The Payback. Mike Lawson

in forty minutes then went back to the first floor. Emma was thorough, and the kitchen was particularly time-consuming as she pulled things out of the freezer and poked around inside of boxes of cereal and rice. DeMarco was surprised the dog didn’t try to eat a roast when Emma put a leftover one on the counter. He had to admit the critter was pretty well trained.

      DeMarco checked his watch. They’d been inside the house an hour and a half.

      ‘Come on,’ Emma said, ‘let’s do the basement.’

      ‘Aren’t you going to put that stuff back?’ DeMarco asked, pointing his chin at the food sitting on the counter.

      ‘No,’ Emma said. ‘He’s going to know we’ve been here anyway.’

      DeMarco was afraid the basement would take forever. Basements are where people store boxes and boxes of old crap they don’t need but are too lazy to sort through and throw away. But the basement of Phil Carmody’s rented house was small and almost barren. A hot water heater and a furnace took up half the space, and Carmody had a set of free weights and a bench-press bench in the middle of the room. DeMarco mentally tallied the weights on the bar and concluded that Carmody bench-pressed three hundred and fifty pounds.

      There was an old Formica-topped kitchen table along one wall and above the table was a Peg-Board containing hand tools. Clamped to the table was a small vise, the sort fly fishermen use to tie flies, and a magnifying glass on a movable arm was mounted over the vise. On the table was a model sailing ship – a four-masted man-of-war under full sail. It appeared the model was ninety percent constructed, with only a few parts remaining to be painted. DeMarco could imagine Carmody sitting here alone at night, in the dimly lit basement of his silent house, slowly constructing the model. It was an image of a lonely man killing time – not a man passionate about a hobby.

      As Emma stood in the center of the room deciding where to begin her search, DeMarco pulled the dog over to the table to take a closer look at the model. It had a zillion parts, little ropes and pulleys and cleats, and DeMarco didn’t see a smudge of glue anywhere. He was wondering if he had enough patience to build something like this when the dog went berserk. It started barking at the top of its lungs and straining against the leash to get at a shoe box underneath the table.

      ‘Jesus!’ DeMarco said. ‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!’ he hissed at the dog. He didn’t know why he was whispering since the dog could be heard a mile away.

      Emma came over and patted the dog on the head and said, ‘Good girl, that’s a good girl,’ and she pulled a doggy treat out of her pocket and fed it to the dog. DeMarco wondered how come she had the doggy treats instead of him. The dog immediately stopped barking, but it continued to push its nose against the box.

      Moving the dog’s head out of the way, Emma pulled the box out from under the table and placed it on the tabletop next to the model. It was sealed in two places with clear packing tape. She studied the box for a few minutes, shrugged, and picked up an X-Acto knife that was lying near the model.

      ‘Hey!’ DeMarco said. ‘What are you doing? What if that’s a letter bomb or package bomb or something like that?’

      ‘Look at the dust,’ Emma said. ‘This box has been sitting here for quite a while.’

      ‘So?’ DeMarco said. ‘That just means it could be a highly unstable package bomb.’

      Emma shook her head, dismissing DeMarco’s objections, and carefully sliced the packing tape and slowly opened the shoe box.

      ‘Shit,’ Emma said.

      DeMarco looked down into the box. It contained a water pistol, a top, a couple of Matchbox cars, and a yo-yo. And a dozen bottle rockets.

      

      It took them twice as long to search Mulherin’s place. The guy’s house wasn’t any bigger than Carmody’s but Mulherin had lived there a long time – and he was both a slob and a pack rat. His basement, unlike Carmody’s, contained so many boxes and bins and cartons that there was barely room to move. Mulherin also had a garage, and it too was filled with junk, so much junk that there wasn’t space to park a car. Even Emma, the woman who never admitted to the impossible, admitted it was going to be impossible for them to search Mulherin’s house thoroughly in less than two days – and all they had was about four hours.

      The dog reacted twice to objects in the house: a case of marine flares in the garage stored next to a two-gallon can of gasoline, and a box of shotgun shells in the pocket of a moth-eaten hunting vest. The shotgun shells looked so old that DeMarco was afraid they might explode in his hand.

      When they finished searching, even the dog looked tired.

      ‘Now what?’ DeMarco said when they were back in the car. ‘It’s too late to check Norton’s place.’

      ‘He lives in an apartment. It won’t take long.’

      ‘Emma, it’s almost four o’clock. They said these guys hardly ever work later than four and usually leave earlier to avoid the traffic.’

      ‘We’ve got time,’ Emma insisted, her lips set in that don’t-argue-with-me line.

      

      Norton had a two-bedroom apartment. The living room was dominated by a television with a fifty-inch screen and there were more auxiliary components than DeMarco had ever seen connected to the set. He counted six speakers in different spots around the small room.

      Unlike Mulherin, Norton was neater than DeMarco’s mother – and that was very neat. There were no unwashed dishes in the sink, no unmade bed, no clothes on the bedroom floor. All the boxes on the upper shelf of his closet were neatly labeled as to their contents. Now that, DeMarco thought, was weird.

      ‘If this guy isn’t arrested,’ DeMarco said, ‘I’m gonna see if he wants to be my maid.’

      Emma ignored him and went directly to the kitchen and began opening drawers.

      ‘Let’s go, partner,’ DeMarco said to the dog and tugged on its leash and started walking the animal around the living room. For some reason the dog was panting now; its tongue was about a foot long.

      When they opened the door to the second bedroom, Emma said, ‘My, my.’

      Against one wall was a long table. On the table was a flat-screen monitor, a laser printer, and a state-of-the-art scanner – those were the items that DeMarco recognized. What had most likely elicited the ‘my, my’ from Emma were the half-dozen other devices that DeMarco didn’t recognize. Above the table was a bookshelf filled with computer books and computer magazines; the magazines were filed in chronological order. Beneath the table was a red Craftsman toolbox on casters and it housed small hand tools and electronic components.

      Emma walked over to the table, picked up an object lying there, and said, ‘Huh.’

      ‘What’s that?’ DeMarco said.

      ‘A section of fiber-optic cable. It can be attached to a miniature camera or video recorder.’

      ‘Ah,’ DeMarco said. ‘One of those things that weirdos poke through a little hole in a bathroom wall so they can watch women pee.’ Norton struck him as the Peeping Tom type.

      ‘That’s one use for it,’ Emma said. ‘Another possibility is Carmody walking around a nuclear submarine with one of these cables up his sleeve, taking pictures of anything he wants and nobody noticing.’

      Emma took a digital camera out of her jacket pocket and began to photograph the computer equipment and the books on the shelf above the table. After she finished photographing the equipment, she sat down at the table and turned on the computer.

      ‘Let’s see what he’s got in this thing,’ she said.

      DeMarco looked at his watch. ‘Emma, we gotta get going,’ he said.

      Emma ignored him and DeMarco soon heard the little tune that Microsoft Windows plays when a computer starts up.

      ‘Damn