Clear.
In the hall, Collier took position opposite the left bedroom and gave her the nod.
Faith kicked open the door so hard that the knob stuck into the drywall. More windows. More pink curtains. Another mattress on the floor, this one with a box spring, dirty sheets. Cardboard box for a bedside table. Dangling cords. A lamp. The closet had a door and the door had a keyed dead bolt.
Faith made herself breathe, because she had been holding her breath so long that she was going to pass out. Her lungs would only half-fill. Her heart was a stopwatch. Sweat dripped from her hands as she forced her grip on the Glock to loosen so the recoil wouldn’t break her wrist if she had to shoot.
Collier stood with his back to the wall, covering the closet. She made herself move forward, blocking out the movie that kept replaying in her head: the closet door opens, a shotgun comes out, her chest is shredded to pieces.
With extreme deliberateness, Faith peeled her left hand away from her Glock. The bones inside her fingers felt like they were rattling together. Her shoulder pinched as she lowered her arm. She reached toward the egg-shaped doorknob. Her skin registered the cold metal. The joints in her wrist started the slow grind of rotating her hand.
Locked.
Faith opened her mouth. She inhaled.
Spacious walk-in master closet!
The hinges were on the outside. The door couldn’t be kicked in.
She glanced back at Collier. He was still tensed, but he was facing away from her, toward the hallway. His chest heaved with each shallow breath. His Glock was pointed up at the ceiling.
The attic.
Optional storage for your precious keepsakes!
In the hall, a string dangled down from a set of folding attic stairs.
Faith started shaking her head. There was no way she was going up into that attic with just one person covering her.
A noise.
The scraping sound, this time heavier, like someone was inching across the attic.
Collier entered the hallway, knees still bent in a low crouch. Faith did the same, stopping in the doorway. He looked at her. She nodded, though every inch of her body was telling her that this was going to end badly. Collier reached up. He grabbed the string hanging from the stairs. The springs squealed so loudly that Faith’s heart nearly detonated. Collier unfolded the steps with one hand, his Glock still pointing up with the other.
Both of them stood completely still, waiting for the other to move.
This wasn’t about being scared. They were both terrified in equal measure. This was about trusting someone to have your back while you prairie dogged your head into an open firing range.
Faith muttered a silent curse and took out her phone. Better to have her hand shot off than her face. She swiped through to the video camera and turned on the flash so that forensics would have a clear recording that explained the two dead cops in the hallway.
She forced her brain to unfreeze the muscles in her leg so that she could climb the stairs. Her foot was an inch off the ground when Collier snatched the phone out of her hand. He shot her a look like she was the crazy one. He planted his black sneaker on the first rung of the stairs. The springs groaned under his weight. He stepped up to the second rung.
Faith saw the movie in her head again, this time with Collier: a shotgun comes out, his chest is shredded to pieces.
Collier stopped on the second rung. Both of his hands were at chest-level, one with his Glock, the other with her phone. He was listening for the sound, trying to gauge which direction it had come from because he would only have one chance of shining the phone’s light into the dark attic space. Faith couldn’t help him locate the direction. All she heard was blood rushing through her ears. She opened her mouth for more air. Her tongue felt like cotton. She could taste her own fear, sour, like rotted meat and sweat and acid.
Collier looked back for her go-ahead. She nodded. They both stared into the black expanse of the attic. His shoulders slumped. His head turtled down his neck. He raised his hand, using the phone as a digital periscope. They both looked at the screen. An image flashed up.
Faith felt her stomach punch into her chest.
Collier sighed out a low, “Fu-u-uck.”
A rat the size of a housecat stared back from the phone, its beady eyes glowing red in the light. It was sitting on its haunches. Its jaw was working as it chewed. Something was in its hands, which was even more horrific because Faith didn’t want to think about a rat having hands that could grab something.
Collier turned the phone in a three-sixty around the attic before holstering his Glock. He used his free hand to zoom in on the rat, then past it. There were two file boxes up against the shared wall of the duplex. They were resting precariously on separate joists because the attic floor didn’t extend that far. An opened package of rotting ground beef was closer to the stairs. White maggots moved across the surface like waves breaking in the ocean. Flies buzzed. While they were watching, the rat’s hands reached out and pulled the tray a few inches away from the stairs. The sliding sound felt like it was happening inside of Faith’s skull.
The rat eyed them carefully as it pried away a chunk of meat with its thin, angular fingers. It drew the rotted meat back to its chest, took a couple of hops away, then bent down its head, and stared at them as it chewed.
“Okay.” Collier stepped back down the stairs. He handed Faith the phone. “I’m going to go throw up now.”
She thought he was kidding because he seemed fine, but then two seconds later, he was in the bathroom horking out the lining of his stomach.
Faith called out, “Be sure to cancel backup.”
Collier retched in the affirmative.
She ran her hand along the dusty top of the closet doorjamb. No key. She took a pen out of a pocket in her cargo pants and poked around the box Harding had used as a bedside table. She checked above the windowsills and the hall door. No key.
