Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) Read online

  I waited and listened. Nothing special was happening. Just me and Chapman breathing, and the regular noises from the hallway. A little buzzing sound from the exit light. Some TV sounds from individual units. That was it. I repeated the strike, trying to be accurate and focused. It took two more hits to get the plate screws loose enough for me to work on the lock. Three bangs.

  One too many.

  A door opened down the hall. Light spilled instantaneously onto the carpet, which was revealed to be blood-red. A woman in a housecoat stepped out and looked down the hall in our direction. I slipped behind Chapman. The lady down the hall was squinting. Her hand over her eyes like she was seeing far into the distance. I poked Chapman in the back. She took a couple of steps toward the lady and said, “Hi. Sorry for the noise. He had a few too many, know what I mean?”

  The neighbor was standing stock-still in the light. She said, “What?”

  Chapman got closer, she said, “We’re sorry for the noise.”

  The woman said, “No problem with any noise, honey, I’m taking out the trash.” The neighbor held up a garbage bag that had been hidden by her body. “You have a great night.”

  Chapman said, “You too,” and came loping back. The neighbor walked away.

  I returned to the task at hand. The knife blade went in at a diagonal angle and I slipped it behind the bolt. The blade compressed the bolt away from the jamb. I pushed, the door opened and I walked in.

  The apartment was a corner unit, with windows looking out to sea. Even at night, the channel was all there, laid out with two islands offshore and the whole Pacific Ocean on the other side. The moon was coming up. We were standing in the entrance, which gave out on a living room to our right. I flipped the light switch. A corner sofa unit with coffee table. Nothing on it. Above the sofa was a large Japanese print of an ocean wave with a little wood boat caught in it. No television. A couple of paces away, a dining area nestled into the window corner. Off to the right was an open plan kitchen. Between the kitchen and the dining area was a counter. A pair of high stools were tucked beneath it.

  There was mail on the dining table. Two envelopes slit open neatly. I pulled the contents. The first envelope contained a water bill, addressed to George Abrams. The second contained a marketing letter from a bank. Next to the mail was a yellow legal pad with a ball point pen beside it. The legal pad was half used up and the page on top was blank. From the dining nook I could see the lights of that cruise ship. Looking down steeply, I could see the street below with parked cars and the sidewalk on the other side.

  Chapman was hovering over me biting her nails and looking very uncomfortable. I said, “Go find shoes, and something dry to wear.” She nodded and went away. I took off my jacket and laid it over a dining room chair. The jacket was damp, but not soaking anymore. Gore-Tex. My other clothes were in worse shape. Particularly the jeans. I didn’t care.

  The kitchen was clean and neat and looked unused. Beside the bedroom, the living room and kitchen area, there was another small room. I flipped the light. It looked like an office. The desk and shelves were covered in boxes and loose paper. I didn’t immediately see a computer or a phone. I yawned. The day had started early on the boat. There had been things to do, ropes to pull. The net had needed some mending. I was tired.

  The bedroom was neat as the kitchen. Chapman was in there changing. She was naked, but I’d already seen that and she was not shy. The closet had a shirt rack, with five identical gray button-down shirts in it. Looked like George had a thing for preppy cardigans. Two of them hung up next to the shirts. They were fine quality wool, with discreet and expensive-looking logos. A shelf held four pairs of neatly pressed chinos in beige.

  Chapman pulled a pair down and slipped them on. She chose one of the button-down shirts to go with it. I said, “Classy.”

  “Always.” She started pulling through George’s jacket collection, and stopped at a thin black leather zip-up. “There it is. I bought it for him last year and he never wore it. Now I’m taking it back.” She pulled it on and admired herself in the mirror. “What do you think, Keeler?”

  I looked at her. “Whatever. I don’t think.”

  Truth was, if previously I had figured Chapman was not my type, now I was revising that thought, big time.

  She let herself fall on the bed. “Holy shit. I think I might just pass out right here and now.”

