“Yeah, why don’t you, man,” Jay said.
For whatever reason, he didn’t mention the odd details of the breakin, the degree to which the staged scene made him uncomfortable. Instead, he asked Rolly to drive by the place a few times through the night, to make sure nothing funny was going on. “I can give you a couple hundred bucks for it,” he said, offering something close to Rolly’s old hourly rate, back when he still did pickup work for Jay as a private investigator. They’d worked together off and on for years, Rolly running a one-man operation out of his bar, Lula’s, and when that closed down, meeting clients at the garage where he kept his fleet of Town Cars. “Looking into stuff,” as Rolly liked to call it, had never been more than a sideline gig, a source of income, sure, but also his own personal gift to the world, like perfect pitch or a throwing arm like Joe Montana’s, a talent that would shame God to waste. He made bank on the car service company and had plans to buy his first limousine next year. These days, he only ever “looked into stuff” for old friends.
“On the house, Counselor,” he said.
Jay hung up the line and bent down to pick up the dustpan.
He started for the hall closet, but then stopped himself a moment later, pausing long enough to right the picture frame on Eddie Mae’s desk. It was a snapshot of her first great-grandchild, a pigtailed girl named Angel. The butterscotch candies had scattered across the desktop. Jay was picking up the pieces one by one when he heard a faint thump overhead, the sound of a heavy footfall, like the heel of a boot landing on a wood floor. He looked up at the tin ceiling tiles, rows of beveled bronze, and swore he heard it again. The gas lamp in the ceiling was swaying slightly from the weight of whatever was going on upstairs, the light pushing shadows this way and that. Jay felt his breath stop.
Someone, he thought, is still in this house.
He started for the phone first, but his mind went blank. He couldn’t for the life of him remember even two of the numbers for Rolly’s mobile phone, his pager either. An emergency call to 911 would waste time he didn’t have. It had taken the beat cops nearly fifteen minutes to get here, and it would take a hell of a lot less time than that for Jay to end up on the losing side of a confrontation with whoever was locked inside this dark house with him.
He went for the .38 next.
It was in the lockbox still sitting on top of his desk.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held a pistol like this, but this one seemed to remember him, the metal warming to his touch. He gripped the gun at his side as he stepped from his office into the center hallway, glancing at the ceiling, wondering what it was that awaited him on the other side. The back of his neck was wet with sweat, the windbreaker sticking to his skin. He unzipped the jacket, peeling it off, arm by arm, as he moved toward the stairs, pressing himself against the side of the wall as he climbed the steps. Upstairs, the overhead lights were all off. He felt his way through the dark, keeping his cover, confident he knew the lay of this property better than anyone else. There was the law library up here, plus the conference room, which he used for makeshift storage, filled with stacks of boxes he hadn’t bothered to unpack after the move last year, files going all the way back to the Ainsley case, his first big civil verdict, against Cole Oil Industries. He heard a crash, glass breaking, coming from that direction. He ran to the conference room, which sat right above Eddie Mae’s desk downstairs, stepping inside just in time to see a silhouette standing by a newly broken window. He smelled hair grease and alcohol, plus something else coming off human skin, the sour punch of marijuana, curling the hairs in his nostrils. He reached for the light switch and raised the .38 at the same time.
The kid froze.
And so did Jay. He had a clean shot, but he couldn’t move, pierced through the heart by the kid’s eyes, red rimmed and black. He was nineteen or twenty, baby faced but tall and lanky like a ballplayer. He wore a flattop fade that had seen better days, and his pants came up short of his ankles, details Jay was storing without even realizing he was doing it. The kid didn’t raise his hands, but neither did he run, and Jay wondered if he had a knife or, worse, a gun. They were in a standoff of sorts, he and Jay, which, as the seconds ticked away, began to feel almost like a dare. Jay had his shot, which the state of Texas said he was well within his rights to take. Shoot. Just shoot. It was a whisper inside his skull, a reckless impulse he didn’t know was still there. Slowly, the kid raised his hands. “Come on, Mr. Cosby,” he said, eyeing the middle-aged black man standing in front of him. “Let’s keep it light, old man.”
Jay felt his grip on the gun slip. He glanced toward the telephone on the conference room table, judging its distance versus his speed. He took his eyes off the scene for only a second, but it was long enough for the kid to make his move. He kicked at the remaining glass along the bottom of the window frame and pushed his lean frame through, moving as fast as a rat through a tunnel. Jay had a line on him, had the .38 still in his hand. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoot this kid in the back. The kid looked over his shoulder once and, inexplicably, flashed Jay a smile. And then he jumped. Jay ran to the open window, careful not to cut himself on the glass. Down below, the kid landed in the grass with a grunt, scrambling to his feet in one ceaseless motion. He scaled the lowlying gate and took off on foot to the south, running toward Wheeler Avenue, the border between Jay’s neighborhood and Third Ward.
Jay stood in front of the window, his chest heaving.