“Of course it is. Give them to me.”
Dwayne, looking like a man who’d lost all hope, handed the keys over to his wife. There were half a dozen of them on the ring, and he didn’t bother to single out the right one for her.
The third key did the trick.
She opened the door, flicked on the light. Crystal managed to duck under her arm and got into the room first.
Cal was on the floor, on his side. Duct tape was wrapped around his ankles and knees, and had been used to secure his wrists together at his back. There was another strip slapped across his mouth.
“Oh my God!” Celeste said, and dropped to her knees.
Cal was conscious, and rolled onto his stomach to allow Celeste to release his hands more easily. But after picking at the tape for several seconds, she turned to Dwayne, who was still standing in the doorway, and asked for a knife.
“Uh, sure,” he said, and reached into his other pocket for a small jackknife. He extracted a blade, then carefully put it into his wife’s hand. “He’s probably going to say some crazy shit, but you need to keep in mind that he might have been hit on the head or something.”
“What are you talking about?” Celeste said, focused now on cutting through the tape on Cal’s wrists without nicking him and drawing blood. Crystal was working at the tape on his ankles. She managed to cut through it with her nails, and was now working on the tape that bound his knees together.
Once Cal’s wrists were free, he rolled back over into a sitting position and worked the tape off his mouth himself, his eyes on Dwayne the entire time. He wadded the tape into a ball and flicked it his way.
“Pretty smart move, leaving me with my phone,” Cal said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dwayne said.
Celeste’s eyes darted back and forth between them. “What the hell happened here? What’s going on?”
Cal helped Crystal free his knees, at which point she threw her arms around his neck and held him tight.
“I couldn’t find you,” she said.
“I’m okay,” Cal said, pulling her arms from around him. “Thank you for tracking me down.” He struggled to his feet, picking up a two-foot-long scrap of two-by-four at the same time.
“You should put that down,” Dwayne said. “We need to talk about this.”
“We can talk in a minute,” Cal said, and then, his face flushed with an instantaneous rage, swung the board as hard as he could into Dwayne’s right leg above the knee. Dwayne wasn’t able to move quickly enough to avoid it, but when Cal looked like he was ready to take a second swing, he stumbled back and out of the way.
“Jesus!” he said, grabbing his leg. “I think you broke it!”
“No,” Cal said, holding up the board and inspecting it. “It’s fine.” Celeste got between them and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it!” She pushed Cal back, then turned to her injured husband. “Did you do this? Did you do this to my brother?”
“I’m hurt,” he said. “I’m hurt bad.”
Celeste, shaking her head in disbelief, looked back at Cal and asked, “Did he do this?”
But before he could answer, something beyond him caught Celeste’s eyes. A large black plastic tarp was draped over something in the middle of the garage floor.
“What is that?” she asked.
Cal turned around to see what his sister was looking at. Celeste walked to the middle of the room, reached down, and took hold of a corner of the tarp and started to pull.
“No,” Dwayne said. “Don’t.”
Celeste gave the tarp a strong tug to reveal what had been hidden beneath.
Dozens of boxes of stereo components. Receivers, mostly. By Sony, Denon, Onkyo. A box marked “3-D Projector.” Several more boxes filled with Blu-ray disc players.
“Where the hell did those come from?” Dwayne said.
FORTY-ONE
ANGUS Carlson said, “They’ve pulled me off active duty until the investigation is over.”
“I’m sorry,” Gale said, slipping an arm over his shoulder to comfort him. They were sitting on the curb out front of their house, under a streetlamp. “But you did the right thing.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like it at the time. At least the guy isn’t dead. I shot him in the leg.”
“You did what you had to do. And you’ve got all those witnesses in the hospital. They’ll all back you up.”
“The gun was empty.”
“What?”
“The guy who was waving a gun around at the woman wearing the hijab-”
“Which one is that?”
“What?”
“There’re the hijab and the niqab and the burka,” Gale said. “Right?”
“The burka covers everything, and the niqab is like that, but you can see the eyes.”
“Then which one is the hijab?”
“That’s the scarf that goes around the head, covers the hair, but you can see the face.”
“Is that what the woman was wearing? That one?”
“Yeah. I was trying to tell you about the gun.”
“I’m sorry,” Gale said.
“When they checked the guy’s gun, there were no bullets in it. I just hope they don’t use that against me. I mean, he was waving it around, acting like a crazy person.”
“You couldn’t know his gun wasn’t loaded,” she said. “It’s not like you have X-ray vision. I mean, lots of people have been shot by the police for waving around toy guns. It wasn’t a toy gun, was it?”
“No, it was real. But when something like this happens, they look at everything. The other guy, he’ll probably get a lawyer who’ll say somehow I should have known, that I shot him needlessly, that I could have defused the situation some other way. But I talked to the chief, and she told me not to worry.”
“Then don’t.” She paused. “How long are you off duty?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will they still let you be a detective?”
Angus shook his head. “No idea. Probably, but I don’t know. This kind of thing, you think you’re in the clear, and then they find something to nail you on.” He laughed derisively. “Wouldn’t my mom just love to hear about this?”
“Angus.”
“It’s been great telling her how good I’m doing, how things have turned out for me, despite all the shit she put me through. But now, this happens, and-”
“Don’t talk about her,” Gale said. “I hate it when you bring her up. Just don’t do it.”
Angus became sullen. “Fine.”
They were both quiet for a minute. Finally, Gale said, “The hijab-niqab-burka thing got me thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Actually, it doesn’t really have to do with that. But it’s just the way things link in your mind, you know. Anyway, it’s probably totally nothing.”
Angus Carlson closed his eyes and dropped his head. “Gale, just tell me.”
“I went for a walk this morning. I had to get out of the house, just to do something, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you know Naman’s?”
“The bookstore?”
“Yeah, he sells used books. He doesn’t carry just-published stuff.”
“He got firebombed the other night,” Angus said. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through his window.”
“I didn’t know that. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered, but I went down there looking for a book.”
“What book?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Come on, what book?”
Now it was her time to sigh. “I wanted to see if there were any books about couples. You know, like us. Couples who don’t have children, and why that is, and why one partner might want a child and the other doesn’t.”
“Gale.”
“You asked me what I was looking for and I told you. But listen to me.”
“Okay, go on.”
“So I walked down to the store, and it was all boarded up, but Naman was there, inside, kind of going through the damage. It was just awful. Books that didn’t catch on fire were all water-damaged from when the fire department got there, but even so, there were some books that weren’t damaged that much at all, except for smelling like smoke. I slipped inside and I talked to him and I felt so bad for him.”