She nodded, cleared her throat and forced a smile. ‘It needed a makeover anyway, what with the dogs around. The insurance will cover it.’ The battle-axe returned, and steely eyes looked at Chloe. ‘You’ll get them?’
Chloe nodded once. That had always been the plan.
Before they could say anything further, Lisa and Shawn burst into the room and climbed on Rocka’s lap. She held them close, her eyes asking them not to mention the house. Chloe nodded fractionally and asked the kids, ‘Right, guys, I bet you’re hungry. What do you have when you’re hungry?’
She jammed fingers in her ears at the loud yells in reply and grinned. ‘I can’t hear you. Now you’ll have to get your own cereal.’
‘Will you go to the locker today?’ Shawn put an end to their gaiety.
‘We’ll hunt for it, yeah,’ Broker replied, choosing his words carefully. The locker was lost to them now, the key either in the debris of the house or with the gang.
Shawn frowned, puzzled at Broker’s choice of words. ‘What’s there to search for when you have the key.’
‘They don’t have it, honey. They went to get Lisa’s backpack but couldn’t find it. They’ll go back and search again.’ Rocka combed his hair with her fingers, her touch calming him.
‘It’s with me.’ Green eyes looked at them from beneath tousled blonde curls, as if to say why wouldn’t it be? Lisa giggled when she saw most of them had their mouths open.
Bear was the first to recover. ‘Your backpack…’
‘Is with me,’ she replied firmly, and then her face became indignant. ‘You didn’t think I would leave Dino behind, did you?’
‘Dino?’ Broker asked for all of them.
Lisa sighed long and theatrically. Adults. They didn’t come with enough training.
‘Keys,’ she held her hand out and demanded.
Broker looked at her blank faced, and when Lisa thrust her hand out again, he gave her the Tahoe’s keys.
She reappeared minutes later with a pink backpack festooned with ribbons and badges. Reaching inside it, she drew out a tattered green dinosaur and placed it in the center.
‘Dino.’ She pointed. ‘Backpack.’ She pointed at it.
Broker closed his eyes briefly, gathering his thoughts and his wits. He started, ‘When did you—’ and stopped when she held a palm up. Adults couldn’t be trusted to ask the right questions.
‘I was carrying it when we left home. Guess none of you noticed.’ She smiled smugly. ‘Now, Broker, can you find my dad’s key?’ she challenged him.
Broker would willingly face off with entire gangs, but kids were beyond him, and he wisely kept quiet. He reached out and emptied the bag, glancing curiously at a pink diary with a tiny padlock, a key dangling next to it. Lisa snatched it out of his hand, saying it was her private journal. He felt the insides of the bag, then the outside, turned the straps inside out, checked the folds, and came up with nothing. He started again, slowly this time, and still found nothing. He noticed Lisa and Shawn grinning, and it clicked.
‘A key and a lock go together, don’t they?’ he asked casually, and Lisa smiled cheekily at him. ‘Took you a long time, Broker.’
He examined the key. It looked like the key to the padlock at first glance, but closer inspection showed that it didn’t match. ‘Your dad did this? I thought he taped it inside your backpack.’
Lisa shook her head. ‘He did, but then I removed it and hung it from the lock. It looked more natural there,’ she said proudly.
Chloe beamed at her. ‘That was very smart, honey. Not many kids would have thought of that. Did your dad say anything when he gave you the key?’
She scrunched her face, trying to remember, and then the blonde curls bounced. ‘He said I should give it to Zebra only. He would know what to do.’
They looked nonplussed for a moment, and then Shawn rolled his eyes. ‘Zeb. Zebra is that striped animal.’
Lisa was on a roll and let that pass airily. ‘Whatever. And I know.’ She stuck her tongue out at him.
‘Dad didn’t say anything else?’ Shawn took the key and inspected it and handed it over to Chloe. It wasn’t anything special, like a billion keys out there, its sole purpose to go in a lock and uncover its secrets — but that was possible only if they knew which lock it fit.
The other men inspected it, but all of them came up blank. Broker went to his bag of goodies, his backpack, and taking a magnifying glass, examined the key, shaking his head in frustration finally when it stubbornly remained anonymous.
He leaned back and half-closed his eyes, thinking. Zeb would know what to do. Why would he? When he opened his eyes, Bwana and Bear had rolled out a map of the city and were marking the gang’s businesses they had hit. Of course.
He leaned over them and marking Brownsville Autos with a cross, drew a large circle around it. Broker fired up his iPad and read out addresses within the circle.
Storage lockers, half an hour’s commute from the garage.
Far enough to have enough distance from the garage, close enough that his absence wouldn’t be missed. He probably went during his lunch hour.
Zeb used to have storage lockers all across the city, where he stowed several emergency stashes of cash, fake passports, identities, clothing, and weapons. Everything that a sudden exit needed.
They studied the twenty addresses, and after some more research, Broker drew a red line through five of them. ‘Not big enough. He would want someplace that was large enough for him to feel anonymous.’
It was at the eleventh self-storage unit that they hit pay dirt.
The locker was empty save for a few clothes and, beneath them, a thin notebook.
Broker ruffled the pages and saw that only a few of them were filled. He went back to the first page and read.
‘If you’re reading this, then I am dead.’
Chapter 32
Broker finished reading in half an hour, breathed deeply, and passed it to Bwana and Roger. They read it in silence, and in silence they headed back to Marine Park.
Shawn looked at them expectantly when they returned and smiled when Broker waved the notebook at him, the smile fading when the three of them didn’t say anything. ‘Nothing in there?’
‘Some clues. Will need some legwork.’
Shawn looked at him for a long moment, looking past Broker’s game face and noncommittal answer, fearing the answer, not ready for it. He slid out of his chair and left the room. Lisa looked at them uncertainly and then, snatching Dino, ran after him.
‘Not good?’ Chloe asked them.
Broker handed her the notebook wordlessly.
Shattner’s journal started from his days in Iraq. He wrote about his wife, his kids, the journal sunny and cheerful, a lot of pages focusing on his ‘sprouts,’ and then he started writing about his marriage coming under strain, and the jottings became darker. ‘… marriage has become a black hole for my money. If only she worked.’
There were several blank pages, and then one started with, ‘There were a million reasons not to go down that route, and I knew all of them. Giving my kids a good life outweighed them all. Keeping her quiet was worth it.’ He wrote about selling small arms that were on the verge of being deactivated, his way of rationalizing.
The entries became swiftly written, the pen digging deep in the journal, words bottled in Shattner finding a release.
The next entry was dog-eared, and the page was heavily smudged, as if Shattner had revisited it again and again.
‘He was an odd one. He never socialized with anyone, didn’t encourage conversation, never smiled… no one knew what he did and when asked, he said, “This and that.” Rumor was that he was Special Ops, working with the rebels, but no one ever knew for sure.’