And Bobby would make sure it was spectacular.

CHAPTER 26

IN THE COVER of darkness, Kyle parked the 280ZX at the end of the driveway, his usual spot, and skulked around to the back, guided by the beam of his flashlight. He opened the screen door, slipped his key in the rear door’s lock, gave it a twist. It wouldn’t turn. No matter how hard he tried, the thing wouldn’t budge. It took him longer than it should have to realize it wasn’t rust.

Sons of bitches. The bank had changed the locks.

His mother’s bank accounts and meager insurance had covered the cost of her funeral, with a little still left over for expenses. But after keeping his car filled and running, paying the cable bill and his phone and Internet bills, the electric bill, the water bill, his bar bills—especially his bar bills—after all that, the money from his mother and his wages from Bubba’s hadn’t been enough to allow him to keep paying the mortgage. He could have gotten a full-time job, sure, except then he’d have a full-time job. But even as he crumpled and tossed out the notices of delinquency as they came, first in the mail and then posted on the door, he didn’t think the bastards would actually have the gumption to foreclose on an orphan.

Which only showed just how much Kyle understood about the ways of the world.

So they had booted him out and then locked him from his house. Or they had tried to, in any event. But he had lived there all his life, including the difficult years of his adolescence after his father’s death, when adventure was somewhere, anywhere, beyond the walls of his mother’s house and curfews were set up only to be knocked down like bowling pins. He had learned to climb into that house half a dozen ways without his mother’s being the wiser, windows he unlocked before leaving, a rear door that could be jimmied open with his student ID.

He made a quick reconnoiter around the perimeter. The bankers had been pretty damn thorough for a pack of whiny money counters. All the windows had been locked tight with jamb locks added, and a dead bolt bolted onto the back door. But they had slipped up on the narrow window beside that door. The window was locked, but its sill had never been set right. Kyle’s mom had often complained about the water that would sometimes leak inside, but she had never done anything about it.

He pressed hard against the top of the sill with one hand while he gave the lower right corner a quick bang with the flat of his other hand, and the bottom of the window popped loose. A little bit of prying, working the window back and forth, and it pulled out of the frame like a giant puzzle piece.

The opening wasn’t big enough for any part of his body other than his arm to slip through, but that was enough to allow him to reach over and turn the knob of the newly installed dead bolt. With the bolt released, he again opened the screen door, put the butt of the flashlight in his mouth, took out his driver’s license, and jimmied the door open. Quick as that, he was inside his old house.

It smelled wrong, empty and old and devoid of life. He had thought he would still be able to smell something of her, her hair spray, her soap, the lotion she rubbed on her hands, knuckles red and cracked from gardening. Nothing. And even in the darkness, he could sense the vacancy, as the sounds of his footfalls echoed without obstruction. Just a dusty emptiness. Out of habit he turned on the kitchen light and then halted at the sight of nothing.

There was no kitchen table, no freestanding cabinet for his mother’s china, no table in the dining room or couch in the front parlor. Those sons of bitches had grabbed everything. A whole life, her whole life, gone, hocked to pay his debts. He had taken a few things of hers when he finally left, a scrapbook she had made, including a few photographs of her and his father, a painting she had done when she was a girl, just a scant few things that could fit in the small space beneath the hatchback of the Datsun along with his clothes and his laptop and his softball bat. He assumed he would come back for the rest, but he had never gotten around to it, and now those bastards had shipped it all off to be sold for mere pennies. While staring at the emptiness of his house and trying not to draw the connection with the emptiness of his life, he suddenly thought about the file cabinet and felt a jolt of desperation.

Damn, the bastards must have sold that, too.

He rushed for the basement stairs, flicked on the light, charged down. The basement was a dismal place beneath the old fluorescent lights that hummed and skittered to no great effect. The floor was cracked and damp, mold rising like a plague on the scuffed bare walls. Pipes and wires sagged sadly from the open ceiling rafters, the outdated circuit box dangled loosely off the wall. And it was empty. As cleaned out as a bank in the path of Bonnie and Clyde.

His mother had once envisioned a playroom for her boisterous young son and had the basement framed out with drywall. But before carpet could be laid and a ceiling hung, the remains of a hurricane had climbed up the East Coast, flooding the neighborhood and sending a slurry of water and mud through fractures in the walls and the cement floor. Soon the idea of a playroom was abandoned, and the basement instead became a storage bin for all manner of junk: old furniture from Kyle’s grandmother’s house, gardening paraphernalia, rolls of corroded metal fencing and stakes for the tomatoes. Kyle had figured the file cabinet would be somewhere hidden among or behind all the refuse. But the refuse now was gone—only the washer and dryer with their rusted bases remained—and the file cabinet was apparently gone with it.

He spun around in despair. They had taken it, those bastards. They didn’t even know what they had, and they had taken it. He had a sudden vision of a brown file cabinet tumbling off a truck onto a pile of scrap metal, its files flipping madly as they fluttered into the wind.

But as he calmed, he considered. He’d been in this basement hundreds of times, and he had never seen the thing, had never even caught a glimpse. Had he simply not noticed it? Possibly. Or maybe it hadn’t been hidden among the refuse where he could easily have spied it. Maybe it had been so well hidden that it eluded even the maniacal grasp of the money-mad bankers.

He began to pace the edge of the moldy drywall. It seemed to track quite closely the contours of the basement. From an opening for the radiator, he could see that the framer had left only a small space between the wood and the flaking stone walls to maximize the size of the playroom. But there was something about the wall on the opposite side of the radiator that bothered him.

He walked up to it. At this point on the floor above, the living room zagged a bit for an open window well with a bench seat that his mother had upholstered in purple paisley. But this part of the dry wall was simply straight. And there was something about the mold. On the space right where that window well should have been, it was spottier than on the other sections, as if the paint that was used was somehow of a different quality than that on the rest of the walls and the mold couldn’t get a purchase here. Or maybe the drywall was simply farther away from the damp stone.