Today's Reading
"Oh, really?" said the kid, who didn't seem to understand what that had to do with this.
"Nobody dead in there, I take it?"
"No, sir. Looks to me like they either left the propane to blow on purpose or left it unattended on accident."
"So there's no corpse in there, but if you go over the hill and look in that house behind the barbed wire, you'll see the owner is dead on the floor of a workshop where he was making Lord-knows-what. Though I wouldn't advise poking your head in unless you've got a strong stomach. They'll have to identify him by his teeth and prints, considering the condition his face is in."
Malort studied the smoking remains of a bed, now just a blackened frame and springs. The morning sunlight and the spray of the hose was decorating the scene with a festive little rainbow.
"Is that true?" asked the kid, trying to piece together the implications. "Did you call it in?"
"I'm not much for callin' things in. Though you should tell your people to wear protective gear when they go over there. I don't know what the guy had in his shop, but there were homemade radiation warning signs on the door. You can decide for yourself whether a homemade radiation sign is scarier than an official one." Malort studied the shack's exposed ashy guts and asked, "Have you seen any sign of a road case? One of them black boxes with aluminum trim, about the size of a footlocker?"
"No, sir. I mean, we haven't dug around inside there, but I haven't
seen anything like that. Hey, uh, Bomb and Arson are on their way. You should tell them about the dead body."
"Nobody has come to take anything from the scene?"
"Not since I been here. I didn't catch your name?"
"And nobody saw the occupant leave? Or what vehicle they were driving? Might have been a blue pickup."
"No, sir." The kid was glancing around now, presumably for someone senior to come to his rescue.
Malort zoomed in with his camera, focusing on the bit of intact wall at the foot of the bed. There was a schizoid scatter of pictures and drawings pinned to the wall, blackened and curled. The residue of a mind gone to batshit. He snapped a photo. He then studied the floor around the bed... "Point your hose away," growled Malort. "I'm gonna check somethin'." He stomped toward the shack, kicked over the burned-out bed frame, and yanked away a waterlogged rug underneath. There it was: a hatch that Opened with a metal ring.
"Huh," said the kid as Malort yanked the hatch open. "They got a basement?"
"They've got a tunnel and a bomb shelter. Follow it back a hundred yards or so and you'll wind up under that house behind the fence. It turned out my intruder didn't vanish; they slipped into a bedroom closet, climbed down a ladder, ran over, popped out here."
Then, thought Malort, they'd rigged it so he'd get a face full of propane tank shrapnel if he tried to follow.
The kid looked amazed. "Damn. Is this like a cartel operation? I have a buddy who said they busted a place that had tunnels running all through the neighborhood—"
"Sir!" shouted a new voice from behind the kid. "What's your business here?"
It was the older guy, coming to assert his authority. Malort tensed up. The dude was in his fifties or sixties, but that only put him in the same range as himself. And you generally didn't want to tangle with a firefighter; they had muscles from hauling gear and bad attitudes from breathing toxic chemicals and remembering the screams of burning children.
"He's looking for a big box," said the kid. "He says the old guy who
owns this land is dead over in that house behind the fence. And now he's found a secret tunnel under the Unabomber hut. And the house is radioactive, maybe."
"Who are you?" asked the older man, ignoring the kid completely. Malort put his phone away. "I was just leaving."
"No, you're not. I'm gonna need to see ID. Hey!"
Malort ignored him and made his way back to the Buick. The senior fireman was talking into a radio now, hurrying to get himself between Malort and his car.
"You just wait right here."
He put a hand on Malort's chest. Malort stopped, looked slowly down at the gloved hand, then back up to meet the old dude's eyes. There he detected the same apprehension he'd seen on the faces of authority figures since his growth spurt in middle school. He decided that, if things continued to progress in this fashion, he would open with forearm blows to the head and then delegate the closing argument to his boots. No doubt the other firemen would try to jump in, but you can't waste your life worrying about stuff that's not gonna happen until thirty seconds from now.
"Everybody," announced Malort, "get out your phones and start recording, because if this old fuck doesn't get out of my way, what happens next should really be something to see."
He balled his fists, and his heart revved into another gear. As stimulants go, an early-morning ass-kicking was only a notch below speed. The old man gave him a perfunctory hard look and then backed down, allowing Malort to get behind the wheel of the Grand National unimpeded. The old man made a big show of photographing the license plate to save face.
As Malort backed up, he leaned out his window and said, "Never challenge a man in a Buick. He's got nothin' to lose."
As he headed back to the main road, he pulled up the pic of the shack's interior and zoomed in on the charred paranoia collage. Written on a handmade banner above the darkened scraps were three words:
THE FORBIDDEN NUMBERS
This excerpt ends on page 14 of the hardcover edition.
Monday we begin the book A Winter Wish by Emily Stone.
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