Chapter Thirty-Eight

NICK SAT IN his car in the parking lot of the imposing brick building in Providence, Rhode Island. To him, Chapel Street Homeless Services had the look and feel of a prison. Small windows, huge slabs of mirrored glass, people in uniforms with keys and lanyards walking busily about. He wondered if it was his paranoid thinking, making him associate a shelter, a center for charity, with threat and capture.

This was the fifth homeless shelter he and Breecher had hit that day. They were hoping to find Rick Master’s sister, last heard to be homeless in Providence. Nick watched Breecher in the side mirror as she walked back to the car, looking tired and downtrodden. She’d only been inside five minutes this time. When she saw him watching, she shook her head.

She came and crouched by his open window.

“Never heard of her.”

“Damn,” Nick sighed.

“I might take a wander around the block, see if I can sniff her out,” Breecher said.

“Shouldn’t we give up for the day?” Nick asked, glancing at the setting sun. “I mean, we’ve got the faintest damn hope of finding her. Master mentioned to me that his sister was homeless in Providence maybe a year ago. Even if that was true at the time, you know what the homeless are like. She could be anywhere by now.”

Breecher sighed, stared at the asphalt. Not for the first time since she’d come back into his life, Nick was struck by how beautiful she was. He knew it was weird to see her that way, now, as pain and uncertainty was dancing in her eyes. And he’d noticed her beauty before, on deployment, sitting across from a troop carrier for four hours, watching the vehicle jostle her gently into a semisleep. Maybe when Nick saw happiness, it just tapped back into that paranoid vein of his mental illness. Small streams all leading to the same river, the same great sea: to be happy was to be unsafe. It was just a state of suspension before an inevitable fall.

Distress was beautiful. It made sense to him.

“We have to keep trying,” she said. “We know Master doesn’t trust us right now. But a message from his sister might convince him to at least hear us out. He has to know we’re as scared as he is.”

“He’s not going to be happy that we told someone,” Nick said.

“We’ll explain,” Breecher said. “We’ll show him that we had to.”

Nick nodded, watching her.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “Can you do something for me?”

“Sure.”

“Can you smell these?” he asked. He took the keys from the car’s ignition and handed them to her. She looked at the keys in her hand.

“What?” She squinted. “Can I smell your keys?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You think they smell like soap?”

“Why in the hell would they?”

“Because someone’s taken an impression of them,” Nick said. He watched her eyes for deception but saw only confusion there. “If somebody wants to take a secret impression of your keys in order to make a copy, they press each key into a bar of soap. I think those keys smell like soap. You see if you do, or if I’m being crazy.”

Breecher lifted the keys and smelled them, watching his eyes the whole time. He felt a loosening in his shoulders. Nick was indeed worried about the keys. He had been worried about microphones, email hacks, spy cameras, someone sneaking into his bedroom at night and messing with his stuff, maybe making impressions of his keys. But he had been quite capable of keeping those concerns to himself. Most of his crazy thoughts he kept to himself. But he’d decided to ask Breecher about the keys when he saw her walking back to the car, just to see how she reacted. And although she probably did think he was being crazy, she smelled the keys anyway. She indulged him. And Nick knew she was doing that for one reason: to make him feel better. She handed him back the keys through the window.

“They do a little, maybe,” she said. “But you used the restroom back at that gas station. You probably used the hand soap, right? It’s strong, that gas station stuff. Would have come right off your hands onto your keys.”

Nick nodded, thinking.

“Plus, you can make much better copies of a person’s keys from a photograph,” Breecher said.

“Oh great. That’s good to know.”

“Just sayin’.”

“Let me come for a walk around the block with you,” Nick said. “It’s getting late. This is not a nice area.”

“I’m fine.” She smirked. “They see you coming with that haircut and those biceps and they’ll think you’re a cop. Go back to that bar we saw with the purple lights out the front. We’ll get dinner. I’ll be twenty minutes tops, then I’ll meet you there.”

Nick watched her go, checked his sideburns in the rearview. Then he sent another text to Master in the same theme as he had been doing for days.

Dude, I need you to check in,he typed. Me and KB are in Providence. We are all in this together. Holla back asap.