Pleasantville Read Free Page B

back in an hour.
    â€œI can swing by the office if you need me, after this wraps up.”
    â€œYeah, why don’t you, man,” Jay said.
    For whatever reason, he didn’t mention the odd details of the break-in, 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 andhad plans to buy his first limousine next year. These days, he only ever “looked into stuff” for old friends.
    â€œOn 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 stickingto 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