Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [17]
“Hello, Alfredo,” Martin whispered, unconsciously breaking his rule of silence when inside a client’s home. The sound of his own voice startled him, shocked him really, but not nearly as much as what followed from the bird.
“Hello chickadee! What’s cooking?”
At this outburst Martin gasped and found himself holding his breath, though he wasn’t sure why. This was a bird, after all, and he had dealt with pets before. Never dogs, of course, but cats were common to many of his clients’ homes, and he was once in a house where a ferret had been on the loose. Birds were also nothing new to Martin, though the birds he had seen thus far had been tiny little things jammed into iron cages. This bird was large, free, and talking. Worse still, it was responding to Martin’s words and actions.
“Scotch and soda, please, neat,” Alfredo squawked, ruffling his wings again. “Thanks mate! What’s cooking? Gimme kiss! Gimme kiss! Gimme kiss!” With each word, the bird grew louder and more agitated until it appeared as if it would leap off its perch at any moment.
At this, Martin’s warning bells became a cacophony of screaming sirens. He could feel himself beginning to sweat and felt a tremor in his hands. At last he succumbed to instinct. Moving quickly, unaware of his dramatic shift in speed, Martin backed up the four stairs to the kitchen, through the living room, and out the door, barely remembering to relock it as he left. Walking more quickly than he should, Martin backtracked halfway down the Grants’ quarter-mile driveway before cutting into and through the woods and emerging back on Sidle Road, a side street adjacent to the reservoir, where he had parked his car in the small dirt parking lot. He drove for more than two miles before realizing that he was still wearing surgical gloves and rubber moccasins and that his lock-pick gun was lying out in the open on the passenger seat. Turning into the parking lot of a family grocer, Martin took several long breaths before restoring his Subaru and himself to proper traveling order.
Martin’s initial reaction was to cancel the Grants as clients immediately and for three days he operated under this assumption, planning no further visits to their home, though he did not delete any of the files on the Grants from his computer. Prior to his visit, Martin had conducted surveillance of the Grants’ home on fourteen separate occasions, at varying times of the day, in order to identify patterns in their life. Sitting in his car, armed with his laptop, or walking the block several times with a digital voice recorder in hand, Martin would gather the information required before entering a client’s home. It was during these sessions that he would look for signs of dogs and maid service, determine departure and arrival times to and from work, and identify clients’ shopping patterns. Were the Grants the type of couple that stopped at the market each day, or did they do all of their shopping on Sunday? Information of this type was invaluable to Martin, and by the end of his fourteenth day, he had gathered a great deal of it on the Grants. Though he had told himself that the correct move was to cancel them as clients and delete his computer files, something inside him was still holding out hope.
Oddly enough, the reason was Alfredo.
Something about the parrot had caused Martin’s mind to stir for days. Unaccustomed to daydreaming, he was surprised to find himself thinking about the bird at the oddest possible moments: while cracking hard-boiled eggs in the kitchen, while photographing a client’s pantry, and while flossing for the fifth and final time that day before going to bed. He tried to dismiss his musing as ridiculous, but still his thoughts returned to the bird that had caused him to break several of his most important rules and flee recklessly from a client’s home. Eventually Martin began considering a return to the Grants’, for reasons he could not imagine. He didn’t need the business. He had plenty of clients and plenty of new referrals worth investigating. Still,