For the next twenty minutes, seven uniformed people turned my office over. The papers that the original invaders hadn’t tossed joined the landfill in the middle of the room. I sat with my arms crossed, my lips tight with anger—and my heart thumping erratically. What if I had missed a niche? I hadn’t climbed a ladder to deal with the ceiling fixtures—I’d only checked the lower ones, the spotlights and lamps that I’d installed when I moved in.
I was fuming with an impotent rage, wishing I could get him on film, when I remembered the surveillance camera in my briefcase. I picked it up from the floor next to the couch and pulled the glasses out. Lemour watched me closely, but when he saw I was only putting on glasses he turned his head away. In that brief moment I reached into my case and fumbled with the battery pack. After two nights in the dark roads of Luella County I could load it blindfolded. I put in a new tape and started recording, following the team’s destructive swath through the room, but focusing mostly on Lemour.
Lemour himself went to my printer and pulled out the cartridge. When he didn’t find the bag of powder he dropped the cartridge, leaving a sooty trail on the floor, and banged the printer on its side. Twelve hundred dollars of Hewlett Packard’s best work. I hoped it would survive mauling.
Scowling with fury, he marched to the couch and yanked me to my feet. He ran a hand underneath, found the slit in the bottom, fumbled inside it. When he came up empty he bared his pike’s teeth in an ugly grimace. He ordered two of the uniforms to turn the couch over. He ripped the fabric completely off the bottom and started prodding the interior.
At that point I pushed past him and went to the desk to beep my lawyer. “Freeman,” I said to his machine. “It’s V. I. Warshawski. The cop who was harassing me last week is in my office. I had a break–in; he came around accusing me of dealing drugs. And now he’s ripped my couch and is wreaking havoc with my papers. If you get this message I’d appreciate your earliest possible response.”
Lemour’s thin lips were a line of rage. He shoved the uniforms out of the way and yanked the phone from my hand, then slapped my face hard with his open palm. I kept my arms at my side through an effort of will so intense that my shoulders ached.
“You think you’re smart, don’t you, Warshki?” he hissed.
“Phi beta kappa my junior year at Chicago. That’s usually for smart people, Lemming.” I was taking singer’s breaths, pushing air to the front of my mouth, keeping my voice light so that no cracks of fury showed in it.
He slapped the other side of my face. “Well, you’re not as smart as you think you are. If I have to take this room apart brick by brick, I will find where you put that stash. I know it’s here, you smart–assed broad. Cuff her while you finish searching,” he added to the woman who’d answered my original call.
She couldn’t look at me. Her dark face turned purply–black with shame as she locked my wrists together; she muttered, “I’m sorry,” through lips that barely moved.
The glasses had slipped off my face at a cockeyed angle. She settled them back on my nose. My neck ached. Tension. Or maybe whiplash from the force of Lemour’s blows.
The crew went through the room, then the hall and the bathroom. Brick by brick. Lemour watched, patches of red on his white cheeks, spittle forming around his mouth. I kept my video glasses on him as best I could with my arms hooked to a radiator coil.
When the team didn’t find the drugs, I thought Lemour was going to go over the brink and choke me. He may have thought so too, but his cell phone rang before he could do it.
“Lemour,” he snarled. “Oh . . . no, sir, it wasn’t . . . we did, sir, all three places . . . bitch must’ve . . . I did, sir, but I couldn’t be here twenty–four hours a day . . . I could still bring her in . . . I see. You can?” His pike’s teeth showed in an unpleasant grin. “I’ll look forward to that, sir.”
He put the phone back in his pocket and turned to me. “Your lucky day, Warshki. My—boss says if you swallowed the evidence I can’t hold you, although I’d like to bring you in and choke it out of you. You can go home. You—Holcumb, is it? Uncuff her and let her go.”
While the officer undid the lock, she whispered that her mother was an upholsterer, that she’d bring her over in the morning and get her to repair my couch, no charge. I was too tired and too angry to do anything but nod my sore neck. I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed, until the last of the battalion had left. I barricaded the door from the inside and sat on the couch. The mess in the room was now so unbearable I couldn’t imagine ever being able to work in this space again.
22 Night Crawlers