  I said, “Bad idea. We go through the place and then we get out.”

  Chapman curled her knees up. “Are you always this much fun?”

  “Oh, this isn’t fun enough?”

  She screwed her face up. “What are we looking for?”

  “We’re looking through everything, in case there is anything interesting. Included in everything and anything are computers and phones. Either of those will be considered interesting until proven otherwise.”

  She blew air up at the ceiling. “Got it.”

  I looked at her. The girl was exhausted and I was riding her hard. I said, “Half hour nap?”

  “Hour.”

  “Forty-five minutes.”

  Chapman said, “Okay.”

  I suddenly felt the weight of the wet jeans against my legs. She looked at me, up and down. “You have to get out of that wet stuff.”

  I said, “I’m good thanks.”

  “No, you’ll get the bed wet. Can’t get the bed wet, Keeler. It isn’t good manners. What will George think, when we find him?”

  “Well if you put it like that.”

  I went back to George Abrams’ closet and pulled down a pair of jeans. Too small. I picked up a pair of chinos, likewise. George was a skinny little guy. I was barrel-chested, my arms were all mass, and my legs were shaped like upside down bowling pins. Chapman was looking at me from the bed. She said, “Not going to work, Keeler. Just take it off and hang it up, then get your ass into the bed like a normal person.”

  “Never really did the normal person thing.”

  “You can fake it till you make it.”

  I stripped off the wet gear. It was like peeling rotten fruit. It wasn’t just wet, it was wet with sea water and the salt had begun to crystallize. I hung my clothes over a chair. When I turned back, Chapman was under the covers. She pulled the comforter back like a marked page. She said, “Turn off the light.”

  I did so and got under the covers. Chapman had left me enough room and it felt amazing in there, almost instantly. Like a fluffy cocoon of pure comfort. Like being on the inside of a cloud. I realized right there and then that I hadn’t been in a real bed for at least four months. Chapman couldn’t have been more right. It was a whole lot better to be in the bed than out of it. Took me a minute to get warm and start feeling perfect. I set my internal alarm for one hour, then I closed my eyes.

  Ten seconds later, I felt Chapman’s shoulder against mine, skin to skin. Warm and getting warmer. Her hand came across my thigh and then further. Her hair brushed against my forehead. Then her voice in my ear. “Sorry, but there are a couple of things I like about you.”

  I took her hand and put it back. “I like you too, but no.”

  Chapman held still for a while, then she turned away. A phrase that she’d said echoed in my head: You have to get out of that wet stuff. The way she’d said the word ‘have’. My mother had been French. She’d said words in a different way from other kid’s parents growing up. Maybe Chapman had spent time in a European country as a kid. Maybe I’d remember to ask.

  Fourteen

  An hour later we were lying side by side, still in bed.

  I said, “What did Jane Abrams do?”

  Chapman said, “Like what, you mean her job?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not sure. I think that she’s rich.”

  I said, “Rich like how?”

  Chapman shook her head. “I don’t know. You think I should have asked?”

  “I guess not.”

  George was an alarm clock user. According to the clock, the time was ten to midnight. By o
ne a.m. we had taken turns in the shower. After that we got dressed. Her in clean clothes that smelled like laundry detergent. Me in damp salty jeans and my old t-shirt. At least George’s socks fit. I got a clean pair from the dresser. His shoes were big on Chapman, but big is better than small in that department.

  I started on the office. Stacks of papers and books were precariously placed on the desk and two shelves screwed to the wall opposite. Beside the desk was a filing cabinet. I sat at the desk and began to leaf through the papers. As far as I could make out, they were research papers related to George’s academic work. There were diagrams and mathematical equations with lines and symbolic figures that I didn’t understand. They were written in a secret language, that was for sure. There was a recurring phrase in the subtitle of many of the academic papers, ‘Non-linear acoustics’.