Collier sounded like he was finished in the bathroom, but then he gagged so loudly that her ears ached. Faith shivered, not because of the sound but because the attic stairs were still open. She could picture the rat lumbering its way down, tiny thumb-less hands holding on to the thin handrail. She put her back to the wall as she slid past the open stairs. She waited until she was safely in the living room to play back the video on her phone.
The rat was a grayish blue with round ears and a thick, dirty white tail the color of the string on a tampon. The creature stared at her through the screen, mouth working. There was no sound, but she swore she heard lips smacking. A streak of blood trailed behind the tray where the rat had been pulling the meat away from the stairs and toward something. Probably a giant nest.
Her whole body shuddered at the thought.
Faith hit “play” again. She remembered a pop-up book someone had given her daughter at Christmas. Emma was clearly terrified of the zillion-eyed housefly that popped out of the centerfold, but she couldn’t stop herself from opening the book and screaming. Faith felt the same way when she watched the video again. She was disgusted, but she couldn’t look away.
The toilet flushed. Collier wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he joined her in the living room. “So,” he said, brushing a smattering of vomit off his shirt. “Rat burglar alarm?”
Faith made herself look away from her phone. The only words that came to mind were the ones she had been hearing about Dale Harding all day. “What an asshole.”
“Could you tell if those file boxes were labeled?”
Faith held out the phone so he could check for himself.
“Uh-uh.” He held up his finger, like he needed a moment to decide. “Okay, it passed.”
“You sure?” His face was the color of an envelope.
“No.” He walked over to the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet. He had to move a stack of dishes so he could stick his head under the tap. He gurgled, then spat into the sink, which was disgusting but Faith had a feeling that Harding had done wo
rse things in that sink.
“Officers?”
Faith had forgotten about Violet.
“Good Lord, it smells like ammonia and trash in here.” The woman stood just outside the doorway. She pinched her nose closed. “Is everything all right?”
“There’s a rat up there,” Collier said. “Big one. Maybe pregnant.”
“Is he gray with white ears?”
Faith showed her the paused video on her phone.
“I’ll be damned.” Violet shook her head. “Barb’s grandson brought his rat over last weekend. He swore up and down that he put the top back on the cage. They looked everywhere for that stupid thing.”
“I’m pretty sure this isn’t a pet.” Collier waved away a fly. “I mean, it’s huge. Like, unnatural.”
Violet offered, “I can show you the missing poster Barb posted on the message board.”
Collier clamped his mouth shut and shook his head.
Faith thought about the package of ground beef near the attic stairs. “Was the rat inside Barb’s house when it went missing?”
“No. The kid put the cage on Barb’s screened porch for about half an hour. Apparently, they like fresh air. He came back and the top was pushed up and the rat was gone.” Violet frowned as she took in the room. “I’m sure Mr. Nimh was more comfortable in this squalor.”
Faith asked, “Is Barb home much?”
“Now that you say that, she normally is. She’ll be devastated she missed all this action. Bit of a busybody.”
Faith loved busybodies. She handed Violet her business card. “Could you have Barb call me? I’d just like a general idea of Harding.”
“I’m not sure she can tell you much beyond what a bully he was.”
“You’d be surprised what people can remember.”
Violet tucked the card into her bra strap. “As I said before, just slip the key back through the mail slot in my office door when you’re finished.”
Faith listened to her flip-flop her way down the sidewalk.
“A pet.” Collier waved away another fly.
“That explains why it wasn’t scared of us.”
“I still want it to die. Like, immediately. With fire.”
“Look for a key,” she told him. “We need to get into that closet.”
“We need to call animal control,” he countered. “Dude kept a rat in his attic. No telling what’s in that closet.”
Faith wasn’t going to wait for animal control. She took in the filthy living room and kitchen, wondering where somebody like Harding would hide a key. Nothing jumped out except an overwhelming sense of disgust. Squalor was a word that seemed custom-made for the way Harding lived. There were Styrofoam plates and cups all over the open-concept living/dining/kitchen area. The moist-looking brown velvet couch and scarred coffee table were overflowing with abandoned KFC take-out bowls. Gnawed chicken bones with green mold, cups of Coke with thick skins on the surface, browned sporks where he hadn’t gotten off all the mashed potatoes.
Then there was the smell, which suddenly hit her like a hammer to the bridge of her nose. Not just ammonia, but rot, likely from Dale Harding’s bad habits, if Sara’s assessment of his final days proved to be correct. Faith hadn’t noticed the stench when they broke down the front door. Adrenaline had a way of focusing your priorities, and her main priority had been not to get killed. Now that her terror had abated, her other senses had returned, and they were immediately assaulted by the stink.
And flies, because there were at least two dozen of them taking advantage of all the trash.
Faith said, “In this heat, maggots can hatch in eight to twenty hours. It takes about three to five days for them to pupate.”
Collier guffawed. “Sorry, pupate is a funny word.”
“I’m saying that it tracks that the meat was put in the attic this weekend, probably to feed the rat. Or keep him up there.” Faith forced open one of the windows to help dissipate the smell. Then she pushed out the screen to take care of the flies.
