KnockOut - Catherine Coulter [111]
Savich didn’t pause. “Let’s go over to Pulitzer Prize Road, take a look at Victor’s apartment building. Maybe they’re there, watching, forgot the time, whatever.”
Sherlock didn’t say anything, but she didn’t like it. She was tense, on edge. She punched her cell phone’s GPS on, and a dulcet female voice told them to turn right in point-five miles. A minute later, they pulled onto Victor’s street in a neighborhood of the small ranch-style houses set back from the road on big yards with pine and oak trees cozied up to the houses. They were lucky it rained here a lot, or the town would never have survived forest fires for so long.
Pulitzer Prize Road was unexpectedly long. Finally the houses began to peter out, and at the very end of the street, on the very edge of Winnett, stood Victor’s apartment building. It wasn’t much, a two-story brick building with maybe six apartments. But the yard was big and green, like all the other yards, and there was a red brick walkway that led up to the door. There was only one house beyond the apartment building, the grass overgrown, its windows boarded up, obviously vacant. Beyond that decrepit house stretched a narrow two-lane road that disappeared into the thick oak and pine trees. Everything looked limp.
“If the locals don’t take care,” Sherlock said, looking around, “the forest is going to consume the town. Nothing but oaks and pines everywhere. It looks like they swallow up the road.”
“I wouldn’t mind sitting under an oak tree about now,” Savich said, looking up at the afternoon sun, hot and high in the cloudless sky, “what with the temperature hovering around a hundred, and the humidity at two thousand. Do you know what the problem is—the sun’s too big down here.”
“We could join that golden retriever over there snoozing away under that pine tree. Everybody must be huddled around their air conditioners.”
“If Cully and Bernie are watching the apartment building from close by, they could be inside that empty house,” Savich said. “Do you see anyone? A car? Anything?”
They looked around carefully, saw nothing but the sun beating down. The trees were utterly still, not a breath of moving air.
Savich turned the car around and headed back toward town. He parked a couple of blocks from the apartment building, between a Toyota SUV and an F-150 truck. They walked back toward the building, their SIGs pressed against their sides to avoid any panic from passersby. They needn’t have bothered. Not a single soul appeared, not Cully or Bernie either. They could be well hidden, Savich thought, but surely they’d have recognized them, at least recognized Sherlock’s bright hair. This wasn’t good, Savich knew it.
Savich would swear the air pulsed with heat. He saw the humidity was making Sherlock’s hair curlier. She turned to him. “Why don’t Cully and Bernie let us know where they are?”
Savich said nothing; what was there to say? He opened the apartment-building front door and stepped into a tiny lobby that held one palm tree and six mailboxes, painted white. The temperature dropped at least thirty degrees.
“It’s like I’ve died and gone to an ice locker,” she said. She flapped her arms, enjoying it.
They looked at the mailboxes even though they knew Victor lived in apartment 403, but why was there a number like that in a two-story apartment building?
“Let’s take the stairs,” he said. “Stay alert.”
They didn’t meet anyone on the stairs. Savich imagined a lot of people were inside, eating dinner. They heard children arguing over whether to watch an old Star Trek episode or Batman, but no adult voices.
The hallway was wide and dark, all the apartment doors painted different colors. Victor Nesser’s apartment was at the very end of the second-floor hall. His front door was painted bright green, with big brass numbers—403.
Sherlock stepped forward, knocked on the door, and waited a moment, her SIG ready. “Mr. Nesser? It’s Clorie Smith, from the Winnett Herald Weekly. I’m here to offer you a full month’s free subscription,