  Abrams had pinned three sheets of office paper on the wall above the desk. They were color printouts with abstract imagery. Waves of neon in bright orange, red, green, and blue. One color melting into another, and so on.

  I reached down to my right and opened the filing cabinet. It was empty except for a laptop computer, tossed in with the power cord. I pulled it out and pushed a few stacks of paper back to make room. I called Chapman in. She came over and stood behind me. I pressed the power button. We waited for the computer to turn on, whirring and beeping and buzzing. Once it had settled down, the screen was blank except for a place in the middle where I was supposed to enter a password.

  I looked at Chapman. She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I said, “Password?”

  She said, “Try Abe and Louie. No spaces, all lower case.”

  I said, “The steak house, Boston.”

  “George was crazy about their rib eye.”

  I said, “Spell that for me.”

  Chapman spelled it out and I typed it in. Then I hit return. The little box in the middle of the screen shook violently. A new message popped up above it, ‘invalid password’. She said, “Try it all upper case.” I did, and we got the same thing, an angry vibration. She said, “I don’t know then, I guess George changed his password.”

  I straightened up and turned around to look at Chapman. She was biting her nails again and her blue eyes were looking right at me. I said, “Anything else to suggest?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I can think of, no. We don’t want to try too many, because it might do something bad.”

  “Like destroy the contents.”

  “I’m not sure, maybe. The rule of threes.”

  I thought about that for a second. Closed the laptop. I pointed to the color printouts on the wall.

  “Any idea what those are?”

  Chapman leaned in and looked at them. She hemmed and hawed. “Acoustic modeling stuff. I don’t know exactly what, but they look like a shape that George probably wanted to memorize.” She ran a long finger over one of the images, tracing a curving line that separated the neon red from the blue. “I think these are the same thing, an object that George would have wanted to be able to recognize in the field. When he didn’t have his big computer.”

  “What would he have, out there in the field?”

  She said, “Oh, he’d have a portable unit. You know, a pelican case with a field laptop and the hardware.”

  I said, “Hardware.”

  “Acoustic sensors that you can put in the water.”

  I left the laptop on the desk and tossed the rest of the office, looking for a phone mostly. Nothing there. Chapman was waiting in the living room. She looked at me when I came out. “Anything?”

  I said, “No. Look for a backpack. We’re taking the laptop. Also, we need to wipe this place down. Make sure we don’t leave prints. And don’t forget the bed. Sheets, towels, old clothes. We take them with us.”

  She said, “You serious?”

  “Yes. We’ll burn them.”

  Chapman went looking for a bag to carry the laptop in. I stripped the bed. Everything went inside the comforter cover. Then I tied the corners and had a large sack to sling over my shoulder. I threw that on the living room floor and took another look around.

  Out the window, the view was the same, except the moon had come clear of the cloud. Its reflection made a line across Carolina Island, across the channel, and right up to the cruise ship.

  I noticed the yellow legal pad again. Half the pages had been ripped out, half were still there. I carefully removed the top page and folded it into quarters. It went in my inside jacket pocket. There was something else. A glass bowl with a small key in it. It occurred to me that the key was for the mailbox in the lobby. I thumbed it into the coin pocket of my jeans. Chapman came out of the bedroom with a backpack. I put the laptop in it, zipped up, slung it over my shoulder.

  We were ready to go.

  I closed the door on the way out. The latch clicked into the bolt hole. The security plate was loose, but the lock still worked. We came out the way we had come in, down the stairwell and then down three steps to the lobby. I focused my attention on the grid of mailboxes. Each box was a small square in dull bronze with a keyhole in the center of each little door. I located number forty-six. Given that George hadn’t been around to collect the mail, I wondered if there would be anything interesting inside. I pulled the small key out of the coin pocket and tried it. Bingo. The little box opened up and a month of mail sat there, which was exactly five envelopes. I unslung the backpack, unzipped it and shoveled the mail in.

