‘You two take the back,’ I said. ‘I’ll cover the front.’
Louis reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced a tear gas grenade. Angel had a second, and I had two more.
‘Try not to get shot before you’ve thrown them,’ Angel told me.
‘I’ll try not to get shot after I’ve thrown them as well,’ I said.
It wasn’t an ideal situation. We’d need to break glass to get the grenades into the house, and hope that we didn’t take fire in the process. If the Collector was cornered, and chose to take his chances inside, then Angel and Louis would have to go in and get him, or flush him out to where I would be waiting. Grenade launchers might have been more effective, but your average grenade launcher tended to attract a certain amount of attention in the suburbs, and was hard to hide under a jacket, even one as expensive as Louis’s. The other option might have been to try and break down the doors and come in shooting like gangbusters, but we risked looking kind of stupid – and kind of dead – if the doors were reinforced or booby-trapped in any way. The Collector was very protective of his health.
This was the third of the Collector’s nests that we had targeted, and we were becoming almost accomplished by this point. We went in fast, and hit both sides of the house simultaneously, the panes of three windows shattering as one. The grenades delivered a combination of military-grade pepper spray and tear gas, and could cover a range of over 20,000 cubic feet in under a minute. Anyone who was in those rooms when they exploded wouldn’t be staying there for long.
I was edgy before the first grenade went in, but I was doubly so as I prepared to toss the second. If shots were going to come, they would come now, but there was no reaction from inside the house. After a minute I heard more glass breaking. Angel and Louis were going in through a window, not through the door. It was a calculated risk: expose yourself while climbing in through the busted frame, or try the door and hope that it wasn’t wired. They’d opted for the former. I pulled back from the front of the house and took cover behind the car in the drive. It was a midsize Chevy sedan, the kind that an accountant might drive. The interior was pristine, and the seats were bare.
Nothing happened. There were no shouts, and no gunshots. I could hear doors banging open in the house, but no more than that. After three minutes, my cell phone rang. It was Louis. He was breathing heavily. Behind him I could hear Angel coughing.
‘He’s gone,’ said Louis.
We allowed the gas to disperse before heading back inside. This house was better furnished than the others we had seen. There were books on the shelves – political biographies and modern histories for the most part – and an effort had been made to decorate the rooms. The wood floors were partly covered by cheap but tasteful rugs, and abstract prints hung on some of the walls. The kitchen closets contained canned goods, rice, pasta, a couple of jars of instant coffee, and a bottle of Martell XO cognac. A small portable refrigerator hummed on the floor. Inside were candy bars, fresh milk and a six-pack of diet soda. A TV in the living room was hooked up to a DVD player, but there was no cable connection. A copy of that day’s Washington Post lay on the floor by the single armchair. Beside it was a mug of coffee, still warm. We must have missed him by minutes, seconds.
My eye caught an object hanging from the reading lamp by the chair. It was a bear claw necklace. The Collector had taken it from Jackie’s truck either before or after he killed him. It had once hung from Jackie’s rearview mirror. It was his good-luck token, but his luck had still run out. In the end, everyone’s luck does.
The Collector always kept souvenirs of his kills. He had not abandoned this one lightly. It was a message for us: a taunt, or perhaps a gesture of recompense, depending upon how one chose to take it.
I stepped carefully to the window and risked a glance at the small backyard. Two houses backed on to this one, and in the distance I saw the lights of Newark. I could feel him out there. He was watching us. He knew that we wouldn’t come after him on foot over unfamiliar ground, and at night. He was waiting to see what we would do next.
‘We got more trinkets,’ I heard Angel say.
He joined me at the window, his back to the wall. Even in the darkness, he didn’t want to make a target of himself. In his gloved hand he held a gold charm bracelet, a photograph of a young woman in an ornate silver frame, and a baby shoe that had been cast in bronze, each a token of a life taken.
‘How did he get out?’ I asked.
‘Through the back door?’
‘It’s still locked from the inside,’ I said. ‘The front door was the same way. And you had to break a window to get in. They only open at the top, and a child could barely ft through the gap.’
‘In here,’ said Louis from the main bedroom.
We joined him there. Like all of the other rooms in the house, it had a low ceiling. A hole for an A/C unit had been cut in the wall by the main window, but there was no unit in place, and the hole appeared to have been boarded up. A chair stood beneath. Louis climbed on it and tested the board. It was hinged at the top, and moved like a pet door with the pressure of his hand. The hole looked small, but then Louis flipped up the frame surrounding it, and suddenly the space was big enough to allow an average-sized man to squeeze through.
‘Bet the board on the other side is hinged too,’ said Louis. ‘He crawled out of here like the bug he is.’
He stepped down from the chair. The night was clear. No clouds obscured the moon.
‘He’s out there, isn’t he?’ he said.
‘Probably.’
‘Can’t go on like this. Eventually he’s going to get tired of running.’
‘Maybe. Who knows how many of these bolt-holes he has? But somewhere there’s one that matters more than the others, more even than this one. That’s where he’s keeping the lawyer.’
The lawyer Eldritch steered the Collector in the direction of those who had, in his eyes, forfeited the right to life – perhaps even the right to their immortal souls. He presented the case for the prosecution, and the Collector took care of the punishment. But Eldritch was injured in the same incident that had killed the woman and brought the Collector down on Jackie, and the Collector had spirited the old lawyer away. Who knew, Eldritch might even be dead. If that were the case, then the Collector would be off the leash entirely. If nothing else, Eldritch held his hunting dog in some form of check.
‘We going to keep looking for this refuge?’ asked Louis.
‘He killed Jackie.’
‘Maybe Jackie brought it on himself.’
‘If you believe that, then we all bring it on ourselves.’
‘That might just be true.’
Angel joined us.
‘Why hasn’t he hit back? Why hasn’t he tried to take us out?’
I thought that I had the answer.
‘Because he believes that he violated his own code when he killed Jackie. Jackie’s life wasn’t his to take, whatever mistakes he might have made. Somewhere in what passes for his conscience, the Collector suspects that we may have earned the right to come after him. It’s like Louis said: maybe we all bring it on ourselves.
‘And then, like us, the Collector is just a pawn in a greater game. He might know more about the rules of it than we do, but he has no idea of the state of play, or how close anyone is to winning or losing. He’s afraid to kill us in case it tips the balance against him, although who knows how long that situation will continue.’