Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

The man paled at the word “hazmat.”

The wife led me to the second floor and into a bedroom that had been turned into a sewing and crafts room. She opened the closet door and pointed to the hatch in the ceiling. This was going to be a tight one.

I set up the ladder as Cynthia entered. The wife was standing nervously in the middle of the room, and the last thing we wanted was her hanging around when I dropped wads of cash down from the attic.

Cynthia, who had clearly thought this scam through, pulled two surgical masks from her pocket. She handed one to me and slipped the other one on over her face, looping the small straps over her ears.

“I wish I had a third one for you,” she said to the woman, who then decided to wait downstairs.

I stuffed mine into my pocket as I moved the hatch aside. I hoisted myself up into the attic, yet another sweltering environment awash in the musty smells of stale air, wood, and what I thought might be mouse droppings. I directed the flashlight to the east wall.

There wasn’t enough room to stand upright, so I moved bent at the waist. My eye caught something on one of the ceiling planks. Something dark and, well, yucky.

“Cyn, can you hear me?”

I heard the ladder rattling, turned, and saw her head poke up into the attic. “Yeah, I’m here,” she said.

“I think they’ve got mold,” I said.

She went back down the ladder.

When I got to the east wall, I started lifting up insulation. In a couple of minutes, I found what I was looking for. A clear plastic bag, about the size of a thick binder, sealed with duct tape and stuffed with neat stacks of bills held together with rubber bands.

I also found something else.

Several small freezer bags, tucked into a larger clear bag, filled with what appeared to be splinters of broken glass, or ice. Except it couldn’t be ice, given how hot it was up here. There were hundreds of these crystal-like pieces, some very small, some as big as the tip of my finger.

“What in the hell is—?”

Then it hit me. It was crystal meth.

When Vince said he was stashing stuff besides money, he wasn’t kidding.

Rona Wedmore got on the phone to one of the department’s tech guys, who went by the name Spock. She wasn’t even sure what his real name was.

“I’m at a bridal shop downtown and I need you here ten minutes ago,” she said into her cell.

“Did I propose and it slipped my mind?” he asked.

Spock showed up twenty minutes later. At five-five and two hundred fifty pounds, he bore little resemblance to the Vulcan, but he seemed to share his smarts. Once Rona let him loose on the store’s surveillance system, which was set up in a storage room filled with hundreds of wedding gowns, he was all business. He’d brought along some equipment of his own, including a laptop, and was plugging things in and running wires here and there.

Instead of reviewing the surveillance data from that morning on the cheap monitor set up in the storage room, Spock was able to see it on his own high-resolution screen.

“What time we looking at?” he asked Wedmore.

“Not sure. Before ten. Can you work backwards, or do you need me to give you an earlier time and you go ahead?”

Spock, eyes fixed on the screen, said, “I can do anything.”

“Let’s go back to eight and work forward.”

Spock went back nearly four hours, then set the footage to play at fast-forward. The camera was positioned over the back door, angled in such a way as to catch the parking area and some of the street that ran behind the shop.

“There,” Wedmore said. “A car just parked across the street.”

“Yeah.”

“What is that? A BMW?”

“I don’t know anything about cars,” Spock said. “I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“What are you? Fifteen?”

Even on Spock’s expensive laptop, the footage was grainy and indistinct. A man and woman got out of the car, started crossing the street, but bore right, and exited the frame. But a few seconds later, they entered the screen from the bottom right corner, so close to the wall that the camera picked up little more than the tops of their heads.

They spent a few seconds outside the door, then entered the building.

“She put in cameras,” Wedmore said. “But she hadn’t set the alarm. Start fast-forwarding again.”

It wasn’t much longer before another car showed up, but instead of parking across the street, this one pulled in right in front of the door. A beige four-door Nissan. Heywood Duggan got out.

Wedmore felt a tightening in her throat. She made a fist with her left hand, digging her nails into her palm.

“This the guy?” Spock asked.

“Yeah,” she said quietly.

Another five minutes went by. The door opened again, and the man and woman exited. A shot of their backs as they walked past Duggan’s car, crossed the street, and got back into the BMW. The car started, did a U-turn in the street, and disappeared in the direction it had come from.

“Go back — freeze that.”

“Freeze what?”

“When the car’s turning around, we’ve got a shot at the plate.”

Spock froze the image. The car and the plate were equally blurry.

“Can’t you blow that up?” Wedmore asked.

Spock said, “It’s not going to get any better.” And it didn’t. He enlarged the image, but the numbers and letters on the license plate were too indistinct to make out.

“Shit,” Wedmore said.

“I can tap into the traffic system. Check their cameras. Look for that car, in that area, around that time. I’ll have a better chance pulling a plate number off their system.”

“If you can do that, I’ll buy you a full set of Star Trek action figures,” Wedmore said.

“I hate Star Trek ,” Spock said.

“Cyn!” I whispered. It was a pretty loud whisper. I wanted to be sure she heard me, but didn’t want to get the attention of the elderly couple who lived in this house.

Her head popped up into the attic for the second time.

“I’ll tell them about the mold,” she said.

“I need to talk to Vince.”

“You can’t find the money?”

“I found money. But I found something else.” I held up one of the bags of crystal meth.

“What is that?”

I tossed the bag in her direction. It landed a couple of feet short of the hatch, and she reached over, grabbed the bag, and examined it. She looked at me.

“You know what this is, don’t you?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said. “It’s one thing driving all over town with cash, but what if we get pulled over with that in the car?”

“Give me a minute.”

Her head vanished. I tried to find a way to get comfortable while I waited for her return. I parked my butt crossways on one of the beams, rested my feet on one in front of me, placed my two hands on another behind me, and leaned back. I’d have much preferred a leather recliner.

Five minutes went by. I began to hear voices below me, then the rattling of the aluminum ladder.

A second later, Vince’s head came into view. I held up the bag and said, “You think we should be wandering around with this?”

“You’re wasting time,” he said. “They said they wanted everything. So we’re giving them everything. Maybe they know about this. Maybe this is part of what they want. I’m trying to save Jane and you’re going to get picky about what we’ve got in the car?”

“I’ll toss it over. You can drop it down to Cynthia,” I said. When all the stored drugs and cash had been removed, I tamped the insulation back down.

By the time I got down to the front door with the ladder, Vince was back in the car and Cynthia was giving the home owners a short list of contractors they could call to take a look at their problem.