Chapter 2 Gabe – Monday Morning Part Two #2
Up close, the front door also did not look great, which explained the noise he’d heard earlier.
Sometime, fairly recently if the newly exposed wood along the frame was anything to go by, the house had been broken into.
Or maybe Randy’d forgotten his key one day and decided to inflict violence on the door.
Randy or someone else had done a half-assed repair involving a sheet of plywood and a nail gun.
Gabe raised his fist and knocked, wincing as the door vibrated in the frame.
“Hello! Anybody home?” Gabe called out. “My name’s Gabriel Karne. I’m here about the vintage glass insulators? The ones you advertised on Marketplace.” That was the story he and Elton had come up with in case anyone was listening.
There was no answer, thank fuck. He was feeling uneasy, but he’d come this far, and he wasn’t going back to Heartstone empty-handed. Althea was depending on him, and he had to admit he was flattered by the trust she placed in him. Casey, not so much.
What was Gabe supposed to have done? Tell Althea that the heirloom necklace with the only photograph of her daughter was gone forever?
When Gabe put it that way, Casey’d done his best glowering and had made him promise to be careful.
He’d agreed because Casey’s glowers were almost as sexy as Casey’s biceps.
Gabe suspected that Casey’s definition of being careful and Gabe’s were of opposing origins. Be safe versus don’t get in trouble. But he’d gone ahead and promised Casey anyway.
Gabe inflicted another healthy knock on the door, listening closely for the sound of someone inside. “Glass insulators? Marketplace? Does this ring any bells?”
Gabe didn’t care much about glass insulators, although they were kind of cool looking.
The intel was that Randy claimed to be a picker, one of those folks who went around to garage sales and abandoned barns and “picked” stuff they could sell to collectors for exorbitant amounts of money.
Not a very good one though, which was probably why he had a part-time job at the pot shop.
But picking was also how Randy found his victims.
“You two are positive about this? The locket is here?” Gabe asked Elton quietly. “He wouldn’t have sold it yet?”
Not that he didn’t trust what he’d been told, but something felt off, and Gabe almost always trusted his instincts.
It was the almost part that often got him in trouble.
Right now, this was starting to feel like trouble.
The tale of how Randy acquired the locket was wobbly, but this was Elton’s friend—and she worked at the Twana County Sheriff’s Office—so what could go wrong?
Gabe could almost hear Casey’s derisive snort.
“Althea says that Hero thinks not. When the jerk wasn’t mooching off her, taking up space at Hero’s place so he could steal personal items like the locket, he lived in Westfort. It’s the family home, apparently, and she can’t imagine anywhere else he’d take it.”
Picker really did mean taking the pick of things that weren’t his. Huh.
“Nice,” he muttered under his breath, knocking one last time for good measure. There was nothing, no rustles or soft footsteps. Not even the bark of a dog.
“I’m heading around back,” he said. “This key from Althea better work on the back door because I am not breaking the door down. If it does, I’ll be in and out before you can say boo.
” He still spoke quietly, just in case. At least the lots at the top of the hill were large, which meant the space between houses was more than just a few feet.
“Remember, Hero—”
“Told Althea the locket was last seen hanging on a mirror in the downstairs bathroom. But Elton, it could be anywhere by now. You know as well as I do that Randy could have pawned it already,” Gabe said.
He should never have agreed to keep the phone on.
But Elton Cox had assigned himself as Gabe’s guardian angel.
Angel wasn’t quite the right word, but something along those lines, and Gabe felt like he owed it to him.
It being reassurance that Gabe wouldn’t get in too much trouble and there would be someone to call 9-1-1 if needed.
As if Gabe had never been on a job on his own before. As if he hadn’t regularly run high-dollar cons and come out pretty okay in the end.
As if there isn’t an overworked guardian angel watching over you 24/7.
Could a memory scoff? Because Gabe could hear his mother’s special scoff.
“That locket has one of the only pictures Althea has of her daughter and granddaughter together. She doesn’t even have another photo of her daughter,” Elton told him for possibly the hundredth time.
Gabe really did hope it was still in the house.
“I’ve got this.” Gabe reached into his jacket and thumbed his phone off as he rounded the corner of the house to the backyard. “Oops, lost the connect—Jesus Christ.”
The overgrown backyard was a serial killer’s wet dream.
