Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

a living? You gather up the remnants of people’s pain and suffering and you sell it to creeps online?”

Tania balked, stunned. She looked up at the square of carpet from the Columbine massacre.

“Listen, lady,” Tania said carefully. “What I do is no different to the work of any person who trades in historical artifacts. People buy and sell war memorabilia on the internet all day long. You go into the game room of any rich guy in the state and you’ll find a gun that was used in the Civil War or stack of letters from someone in the trenches or a … a Roman spear. A flag torn down in some foreign battle. This is history.” She gestured to the walls. “You can tour whole museums full of this shit. Only difference is that those pieces are from government-endorsed murders. These are the history of individual murders.”

“This teddy bear.” Jessica pointed to the burned pink bear in the cabinet beside her. “Whose bear was this? What happened to that kid?”

“Look, are you going to buy the letters or not?” Tania snapped. Her eyes were wide. “I didn’t let you down here so you could judge me.”

“I’m not buying the letters,” Jessica said. She drew her gun out of the back of her jeans, her badge from her front pocket. “I’m confiscating them. I’m a cop. These letters are pertinent in an ongoing missing person investigation.”

“You got a warrant?” Tania asked.

“No, but—”

Tania brought her hands up from where they had hung by her sides, out of sight below the desk. In them was an enormous 12-gauge shotgun. Jessica looked down the barrel of the gun as the aim swung around at her, her own pistol useless, pointed at the floor by her side. She let her gun slip onto the carpet at her feet with a gentle thud.

“No warrant, no letters,” Tania said.

Jessica jolted as Tania pumped the action of the shotgun. The sound was loud in the small space, like the crunch of truck gears. She felt the roof of her mouth turn dry with terror. When she spoke, her voice was gravel.

“How much did you say they were?” Jessica asked.

“Six grand for the lot,” Tania said, the aim of the gun lingering on Jessica’s stomach. “But for six and a half I’ll throw in two jars of toenails. Non-premium killer of your choosing.”

“Just the letters,” Jessica said. She carefully extracted her wallet from her back pocket.

BLAIR

We watched Lemon’s cruiser stop outside a house on Redduck Avenue. The house sat behind a tangle of wild vines that had almost consumed the low brick fence at the front of the yard. Sneak was on her phone, tapping the screen as she zoomed out on our location on GPS.

“Is it Redduck?” Sneak wondered aloud. “Or Red Duck?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re, like, two blocks from the police station,” she noted.

“He’s not calling it in, whatever he’s doing,” I said. We waited in silence. “What do you think? Dropping in on family? Maybe he thought he’d swing by and see what Grandma wanted.”

“Maybe this is his place,” Sneak mused. “We’re not going to see anything from here. Do a drive-by.”

I took the car around the block, slowing and looking carefully at the house with the vines as we went by. Number 17. The long driveway was packed full of items: buckets and gas canisters, chairs and folded tables, wooden boxes stacked high, rusted bicycles leaning against them, a tarp haplessly flopped over some of it, trying to protect the jumble of objects from the sun. I saw boarded-up windows at the front of the house, others taped with newspaper. Sneak unbuckled her seat belt and turned in her seat to get the longest view she could as we went by.

“Grandma’s a bit of a pack rat,” Sneak said.

“Weird,” I agreed. We returned to the spot a block down from the house where we had pulled in to watch Officer Lemon disappear. The car ticked as it cooled after I turned off the engine.

“I’m going in,” I said.

“You can’t,” Sneak scoffed. “He’ll recognize you.”

“I’m not going to waltz up and knock on the door,” I said. “I’ll just see what I can see and get out of there.”

“Let me go.” She opened her door. “He doesn’t know me.”

“He’s on the lookout for a fa—” I swallowed. “A woman fitting the description witnesses gave him of the person who stole his phone. Blonde curls.”

“What are you going to do if you get caught?”

“I’ll handle it,” I said.

Walking with a deliberately casual air is more difficult than it seems. I kicked my sneaker twice on uneven edges of the sidewalk on the way to the house. A truck parked on the road diagonally opposite read Ramirez Commercial Plumbing. A logo of a smiling plumber brandishing a wrench high above his head like a sword was painted on the side. I turned sharply down the driveway, watching the blocked-out windows for any sign of Lemon, and ducked behind the pile of trash at the side of the house. The backyard was packed with old, rusted cars that had probably once been vintage specials patiently awaiting restoration. A tortoiseshell cat was dozing on the hood of one, the grass so high inside the car body that I could see it through the windshield. The cat lifted its head at the sight of me. It was a large beast with a boxy skull, its face slashed through with scars.

I went to the nearest window and peered through a small rip in the newspaper covering the glass, but all I could see in the darkened room was a bookshelf crammed with sun-yellowed volumes. The next window was blocked completely, but the room after that was revealed through a crack between two wooden panels. I saw rolls of carpet or rugs numbering in the dozens stacked from floor to ceiling.

“Hey!”

A gasp escaped my throat before I could silence it. A wide-shouldered Latino man was standing in the driveway, wiping grease from