07 Seven Up Read Free

rapped on it hard. “Mr. DeChooch?”
    Still no answer.
    I opened the door and looked inside. Empty. The bathroom was empty and the other two bedrooms were empty. No DeChooch.
    Shit.
    “What's going on?” Lula called up.
    “DeChooch isn't here.”
    “Say what?”
    Lula and I searched the house. We looked under beds and in closets. We looked in the cellar and the garage. DeChooch's closets were filled with clothes. His toothbrush was still in the bathroom. His car was asleep in the garage.
    “This is too weird,” Lula said. “How could he have gotten past us? We were sitting right in his front room. We would have seen him sneak by.”
    We were standing in the backyard, and I cut my eyes to the second story. The bathroom window was directly above the flat roof that sheltered the back door leading from the kitchen to the yard. Just like my parents' house. When I was in high school I used to sneak out that window late at night so I could hang with my friends. My sister, Valerie, the perfect daughter, never did such a thing.
    “He could have gone out the window,” I said. “He wouldn't have had a far drop either because he's got those two garbage cans pushed against the house.”
    “Well, he's got some nerve acting all old and feeble and goddamned depressed, and then soon as we turn our backs he goes and jumps out a window. I'm telling you, you can't trust nobody anymore.”
    “He snookered us.”
    “Damn skippy.”
    I went into the house, searched the kitchen, and with minimum effort found a set of keys. I tried one of the keys on the front door. Perfect. I locked the house and pocketed the keys. It's been my experience that sooner or later, everyone comes home. And when DeChooch does come home he might decide to shut the house up tight.
    I knocked on Angela's door and asked if she wasn't by any chance harboring Eddie DeChooch. She claimed she hadn't seen him all day, so I left her with my card and gave instructions to call me if DeChooch turned up.
    Lula and I got into the CR-V, I cranked the engine over, and an image of DeChooch's keys floated to the forefront of my brain. House key, car key . . . and a third key. I took the key ring out of my purse and looked at it.
    “What do you suppose this third key is for?” I asked Lula.
    “It's one of them Yale locks that you put on gym lockers and sheds and stuff.”
    “Do you remember seeing a shed?”
    “I don't know. I guess I wasn't paying attention to that. You think he could be hiding in a shed along with the lawn mower and weed whacker?”
    I shut the engine off and we got out of the car and returned to the backyard.
    “I don't see a shed,” Lula said. “I see a couple garbage cans and a garage.”
    We peered into the dim garage for the second time.
    “Nothing in there but the car,” Lula said.
    We walked around the garage to the rear and found the shed.
    “Yeah, but it's locked,” Lula said. "He'd have to be Houdini to get himself in there and then lock it from the outside. And on top of that this shed smells real bad.
    I shoved the key in the lock and the lock popped open.
    “Hold on,” Lula said. “I vote we leave this shed locked. I don't want to know what's smelling up this shed.”
    I yanked at the handle, the door to the shed swung wide, and Loretta Ricci stared out at us, mouth open, eves unseeing, five bullet holes in the middle of her chest. She was sitting on the dirt floor, her back propped against the corrugated metal wall, her hair white from a dose of lime that wasn't doing much to stop the destruction that follows death.
    “Shit, that ain't no ironing board,” Lula said.
    I slammed the door shut, snapped the lock in place, and put some distance between me and the shed. I told myself I wasn't going to throw up, and took a bunch of deep breaths. “You were right,” I said. “I shouldn't have opened the shed.”
    “You never listen to me. Now look what we got. All on account of you had to be nosy. Not only that, but I know what's