search.

Whoever was down below us was as quiet as we'd been. After a few minutes, Lane said, "Are you sure they're down there?"

I nodded: "I heard a key in the lock."

A minute later: "I don't hear anybody," she said.

"Quiet."

I was standing on a joist. A long plank ran down to the end of the house, to a head-sized vent that looked out over the front yard. Half hunched against the low overhead, I eased down the board and peered through the vent. A sports utility vehiclemaybe a 4Runner or a Pathfinder, I could only see the front end of it-was parked in front of the green house, a spot that had been empty when we came in. There was no other movement on the street, although I could see a television through a window across the street. Then I heard the door open below me, softly, and a man stepped out onto the curved driveway. He looked back and said, "Hurry, goddamnit."