I switched the flashlight back on and came out into the basement corridor and closed the door quietly behind me. Stood still and listened. I could hear the furnace. Nothing else. I tried the next room. It was empty, too. But only in the sense that it was currently unoccupied. It had stuff in it. It was a bedroom.
It was a little larger than the storeroom. It was maybe twelve-by-ten. The flashlight beam showed me rock walls, a cement floor, no windows. There was a thin mattress on the floor. It had wrinkled sheets and an old blanket strewn across it. No pillows. It was cold in the room. I could smell stale food, stale perfume, sleep, and sweat, and fear.
I searched the whole room carefully. It was dirty. But I found nothing of significance until I pulled the mattress aside. Under it, scratched into the cement of the floor, was a single word: justice. It was written all in spidery capital letters. They were uneven and chalky. But they were clear. And emphatic. And underneath the letters were numbers. Six of them, in three groups of two. Month, day, year. Yesterday's date. The letters and the numbers were scratched deeper and wider than marks made with a pin or a nail or the tip of a scissor. I guessed they had been made with the tine of a fork. I put the mattress back in position and took a look at the door. It was solid oak. It was thick and heavy. It had no inside keyhole. Not a bedroom. A prison cell.
I stepped outside and closed the door and stood still again and listened hard. Nothing. I spent fifteen minutes on the rest of the basement and found nothing at all, not that I expected to. I wouldn't have been left to run around there that morning if there was anything for a person to find. So I killed the flashlight and crept back up the stairs in the dark. Went back to the kitchen and searched it until I found a big black trash can liner. Then I wanted a towel. Best thing I could find was a worn linen square designed to dry dishes with. I folded both items neatly and jammed them in my pockets. Then I came back out into the hallway and went to look at the parts of the house I hadn't seen before.
There were a lot to choose from. The whole place was a warren. I started at the front, where I had first come in the day before. The big oak door was closed tight. I gave it a wide berth, because I didn't know how sensitive the metal detector was. Some of them beep when you're a foot away. The floors were solid oak planks, covered in rugs. I stepped carefully, but I wasn't too worried about noise. The rugs and the drapes and the paneling would soak up sound.
I scouted the whole of the ground floor. Only one place caught my attention. On the north side next to the room where I had spent the time with Beck was another locked door. It was opposite the family dining room, across a wide interior hallway. It was the only locked door on the ground floor. Therefore it was the only room that interested me. Its lock was a big brass item from back when things were manufactured with pride and aplomb. It had all kinds of fancy filigree edges where it was screwed into the wood. The screw heads themselves were rubbed smooth by a hundred and fifty years of polishing. It was probably original to the house. Some old artisan up in nineteenth-century Portland had probably fashioned it by hand, in between making boat chandlery. It took me about a second and a half to open.
The room was a den. Not an office, not a study, not a family room. I covered every inch with the flashlight beam. There was no television in there. No desk, no computer. It was just a room, simply furnished in an old-fashioned style. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled across the window. There was a big armchair padded with buttoned red leather. There was a glass-fronted collector's cabinet. And rugs. They were three-deep on the floor. I checked my watch. It was nearly one o'clock. I had been on the loose for nearly an hour. I stepped into the room and closed the door quietly.
The collector's cabinet was nearly six feet tall. It had two full-width drawers at the bottom and locked glass doors above them. Behind the glass were five Thompson submachine guns. They were the classic drum-magazine gangster weapons from the 1920s, the pieces you see in old grainy black-and-white photographs of Al Capone's soldiers. They were displayed alternately facing left and right, resting on custom hardwood pegs that held them exactly level. They were all identical. And they all looked brand new. They looked like they had never been fired. Like they had never even been touched. The armchair was set to face the cabinet. There was nothing else of significance in the room. I sat down in the chair and got to wondering why anybody would want to spend time gazing at five old grease guns.
Then I heard footsteps. A light tread, upstairs, directly over my head. Three paces, four, five. Fast quiet steps. Not just deference to the time of night. A real attempt at concealment. I got up out of the chair. Stood still. Turned the flashlight off and put it in my left hand. Put the chisel in my right. I heard a door close softly. Then there was silence. I listened hard. Focused on every tiny sound. The background rush of the heating system built to a roar in my ears. My breathing was deafening. Nothing from above. Then the footsteps started again.
They were heading for the stairs. I locked myself inside the room. I knelt behind the door and tripped the tumblers, one, two, and listened to the creak of the staircase. It wasn't Richard coming down. It wasn't a twenty-year-old. There was a measured caution in the tread. Some kind of stiffness. Somebody getting slower and quieter as they approached the bottom. The sound disappeared altogether in the hallway. I pictured someone standing on the thick rugs, surrounded by the drapes and the paneling, looking around, listening hard. Maybe heading my way. I picked up the flashlight and the chisel again. The Glock was in my waistband. I had no doubt I could fight my way out of the house. No doubt at all. But approaching an alert Paulie over hundreds of yards of open ground and through the stadium lights would be difficult. And a firefight now would bury the mission forever. Quinn would disappear again.
There was no sound from the hallway. No sound at all. Just a crushing silence. Then I heard the front door open. I heard the rattle of a chain and a lock springing back and the click of a latch and the sucking sound of a copper insulating strip releasing its grip on the edge of the door. A second later the door closed again. I felt a tiny shudder in the structure of the house as the heavy oak hit the frame. No beep from the metal detector. Whoever had passed through it wasn't carrying a weapon. Or even a set of car keys.
I waited. Duke was surely fast asleep. And he wasn't the trusting type. I guessed he wouldn't walk around at night without a gun. Neither would Beck. But either one of them might be smart enough just to stand there in the hallway and open and close the door to make me think they had gone out through it. When in fact they hadn't. When in fact they were still standing right there, gun drawn, staring back into the gloom, waiting for me to show myself.
I sat down sideways in the red leather chair. Took the Glock out of my pants and aimed it left-handed at the door. Soon as they opened it wider than nine millimeters I would fire. Until then, I would wait. I was good at waiting. If they thought they were going to wait me out, they had picked the wrong guy.
But a whole hour later there was still absolute silence out in the hallway. No sound of any kind. No vibrations. There was nobody there. Certainly not Duke. He would have fallen asleep by then and hit the deck. Not Beck, either. He was an amateur. It takes tremendous skill to keep absolutely still and silent for a whole hour. So the door thing hadn't been a trick. Somebody had gone out unarmed into the night.
I knelt down and used the bradawl on the tumblers again. Lay full-length on the floor and reached up and pulled the door open. A precaution. Anybody waiting for the door to open would have their eyes locked at head height. I would see them before they saw me. But there was nobody waiting. The hallway was empty. I stood upright and locked the door behind me. Walked silently down the basement stairs and put the flashlight back in its place. Felt my way back upstairs. Crept to the kitchen and slid all my hardware along the floor and out the door into the porch. Locked it behind me and crouched down and picked up all my stuff and checked the view out back. Saw nothing except an empty gray world of moonlit rocks and ocean.