Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“The light will be better in the room I’m staying in.”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “But let me take a quick look.” She handed it to me, and I flipped through the file. Correspondence, but I didn’t find any clinical trial. I handed it back to her.

Then we both heard a high-pitched beeping, three beeps in a row, coming from the study. The alarm. We looked at each other. If the door to the safe room had been closed, we wouldn’t have heard it.

“Shit, Heller,” she said.

“Did it just rearm?”

“The batteries in my jammer must have died.”

“We’re stuck,” I said.

Not necessarily in the file room, but in the study. It was now alarmed. We couldn’t open the study door from the inside without setting off the alarm.

She bowed her head, which was what she always did when she wanted to think hard. Then she said, “No motion sensor inside the study. But we can’t open the door.”

“Right,” I said, impatiently.

“Windows are all alarmed.”

“Not all,” I said, thinking of the narrow bathroom window. “We can get out through the bathroom,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“No contacts on the windows. I noticed earlier.”

“Fantastic, Heller.”

Envelope in hand, she left the safe room and went to retrieve her dead Wi-Fi jammer from where she’d left it standing, on the wooden floor by the door to the hallway. The room was still mostly dark. I could smell the faint cigar, the lemon oil. The highly polished surface of his desk now gleamed in the moonlight. It was a few minutes after three in the morning. I pushed the safe room door closed. It clicked smoothly into place. A fairly recent installation, I thought, very high-end. That he hadn’t cheaped out on.

Maggie opened the bathroom door, saw the narrow window I was talking about. “I can fit through it no problem, but you’re a big guy, Heller.”

“But lithe,” I pointed out. Which was an overstatement. She opened the window — double-hung and heavy — and swung her feet around, and in a neat maneuver she slid through the open window and thumped onto the grass outside.

I followed, though it took an extra bit of maneuvering, given the tight space between the toilet and the sink. But a moment later I landed on the grass below. It was chilly fall weather out there, with a strong breeze and a few drops of rain.

Maggie put a finger to her lips. I nodded, and I followed her across the lawn until we reached a manicured chess garden enclosed almost entirely by tall hedges. From here you couldn’t see the house, which made it a good place to talk.

In the center of the garden was a gazebo, and inside that was a small stone table topped with a black marble chessboard.

“Nick Heller saves the day again,” she said, shaking her head.

“Just lucky I noticed the window,” I said.

“Man, I really fucked up. I should have put that jammer through a field test. Good thing Nick Heller was here.”

It was sort of strange, the way she kept using my full name, like I was a brand, or maybe a superhero. She’d called me Heller when we were seeing each other, so I was used to her just saying my last name. But full name? That was new.

“You’re not actually with Sukie Kimball, are you?” she said as I sat down.

“No. Hired by her. You were hired by Cameron?”

She paused, looked at me. “Can I trust you?”

“What do you think?” I said.

She nodded. We had to trust each other, and she knew it. She was grateful to me for pointing out the unalarmed bathroom window. “I was hired by Megan, but Cameron’s cooperating.”

“Megan wanted to see her father’s latest will?”

“That’s part of it. They’re all afraid Natalya’s going to cheat them out of their inheritance. They have reason to believe Daddy revised his will again, but he’ll never talk about it. So she didn’t just want the will. She wanted to find out where he stashes his secret assets. So I was also looking for records on shell companies, that sort of thing.”

“How long have you been private?”

“Four years.”

“You’re out of the army?”

“Seven years. Since — us.”

“What have you been doing?”

“You mean, have I been dating?”

“No, that’s not what I said.”

“Isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve been staying busy, got a lot of work, building this private-eye business. Staying in trouble.” She grinned.

“Am I forgiven?” I said after a pause.

She was silent for a long time. “You know, what happened before, we don’t need to get into that, Heller.”

“Maybe we should.”

“The way we left things between us maybe was a good place to leave things.”

“Now I get it,” I said. “It took me a long time, I’ll admit. But I understand now why you were so angry.”

“Why are women always described as angry?”

I didn’t want to get into it with her. “Remember when you made that bouncer at the bar in Fort Bragg back down?”

She laughed. I’d forgotten how much I loved this woman’s laugh.

“You scared the shit out of him,” I went on. She laughed even more. “Talk about female anger.”

She took my hand in hers. “You could always make me laugh, Heller.”

“Okay,” I said. “You have to get back to your room and take some pictures. Then get the envelope back to me by eight, okay? Put it in a bag so it’s not recognizable. Break’s over.”

The mansion was completely dark. Dawn would come soon. The wind still whipped, but it didn’t rain, just spattered a bit. We made our way back to the house. Her room was in the other wing, and we decided it made the most sense for her to enter at the back door.

“Remember, I’m Hildy,” she said.

Turned out that we both knew the code to the main house alarm — it was the month, day, and year that Conrad Kimball had first met his Natalya. That code his kids knew. The alarm was still on by the time I got to the front door, which just meant that I’d beat Maggie to it. I punched in the code, and it instantly disarmed.

The grand stone staircase was right before me. I padded up the staircase to the second floor, to the wing where I was staying. In the dark hall someone passed by quickly. I saw that it was Cameron, presumably going into his own room. Maybe he was too drunk to recognize me. I hoped so.

I located my bedroom and collapsed on the bed. I was exhausted. I glanced at my watch. Four in the morning.

I’d catch a few hours of sleep. My alarm clock would be Maggie Benson knocking on my door at eight a.m.

I dozed fitfully, had troubled dreams.

I still dream about things that happened to me in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can’t avoid it. If you don’t dream it, something’s wrong; you’re suppressing bad stuff. Sometimes I’ll dream about people dying. Friends dying. Or I’m exposed in a combat situation and suddenly my rifle jams. Regular people have anxiety dreams about, like, discovering they’re about to take a final exam in a course they forgot they had signed up for.

But if they’ve served in combat, they might dream that they’re ten shots into a guy, an enemy, and he won’t go down, he just keeps advancing.

I dream, sometimes, of combat situations I’ve been in. Probably because on some level my brain needs to keep processing these moments of high anxiety, to keep me sane. That’s my theory, anyway.

That night I dreamed of the time Sean Lenehan saved my life.

We were based in Asadabad, in Kunar province, in the northeastern part of Afghanistan. Our mission was to advise three hundred or so soldiers in an Afghan National Army kandak, which is their word for battalion.

One day one of our two interpreters, Abdul Rahim, rushed in to the team house and told us that the other interpreter, Khalid, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. He was being held in a house in a village in the Pech Valley, one of the most violent and dangerous areas in Afghanistan.