Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

side door, I rang the upper and lower bells and waited. Thirty seconds passed. I pressed both again. Still no response. Glancing at the street a final time, I moved into the back yard. Tall vinyl fences were in the back and on the house side. Thick shrubbery was on the driveway side. The yard felt secluded. No exterior cameras I could see, but I pulled down my watch cap anyway and pulled up the hood of the sweatshirt under my jacket. A mercury vapor light was mounted on the clapboard, near the back porches and out of reach. It had a motion detector sensor angled downward but that mattered little in the middle of the afternoon. If I kept away from the driveway, I would remain unseen.

The lower porch had no stairs and was enclosed by glass as if it were a greenhouse. The upper was open, its awning cranked shut and outdoor furniture covered for the winter. A weathered wooden swing set sat in the middle of the snow-covered lawn. Beyond it was the garage whose upper apartment windows were covered. The entrance was at the corner where the concrete met the lawn. I passed it, crunching through the snow to the garage window. More curtains kept me from seeing inside. Then I returned to the apartment door and listened to my surroundings as I considered which building I would enter first.

The only identifiable sounds came from traffic on Kensington and the whisper of wind. Somewhere in the distance was hammering followed by its echo, too far away to concern me. A bell from a nearby church or maybe the school just off Bailey rang three times, signaling the hour. I continued to listen. No music, no TV, no talk radio chatter. No Christmas carols. But more important to what I was about to do, no voices or sounds of people bustling about. No kids. I tried to remember if Fatimah had said how many children she had. Kids, she had said, and I hadn’t asked for information. Daughters, Bianca had said, so there were at least two. That meant that if the bastards had got here ahead of me, I might find five bodies.

Remembering the flower shop’s alarm panel and interior security cameras, I decided to check out the garage and its apartment first. It was unlikely that a detached garage would be included in the alarm system. I reached into my jacket pocket for the leather case that held the lock pick gun and tension tool I usually kept in my gun safe. I put the bent end of the tool into the door lock and inserted the pick gun. Exerting pressure on the tool, I squeezed the trigger four or five times, until the lock’s pins vibrated into place and the tool turned like a key. Withdrawing the pick gun and the tool, I opened the door and stepped inside.

It was dark, so I clicked on my pocket flashlight. A staircase led to the apartment. To my left was a solid wooden door that opened into the garage. I unlocked it and looked inside. Against the far wall was a tan Dodge van with Flowers by Fatimah on the side. Along the front wall were garden tools, a power mower, and boxes of flower shop supplies like plant stands and Styrofoam rings. Oil spots dotted the remainder of the cement floor, suggesting there was a second vehicle. Closing the door and mounting the stairs, I made a mental note to log into IntelliChexx for Ike Kelly’s DMV registrations. The apartment was compact—a bedroom, a kitchenette that doubled as a TV room, and a narrow bathroom. The unmade bed and the dishes in the sink suggested the occupant had intended to come back, but there were no clothes, anywhere.

At least there were no bodies, I told myself. Yet.

Going back downstairs, I stopped in the entryway to think about the alarm system. While the garage had not been included, I had seen the security panel inside the flower shop. Ordinarily, such panels at primary entrances had delays of thirty to forty-five seconds to give the person entering with a key time to punch in the security code. Most systems had interior panels in places like the master bedroom, so occupants could activate the alarm at night and deactivate it in the morning. Also, each panel would have two panic buttons that requested immediate police or fire dispatch. The average response time was three to six minutes, but busy days could push that to fifteen or twenty. If someone had broken in, especially with Keisha on high alert, somebody would have pushed the panic button, the primary purpose of which was to scare away the intruder. A determined and skillful killer could have taken them all out in the time it took a squad car to reach the house, but that would have meant the place I planned to enter was already a crime scene. The absence of police tape and the empty slot in the garage suggested I would find no bodies, no dead daughters.

But I had to be sure.

Two-family houses, as this one had been before the lower flat was converted into a business, sometimes had two separate alarm systems. The front door to the upstairs, solid steel and pristine, had struck me as seldom used. Perhaps that was intended to keep business and home separate. The side door, then, might serve as the primary access to the second floor. In any case, the interior wall would have one or two panels or none at all. If there were no panels I would know it the instant I opened the door, and I’d have to run. With two or one, I would have just enough time to get inside, peek at the downstairs if there were no additional doors to open, take the steps two at a time to peek at the upstairs, again if there were no doors to open. Locked doors usually meant the