  I stood for a moment looking through a square window fit into the door. Parked cars and nobody walking in the darkness. No dogs. No bears. Not even a cat. I opened the door and stepped out to the sidewalk. I made it two steps, and a voice from my left said, “Nice and slow. Put the bundle down and get the hands up and out where I can see them.”

  I turned my head and saw a uniformed policeman. He was maybe thirty years old with a face like a burger bun. The cop stood six feet away, pointing a Glock at my face. There was another guy behind him, older, maybe fifty and change. No uniform. The older cop stepped out to get an angle, he swung his gun at my chest.

  The younger cop said, “Is this the guy?”

  The older cop said, “Yup. That’s him.”

  I said nothing. But I was beginning to get pissed off.

  Fifteen

  It was not just the two policemen outside of the Edna Bay Apartments, they had brought the whole crew. Must have moved in while we were on our way down the stairs. Across the street and to the right of the building entrance was an unmarked Ford Explorer. Two marked versions of that same vehicle had sealed off both ends of the block. I recalled my conversation with June at the SEAS office. Looked like Mister Lawrence had gotten a three-for-two deal from Ford, for the police vehicle upgrades.

  I dropped the bundle and put my hands slowly in the air.

  They turned me around against the wall and read me my rights. I was being arrested for murder. I looked over and saw Amber Chapman being taken away in handcuffs. We made eye contact in the brief moment before a cop’s hand ducked her head and put her into one of the prowlers.

  The older guy spoke to the younger cop. “Do the GSR on him.”

  The younger guy pushed me up against the unmarked Ford’s hood. He said, “Stay here.” A few moments later, he was back with a cardboard box. GSR stands for gunshot residue. The uniformed cop set up on the hood and tried to keep cool while fiddling around with the cheap-looking evidence testing kit. The older guy was leaning against the back of the car, sucking on a cigarette. When he was done, he flipped his butt and walked over.

  “Make sure you do the lab test first, huh?”

  “Yeah, Jim.”

  After the lab test, they swabbed me for presumptive. I knew this because I’ve done it myself. We had higher quality kits in the military. But they performed the same function. Presumptive tests are for the field. They can tell you if the guy discharged a firearm recently, but you need the lab tests to verify the presumptive. The lab tests are more thorough. We hadn’t bothered w
ith lab tests in Iraq or Afghanistan, nobody was going to have to prove anything in trial. Hadn’t bothered testing at all in Syria.

  The presumptive came out negative. Good news for me, but evidently not good news for the policemen. The younger guy packed his kit away in the worn cardboard box. They put me in the vehicle.

  The uniformed cop drove. Next to him was the older guy. From his voice I figured him as the detective who had found Jane Abrams’ body. Name of Jim, radio call sign thirteen. His sad eyes told me that he would rather be home in bed than in the police car. I was in the back separated by a wire grid. Both of them kept their eyes forward and their mouths shut. Which suited me fine, because I had no plans to engage in conversation.

  The question on my mind was, how did they know I was their guy? One possibility was a security camera at Beaver Falls Lodge that I had missed. But if there had been a camera, they would know that I was not their guy, because they would have the shooter on video.

  The other option was that someone had given the police my name.

  Maybe it was Deckart.

  Maybe he had discovered that I was not in fact working for Mister Lawrence.

  Which would be easy to do, if he asked Mister Lawrence.

  Then maybe Mister Lawrence had decided to take me out of the equation.

  Drop the hammer on Jane Abrams and friends, set Keeler up for the fall. The only other person who both knew me and had a connection to the evening’s events was Amber Chapman. I had been with her the whole time, so I shelved the possibility that it was her who had set it up.

  The follow-up question was easier. What to do? The answer was nothing. In the United States, there is no escaping police custody. You can try. You can even be successful on a tactical level, for a period of time. Long or short, it does not matter. Because in the end they will get you. And the moment you cross state lines it becomes a federal situation. Once they get going, the FBI is very good at what it does.