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“Which is why he’s sniffing around Marie and Laila,” I fill in.
“He’s angling for the house,” Dominik confirms. “Laila has been good at keeping him at bay. I asked her if she needed help handling him—a few times, actually—but she always turned me down.”
“I think it’s why she stopped telling us about Charles,” Gedeon says. “She didn’t want us getting involved.”
“Unfortunately for her, I don’t care what she wants.” I shove to my feet and stride for the door, the words of that lie buzzing on my lips.
Dominik calls after me, “What are you planning?”
“I have a father-in-law to introduce myself to.”
Charles Barnes lives less than an hour from me.
For a man desperate for cash, he lives well enough. His address brings me to a tidy little townhouse in a neighborhood with ornate iron cages around the trees and commercial-worthy families pushing strollers, sipping coffee, laughing.
“Pretty nice digs,” Gedeon observes, peering up at the house from his window. “Cheap doors, though. I could kick that in first try.”
I park on the opposite side of the street and turn back to them. “I’m going to go the old-fashioned route and knock. And I want you two to wait here.”
“What are you planning?” Dominik asks again.
There’s still a thread of tension in his voice. One day, I’ll be grateful for the way he safeguards my wife’s feelings.
Right now, it’s just a reminder that he knows her better than I do.
“I’m planning to talk to him,” I say flatly. “The two of you stay here and run interference if he tries to flee.”
I walk through the low metal gate and follow the sidewalk to the porch. The closer I get, the more the cracks—both literal and figurative—begin to show. The porch is fractured and sagging. Mail overflows from the rested mailbox, some of it spewing off the porch and piling under the overgrown box hedge to the right.
I push a doorbell that’s yellowed with age, but there’s no distant chime, no motion inside. So I knock twice with a tarnished knocker.
Finally, I hear a shuffle of life on the other side of the door. A muffled, wheezy cough. More shuffling.
Stepping away from the door, I glance through the arched window to the left just in time to see an eye peeking out at me from behind the drawn velvet curtains. The curtains instantly snap closed.
Fuck it.
Plan B.
I step away, cock back my foot, and deliver one solid kick in the center of the door. Just like Gedeon said, it caves like a paper banner at a football game.
I push my way through the wreckage and into the house. The interior matches the exterior: nice in theory, but crumbling inreality. Thick layers of dust blanket every inch of the house, disturbed here and there by dragging footstep trails.
I follow sounds of grunting into what must be the living room. The daylight seeping in through cracks in the heavy curtains paints the room in shards of bloody red amongst the pockets of black shadow.
It’s out of one of these shadows that Charles Barnes lunges towards me, rusty fireplace poker extended like a sword. “You’re breaking and entering!”
I resist the urge to laugh at his choice of weapon. If he kills me with that pathetic thing, I deserve to die. “And you’re going to need something better than that to stop me.”
He flinches, but doesn’t lower the poker. “Are you Hamlin’s man?”
I can work with that.
I shrug noncommittally.
Sweat is collecting over his eyebrows. “Listen, I told your boss the other night, I’ll get him his money. I swear. I just need more time.”
“Hamlin’s not a patient man, Charles.” Fuck if I know a thing about whoever Hamlin is, but the panic in Laila’s father’s eyes tells me enough.