At least no dog, so things were not going sideways.
Yet. Gabe liked dogs—Casey’s dog, Bowie, was a case in point, as were the rescue dogs Mickie Lundin worked with.
But the canines Gabe tended to interact with when he was doing something like this were not inclined to play nice.
They were a tad bitey and often had anger management issues.
Human-caused, for sure, but anger issues nonetheless.
The backyard was enclosed by four-foot-tall chain-link fencing. A slightly ajar gate beckoned him, and Gabe slipped through it, wincing at the squeak of the hinges. Did everything around here have a complaint?
A sigh of relief escaped him when the provided key fit perfectly.
“Thank St. Fuck.”
Twisting the key, Gabe was rewarded with a satisfying pop and release of the lock.
The back door opened surprisingly easily considering the state of the one at the front.
Gabe stepped inside, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, then got his first glance—and whiff—of the kitchen and regretted it, slapping a hand over his mouth and nose.
“Jesus Christ,” he repeated.
The stench was literally eye-watering. The grubby linoleum floor was close to impassable, and not only because of cardboard boxes stuffed to bursting with empty and partially empty takeout containers and other paraphernalia.
Cabinet doors gaped open, and broken glasses and cutlery were strewn across the flooring.
“No fucking wonder he liked Hero’s place better.”
Gabe couldn’t bring himself to shut the door to the outside, not with the rancid smell of unidentifiables lingering in the air. His gut told him to find the locket and get the hell out of there.
With care, Gabe stepped around the scattered remains and headed for a short hallway across from where he’d entered.
He had studied the floor plan sketched out by Hero and was pretty sure the downstairs bathroom was midway down the hall and near the bottom of a staircase that led up to the second floor.
He fucking hoped that was as far as he had to go.
The reek did not lessen when he left the kitchen.
As he approached where the bathroom was supposed to be—tiptoeing, for fuck’s sake—he passed a gallery of Witherspoon family mug shots, nearly knocking one of them off the wall with his shoulder.
The snapshots were protected by cheap-ass frames and plexiglass.
They hung at jarring angles because the hallway was narrow and no one of adult height would miss bumping against them.
Out of habit, Gabe paused to straighten them.
And judged each one. The Witherspoon family had stopped memorializing themselves when Randy looked to be ten or so.
At the time, he did not look pleased to be clutching the hand of a genderless blob of a toddler.
The toddler’s face was red and scrunched up in mid-scream.
“That haircut was the beginning of the end,” Gabe said to Randy’s face before moving into the bathroom.
Unsurprisingly, the small room was filthy, equally as bad as the kitchen but in a different way.
How could Randy live like this? How could Hero stay here?
It seemed like she would have said something about the state of things, but maybe this had happened after she’d left.
He accidentally inhaled a waft of stench, and Gabe’s stomach churned.
Holding his breath again, he glanced quickly around the small room, which was enough to tell him there was no locket hanging on the mirror.
You should’ve known it wouldn’t be so easy, Chance.
Pulling open the top drawer underneath the shallow sink, Gabe regretfully breathed in a sigh of relief, nearly coughing on the inhale.
There, tangled in with dental floss samples, a razor, a black hair comb, and Band-Aids in rarely needed sizes and shapes, sparkled the necklace.
Scooping it up, Gabe stuffed the piece of jewelry into his pocket and stepped back into the hallway.
That was when the distinct sound of a key turning and the subsequent click of a lock opening reached his ears.
Gabe froze.
Shit.
The front door creaked open, and Gabe recognized the slope of Randy’s shoulders and the hoodie they were encased in.
Triple shit.
Spinning back the direction he’d come, Gabe abandoned stealth and raced for the still open back door. He’d never known if there was a patron saint for ex-grifters, but in that moment Gabe decided there had to be, and he prayed to them loud and hard.
“Hey! Stop, you asshole!”
Gabe did not stop. He raced through the kitchen and out the door he’d fortunately had the forethought to leave open. Behind him, he heard Randy’s heavy footfalls. It seemed like they were gaining ground. Why was he always being chased?
“I’m gonna kill you,” Randy shouted, thundering after him.
“Was it something I said?” Gabe yelled over his shoulder as he took off toward the side of the house. The grass was wet, and the mist had returned. He slipped and had difficulty finding purchase but made it through the gate.
Fucking Mondays.