Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Since he did not have the benefit of sympathetic neighbors in this case, Richard parked on the street and made his first approach to the building as a pedestrian, sans sledgehammer. It was a brilliant sunny morning of the sort that Seattle would occasionally lay before its desperate residents in the early spring; wild rhododendrons in the vacant lot across the street were showing red blossoms, and hobbyist-pilots were taking off from Boeing Field in their little planes. Richard pounded for a while on what he took to be the front door, then wandered around back. Two large roll-up doors fronted on the alley. Between them was a single human-sized door. Richard was knocking on the latter when a pickup truck pulled into the alley and rolled to a stop, close enough that he could have reached out and touched it. The engine shut down and the door swung open. Out came a lean, close-cropped, stubbled Caucasian male in his thirties, dressed in a scarred brown leather jacket over faded and frayed Carhartts. “Looking for Peter?” he asked, stepping to the roll-up door on the right and inserting a key into a massive tamper-proof padlock that dangled from its hasp. Before Richard could answer, he continued, “I haven’t seen him in a week and a half.”

“Really.”

“Pisses me off too, because he’s my landlord, and I want him to fix my Internet. Do you have any idea where he is?” The man dropped to a squat, gripped a handle on the front of the big door, and stood up, heaving it open to reveal a dark bay filled with welding machines and the paintless steel tools and tables favored by those who worked with unbelievably hot things.

“I’m investigating his disappearance.”

The man straightened and turned to look at him. “You a cop?”

“Private investigator,” Richard said, “hired by the family.”

“So they don’t know where he is either?”

“He and his girlfriend went missing a week ago.”

“Exactly a week, or—”

“Last they were seen was Monday afternoon.”

“My Internet died Monday night, late.”

“Heard any disturbances, or—”

“No.”

“But you’re only here during business hours?”

“My hours are irregular,” the man said, “but I don’t sleep here.”

Richard nodded at the roll-up door on the left. It was secured by another massive padlock. “Is that his bay?”

“Yup.”

“I don’t suppose you have a key?”

The welder thought about it. “Yeah, I got one.”

“Mind if I borrow it?”

“Sorry, but I don’t lend out my equipment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

The man stepped forward into the darkness, reached out, grabbed something, and pulled hard, putting his weight into it. He began backing toward the alley. As he came into the light Richard saw that he was towing a two-wheeled cart loaded with a pair of gas cylinders, regulators, a length of hose, and a triple-barreled torch. “My key,” he said. “Opens just about anything.”

While the welder halved Peter’s padlock—a procedure that took all of about three seconds, once he got his torch up and running—Richard ambled around in the alley, looking at the upper-story windows that he supposed belonged to Peter’s living quarters. They were old-fashioned multipaned casement windows with metal frames. He noticed that one of them had a missing pane, right next to the latching handle on the inside.

“It’s all yours,” the welder announced, stepping back. “Mind your hand, it’s going to be hot for a while.”

Keeping well clear of the hot parts, Richard got the door unlatched and hauled it open.

Damn, but there were a lot of cars in here. As if Peter had been running a chop shop. In a few moments he identified Peter’s boxy van—the one he and Zula had taken up to B.C.—and Zula’s Prius, which had been parked as far back in the bay as it would go, apparently to make room for a little sports car that had been shoehorned into the remaining space. The latter had B.C. plates. The keys were still in its ignition.

Hands in pockets, Richard ambled around. The welder remained on the threshold of the big door, perhaps wisely declining to trespass.

“There’s your problem,” Richard announced. He was standing before half a sheet of plywood that had been screwed to the wall and used as a surface for mounting telecom stuff: cable modem, routers, punch-down blocks, phone gear. In two places, cables had been severed, their cut ends carefully pushed back into place so that the damage was not obvious. One was telephone, the other was the black coax line that had formerly run to the cable modem.

This was the first suggestion of actual wrongdoing that Richard had seen. Of course, the fact that Zula (and, apparently, Peter) had disappeared was more than sufficiently alarming that he’d thought of nothing else for the last couple of days. But in all of the investigating he had done so far, he had not seen actual evidence that human maleficence was involved. He suspected it, he feared it, but—as the Seattle detective assigned to Zula’s missing persons case doggedly pointed out—he couldn’t prove it. The appearance of those two severed wires thus struck him as deeply as a pool of blood or a spent shell casing.

He pulled out his phone and texted John: CALL OFF THE MOUNTIES. PETER’S CAR HERE. ZULA’S TOO. He decided not to mention the third car or the severed wires for now.

“You recognize this sports car?” Richard asked. His voice sounded funny to his own ears: dry and tight.

“Nope.”

“Well. I’m going to look upstairs.”

“Yup.”

He’d hoped that last night’s forced entry to Zula’s apartment would be the last time he’d have to expose himself to the possibility of seeing something horrible. Now here he was climbing another staircase toward another possible crime scene. This time he considered it much more likely he’d see something that would scar him for life. But it was his responsibility to shove his face into this particular psychological buzz saw and so he reckoned he should get on with it.

What he found, though, was not what he’d expected. Peter’s apartment contained no persons, living or dead. Nor were there any signs of violence or struggle, with two exceptions. One—which he had anticipated—was the missing windowpane, which had clearly been used by someone to break into the loft. The shattered glass was still sprayed over the floor below it.

The other was a wrecked gun safe standing against the wall in the corner of the loft. Something comprehensively bad had happened to it. Its finish had been burned away in a line that went all the way around its top, as though it had been attacked with a thermonuclear can opener. The entire top of the safe had been sliced off and thrown on the floor, where hot metal edges had burned into the wood. Instinctively Richard scanned the ceiling for smoke detectors and noted that they were all dangling open, their batteries removed.

This part seemed almost like a waste of time, but he stepped forward and looked down into the safe and verified that it was empty.

He walked back down the stairs and found the welder. “I could use your professional opinion on something.”

“Plasma cutter,” was the welder’s verdict, after he had come up the stairs and got a load of the ruined gun safe.

“Do you have one?”

“No!” said the welder, and shot him a look.

“I wasn’t accusing you,” Richard said, holding up his hands. “I was just curious what they look like.”

“It’s a box,” the welder said, holding up his hands to indicate size. “About yay big.”

“Portable.”

“Totally.”

“Portable enough to take it through yonder window?”

“That would be a bit of a stretch. I would recommend stairs.”