Collier belched loudly, then asked, “You got any breath mints?”
“Nope.”
Faith turned away from Collier. She thought about the breath mints in her car, and how nice it would be to go outside and take a five-minute break from Harding’s greasy, disgusting house. Her sense of smell had definitely returned. The rancid odor was biting into the back of her mouth and nose. She would’ve bet her life savings that the rotting meat in the attic was nothing compared to what was underneath the piles of wet-looking newspapers and magazines Harding had scattered around the floor. Violet was right. The trash was born of sheer laziness. If Harding had finished eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese when he came through the front door, he just dropped the bowl where he was standing and moved on.
“It’s weird, right?” Collier was watching her. “The way freaking out takes away your sense of smell?”
“How can you not smell this?” Faith opened another window. She wasn’t going to bond with this jackass. “Where’s the TV?”
Collier ran his finger along a low console table, separating the dust like the Red Sea. “There was a TV here, but it’s gone. Looks like it was big.”
“No computer.” Faith opened a drawer in the table beside the couch. She used her pen to poke around the take-out menus. “No iPad. No laptop.” She opened another drawer. More crap. No key to open the closet.
Collier said, “Harding strikes me as a paperwork kind of guy.”
Faith coughed as a new smell infiltrated her nostrils. She pushed open another window. “There were charging cables beside the bed in the master.”
“I’m detecting that was for his phones.” Collier had his arms crossed again. He stood with his feet wide apart, probably because he was used to carrying fifty pounds of equipment around his hips during his patrol days. He said, “So, this thing you’ve got going on with Trent. Are you his work wife or do you got something else on the side?”
Faith watched an Atlanta police cruiser pull up behind her Mini. They had probably been en route when Collier canceled the call for backup and decided to come check it out anyway. The two men looked young and eager. Their necks craned as they stared at the house. The driver rolled down his window.
Faith waved them off, calling out the window, “We’re fine.”
The driver put the gear in park anyway.
“Lemons into lemonade,” Collier said. “We’ll send one of the unis into the attic for the boxes, don’t mention the rat, and see what happens.”
“Two weeks of rabies shots is what happens.” Which she knew was exactly what Dale Harding was hoping for when he shoved the boxes up into the attic with the packet of ground beef and some weird kid’s stolen rat. Just one more way for the guy to wipe his ass on the toilet paper of his life. Harding knew that he was weeks away from death, whether by someone else’s hand or his own shitty life choices. He also knew that someone would have to empty his house, and that they would likely get a face full of rat in the process.
Faith walked out the front door. The sun cut open her eyeballs. She wasn’t sure whether she had tears or blood streaming down her face. She didn’t care. Harding had been a cop. He knew what you risked when you pulled your gun and busted into a house. And he had set them up anyway.
She held up her hand to block the sun. The unis were standing by their cruiser, heads down, staring at their phones.
She told the driver, “Give me your tire iron.”
He said, “My tire iron?”
Faith leaned into the car and popped the trunk. The tire iron was snapped into a kit mounted inside the rear quarter panel. She hefted the weight of the long, heavy metal bar in her hand. It was the single-handle type, L-shaped with a socket on the end to loosen the wheel lugs.
Perfect.
Collier was watching from the window when she went back into the house. Faith grabbed a chair from the cheap dining set and dragged it down the hallway. Collier followed, asking, “What are you doing?”
“I’
m beating this asshole.” She stood on the chair and swung the tire iron into the ceiling. The socket end lodged into the Sheetrock. She shoved the bar in farther, turned it at an angle, and pulled down. A chunk of ceiling dropped to the floor. She took another swing with the tire iron. She thought about the Mesa Arm’s website, how it promoted its energy-efficient upgrades, like the spray foam in the attic that made it possible to break open the ceiling without getting a face full of pink insulation.
Faith dropped the tire iron, pleased that her guestimate had worked out. The two file boxes were within arm’s reach. All she had to do was fight the flies to get to them.
“Hey, lady,” one of the unis called from the hall. “You know there’s some stairs right here.”
“There’s a rat,” Collier told him. “Like, Godzilla’s brother.”
“You mean Rodan?”
“Chibi, man. Rodan was a surrogate. Chibi was blood.”
“Goro,” Faith said, because she had spent three years of Saturdays watching Godzilla movies when Jeremy went through a phase. “Collier, help me with these boxes.”
“She’s right,” Collier said. “It definitely looked like Gorosaurus.” He bared his teeth and made his hands into claws. “Like it was out for blood.”
Faith let the first box drop on his head.
Annoyingly, Collier still managed to catch it. He put the box on the floor and waited for her to pass down the second one.
The uni said, “You need us for anything else, man?”
Collier shook his head. “I’m good, bro.”
“The closet,” Faith reminded him.
“Oh, right.” Collier motioned for them to follow him into the other room. Faith took a precarious step down with the heavy second box in her hands. She put it on the floor beside the first. From the other room, she heard a discussion about the best way to pull pins from the hinges, like they had never seen a hammer and a flathead screwdriver before.