3
On the recording, the woman parked right in front of the store.
She was older, her hair a gray that came from four hours in a salon chair, and she dressed in yoga pants and a puffer jacket like she was thirty years younger.
Her license plate, plus a quick call to Tinajas at the DMV, gave Jem a name—Barbara Hatch—and a Sandy address.
It turned out to be the center unit in a row of townhouses.
He parked the Subaru at the end of the block and watched.
It was a quiet street, with big trees planted along the verge.
The townhouses looked like they might be twenty or thirty years old.
Their paint was faded. The siding was dated.
Decorative bushes planted along the foundation hadn’t been pruned, and now they looked overgrown and messy.
After fifteen minutes, when he still hadn’t seen anybody, Jem got out of the car.
He grabbed the first aid kit from under the seat, gripped it by the side, and dug a pen out of the glove box.
There was a Jazz cap in one of the seat pockets, and he snapped it against his thigh a few times before putting it on.
Just an ordinary guy with a clipboard, doing ordinary guy things like checking the meter.
What meter?
Who the hell knew?
He wandered up the block, walking across the lawn, stopping to look behind the bushes—in part to keep up the act, and in part looking for windows. It turned out the townhouses had basements, but the windows were tiny things that weren’t going to work for what Jem needed.
As he walked, he kept an eye out for nosy neighbors. The windows in the townhouses remained empty. Across the street, single-family ramblers with wide driveways and rock-lined flowerbeds stared back at him. Not a single person in sight.
So far, so good.
When he got to the center unit, he slowed.
It had two front windows, but trying to get in through those would be like hanging out a sign for the police.
The backyard was always an option, but the center unit meant he could have people on either side of him.
He went up onto the stoop and knocked. Nobody came.
He leaned on the doorbell and counted to sixty.
Still nothing. The curtains were drawn, and they hung perfectly still.
He kicked back the doormat. No key, but it had been worth a shot. People who ran a game like this one usually thought they were so much smarter than everyone else. And people who thought they were smarter than everyone else usually turned out to be idiots. Just for kicks, Jem checked the downspout.
And there it was: the little hide-a-key box.
Still nothing on the street. No cars. No people. Nobody watching from the windows.
He unlocked the front door and let himself inside.
The dense stillness of an empty house met him.
And a lot of coconut air freshener. He stood in a split-level entryway.
Below him, he could make out what looked like a living room, with the corner of a sliding glass door visible at the far end.
Above, another living room. Perfect. Two living rooms. The bright January sunlight made the curtains glow.
He went up. The furniture was white microfiber—big, overstuffed pieces. There was a glass coffee table. Bookshelves that only had a few books and a lot of trinkets, like a bowl filled with wine corks. A massive TV held Jem’s blurry reflection.
It was a middle-class home. Dated, maybe. Like your elderly aunt lived here, and she kept it too warm, and it was always kind of a relief to leave. No beer cans littering the floor. No dirty clothes. No ashtray with the roaches of old joints.
Well, Jem figured, it took all kinds of people to fuck up the world.
He passed the kitchen and went down the hallway.
A small bedroom on the right was decorated with a race car theme and had a dusty, unused smell.
Then a hall bathroom with soap shaped like seashells that, Jem knew, you weren’t supposed to actually use.
And then another bedroom. This one was larger, with walnut-veneer furniture: a dresser, nightstands, a queen bed.
The lampshades had tassels, and the tassels had crystals.
A fabric head-thingy on the dresser wore a black fedora with a pink feather jutting out of it.
Was the head-thingy just, like, a hat holder?
Was that normal? These were the kinds of questions you couldn’t ask if you broke into someone’s home.
After a couple of minutes of opening drawers and finding the usual assortment of clothes—plus one drawer in the nightstand with, like, ten bottles of Tums—Jem did a quick spin through the racecar bedroom.
He found even less here; even the closet was empty.
He wiped down everything as he went so if he had to leave fast, he wouldn’t have to worry about prints.
In the kitchen, he got a Coke from the fridge. The chairs were the tubular kind, which always made Jem think he was about to get dumped on his ass, but once he got settled, he bounced a little as he drank some Coke.
Would Tean break into someone’s house to steal back a comic book?
No, probably not.
On the other hand, would it matter that this person was a thief, and they’d taken advantage of someone?
Yeah. Tean didn’t like that kind of thing. In fact, Tean would probably believe that person deserved some kind of payback.
So, if you looked at it that way, Jem was basically doing exactly what Tean wanted.
Which sounded, Jem had to admit, like the kind of thing someone who thought he was smarter than everybody else would tell himself to make himself feel better.
“Oh shit,” Jem said aloud as he lurched up from the chair. “The freezer.”
The comic book was double-bagged and hidden in the ice bin, which probably wasn’t the best place for something worth six figures.
Jem started to close the freezer door when he noticed the little silicone trays stacked inside.
They were the same ones he used to make Scipio’s treats—you mixed together a bunch of goop, stuck it in the freezer, and then the dog would gnaw on it for an hour.
Or, if you were Scipio, fifteen minutes.
A low growl came from the hall.
Fuck me, Jem thought.