Chapter 20 Jennie
I lay on my back, arms folded, blanket kicked to the foot of the bed.
I counted each slow tick of the ancient wall clock in the hall.
Nobody on the Coleman crew had the stamina to run night patrols in July, the hands were all two beers deep and dreaming of air conditioning.
There’d been no movement in the house since midnight, when Cordelia did her final loop through the kitchen, checking the stove, the locks, her phone for any stray digital shrapnel.
Levi’s snoring had started a few minutes after that, a wet, full-throttle rasp audible even with my door closed.
Somewhere around three, I gave up pretending and reached for my phone.
I scrubbed back to the first alert. Holy shit.
The drone camera had caught all of it. Four Coleman trucks rolling up within seconds of each other.
The Colemans fanned out, Harlan in front, Wyatt and Levi moving to the tailgate of the second truck.
What came out of that truck wasn't cattle equipment.
I watched Harlan take a briefcase from a strange man.
He didn't open it on the spot, just held it at his side while the man who'd handed it over said something I couldn't lip-read at that distance.
Then they loaded up the crates of guns and were gone, all three vehicles clearing out, and the Colemans were back in their trucks within four minutes.
Harlan's face I could see well enough to testify to. Not the strangers. They'd kept their backs to the camera for most of it, the way people do when they know how to manage a sightline. Someone had coached them, or they'd done these enough times that they didn't need coaching anymore.
I set the phone face down on my chest and stared at the ceiling. What I had was Harlan Coleman accepting a briefcase from men I couldn't name, in exchange for cargo I couldn't prove was what I thought it was. It was useful but not actionable, and the safe was the thing that could change that.
I'd packed for this moment before the sun set.
The UV powder and blacklight pen went into my front jeans pocket.
The geologist's kit which I’d had these things in, disguised as rock dust was zipped and ready under the bed.
My plan was simple. Slip into the office, dust the keypad, snap a picture, and get out while everyone was dead to the world.
The only variable was the safe itself. I'd seen the model in passing, a Sentry, mid-tier, keypad entry, battery compartment taped shut because someone had dropped it once and the plastic latch never recovered.
Four digits, no failsafe, but the real trick was narrowing it down to the correct sequence.
That's what the powder was for. UV powder clings to oil, sweat, the tiny microflora that ride fingertips and betray their owner even after a half-hearted hand wash.
The trick was that I couldn't see it without a blacklight.
Under one, the most frequently pressed keys glow, the ones used most often shining brightest, and the rest fading out.
It wouldn't give me the sequence, but it would give me the four digits I needed, and I could figure out the combination in under five minutes if it came to that.
My chest buzzed with adrenaline even as my limbs felt locked in a block of ice.
I checked the hall again through the narrow slit of the door.
No light, no movement. The only sound was a faint fridge compressor wheezing through its nightly cycle.
It was a good house for this. The bones of the place were so old they absorbed noise instead of reflecting it, and if I didn't drag my heels or slam the doors, I could move around in near-perfect silence.
At 3:13, I went. I left the bedroom door unlatched, too risky to click it shut, and padded down the hallway barefoot, cringing at the cold of the tile. I could see the office door at the end of the hall. Closed, but probably not locked. I
I thought of all the things that could go wrong, a misstep, a creaking hinge, a phone ping in Harlan’s room, some overcaffeinated hand who’d stayed up playing poker. But nothing happened.
The office was as I’d left it, legal pads on the desk, safe behind the survey map, all the furniture aligned.
The moon shone through the window, giving me a path.
I stepped inside, pulled the door almost shut behind me, and flicked on the blacklight pen.
It made the whole room pulse violet, every speck of dust and lint going incandescent in the haze. My ears rang in the quiet.
First, I pulled the map off the wall, careful to catch it before the frame hit the floor. I set it against the bookshelf, then turned to the keypad. My hands didn’t shake, they never did, not in the moment.
I uncapped the powder and dusted the keypad lightly.
It caught on the edges of the keys, invisible in normal light, but under the blacklight pen the numbers popped instantly.
2, 3, 5, and 6 were lit. The 2 and the 6 had a little more flare, which meant they were the most frequently used and the combo probably started or ended on one of them.
I snapped a final shot at a slight angle, then cleaned the keypad with my shirttail to clear the powder.
Thirty seconds, maybe forty. No footsteps, no sound from the house.
I re-hung the map, careful to nudge the frame onto the groove of the nail, because people notice if the frame isn't right.
I swept the blacklight over the desk, the drawers, even the arm of the chair, in case my fingers had left behind any traces. Nothing damning showed.
I went back down the hall and into my room.
I shut the door and slid under the blanket, then pulled up the photos and zoomed in on each one.
The numbers held were 2, 3, 5, and 6. I worked out the permutations in my head and realized there were only twenty-four possible combinations, easy enough to brute-force if the situation demanded it.
I set the phone on the nightstand, face up this time, and waited for my heart to dial down from redline.
The world was still and safe for the moment.
I rehearsed every next move. When to slip back in, how to hit the safe without leaving prints, where to stash the evidence.
I thought about what it would mean if I found nothing, and what it would mean if I found everything.
I let the possible futures fight it out in the dark until exhaustion tripped the breaker.
I drifted into the shallow doze I always got when waiting for the other shoe to drop.