'Let's call it thirty, since we're friends. You want, you can go grab your set of keys and I can make you a couple of quick copies right out of the truck, five bucks each.'
'That's all right.' Evan fished out two twenties. 'I know I've got some dupes inside. I've just got to remember to put 'em out here somewhere for next time. But right now I think I'd better get in there and lie down a minute.'
'Sure, okay. But let me run and get you your change.'
'No, keep it.'
'I can't take tips from teammates, Ev. It's one of my rules. I've got some cash back in the truck. Won't take me thirty seconds.'
He put a firm hand on his friend's shoulder. 'Dave, really, I'm hurting a little here. Thanks for your help, but I've got to get horizontal pretty quick or I'm going to get sick. Seriously. Take care of yourself. I'll see you around.'
'You need a doctor?'
The effort for even half a smile was almost too much to bear. 'You don't let me get inside pretty quick, you're gonna need a doctor. You hear me?'
'All right, all right. But stop by the field sometime. We're still playing Tuesdays and Thursdays.'
'I will. Promise.'
'I'll buy you some beers with your tip money.'
'Deal,' Evan said, stepping inside the door. 'Later.'
He stood in the living room. Part of him had a hard time believing that he was truly here, illegally inside another man's home. It felt surreal. This wasn't who he was. It wasn't the kind of thing he'd ever done, or even thought about doing.
But now, once inside, he couldn't let those considerations slow him down. There was no telling when Nolan might return. Evan had no idea what hours he worked, or what he did on a day-to-day basis, or even if he had any regular schedule at all. If there was something incriminating to be found in this place, and Evan's guts told him there was, he had to find it and then get out fast. It wasn't a matter of finding evidence that could be used in court-he simply wanted the knowledge.
Or at least that's what he let himself believe. He would decide then how to use what he knew at his leisure.
The room he was in was Spartan, furnished with a leather couch and matching twin leather chairs in front of built-in, mostly empty, bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. A large mirror over the mantel gave an impression of space, but the room probably wasn't more than ten feet wide. Half of the back wall was a glass doorway that opened onto a small brick patio, shaded by large oak trees. A potted plant squatted in the corner. The first glance told him that there would be nothing of interest here, but he forced himself to slow down and make sure.
When he was done, he parted the blinds in the front window, saw nothing out in the street, and crossed the tiled entry area that led into the kitchen, which didn't have much more personality than the living room. It was, however, quite a bit more exposed, since the double-wide window over the sink looked out over the small lawn to the street beyond.
It didn't appear that Nolan did a lot of cooking for himself-the refrigerator had eggs, beer, a pack of American cheese, and milk, with tomatoes and lettuce in the vegetable bin, and some condiments, while the freezer held three boxes of frozen spinach, a carton of ice cream, and a few packages of chicken breasts and ground beef.
A door next to the refrigerator led out to the small single-car garage, where Nolan had hung his empty duffel bag and two empty backpacks on hooks on the far wall. An uncluttered workbench obviously hadn't seen much use, and neither had the drawers under it.
Back in the kitchen, Evan finally got his nerves under control as he scoped out the street again and then ducked under the window passing through. Just off the living room in the back of the house, he entered a decent- sized den with a desk and a computer. The wall featured a tacked-up map of Iraq with several color-coded pins stuck in various spots-Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, Abu Ghraib, Anaconda. Evan tried the mouse first to see if the monitor screen came on, and when it didn't, he hit the button on the CPU. While it booted up, he went through the next door into the bedroom and stopped in his tracks.
Drawing a heavy breath, he crossed over to the bureau next to his enemy's perfectly made bed and picked up the photograph of Nolan and Tara in a heavy silver frame. They were hugging each other for the picture, obviously from the deck of a boat out on the Bay, both smiling out at him on a lovely day. He held the picture long enough that the urge to smash it against the wall came and went. Then, replacing it carefully in its original position, he went back to his searching in earnest. Dresser drawers, bathroom drawers, cupboards, and closets.
The headboard of the bed yielded up the first weapon, another M9 Beretta, the same weapon that Evan had carried in Iraq. He smelled the barrel and picked up no odor, then removed the clip and verified that it was full. But a pro like Nolan, if he had used the gun, would have cleaned it and reloaded immediately afterward.
The bedroom closet, neat like the rest of the house, contained another backpack on the top shelf. This one he emptied out on the bed piece by piece. It held another Beretta 9mm, ten clips of ammunition, and six hand grenades. Evan didn't know for sure if they were fragmentation grenades or the so-called flash/bangs, which were nowhere near as lethal. But either way, he was willing to bet that they were illegal in the hands of private citizens. Evan was sure that they would be of interest to the police, once he figured out a way to get some law enforcement person interested in Nolan as a suspect in the Khalil murders.
Replacing the backpack, he went back into the den and sat in front of the computer. Clicking on the icon labeled 'Allstrong,' he scanned through a few documents-mostly what appeared to be copies of or amendments to government contracts or work orders that the company had secured overseas. There were also a significant number of e-mail files, and several resumes of people who had served in the military, which attested to the kind of work Nolan was probably doing over here Stateside. Evan entered a few more of the documents and searched for the name Khalil, but came up empty.
Lacking a password, though he tried several obvious ones, he couldn't get into Nolan's regular e-mail file. The icon named 'My Pictures,' by contrast, came right up. Immobilized by what he feared he might see there-more photos of Nolan and Tara in much more intimate settings than the deck of a boat-he finally clicked on the first folder and, finding not even one picture of Tara, sighed in relief.
These appeared to be shots Nolan might have taken when he was shopping for a house. Here was a tree- lined street just like the one he lived on, cars parked along the curb. Then different angles, in different lights, on another house, large and grandiose. In fact, on closer inspection, on the clearest picture from directly in front of the building, the place was actually a pink-hued monstrosity. What in the world, Evan wondered, could Nolan have seen in the place that would have prompted such a detailed study?
Suddenly recognition straightened him upright. In the paper that morning, Evan had seen a black-and-white picture of the remains of Mr. Khalil's house, which of course no longer looked very much like the residence in this picture. But in the article, hadn't he read something about the house being pink?
Hurriedly he started pulling open the drawers to the desk. There was a digital camera in the middle drawer and for a second he considered looking at what it contained. But he couldn't take the time. He checked his watch- two forty-five. He'd been in here too long already. In the lower right drawer, he found an open ten-pack of floppy disks. Four remained in the box, and with his hands shaking now, he took one out, inserted it into the A-disk slot, and copied the file from the 'My Pictures' photo onto the disk.
Ejecting the disk, he put it in his breast pocket, then sat back, took a breath, and walked himself through turning the computer off the careful way, through the 'Start' menu.
Keenly listening for the sound of the garage door opening, or of a car pulling up out in the street, he forced himself to wait until the terminal screen went black. Then he got out of the chair and replaced it where he hoped and thought it had been. He pushed all the desk drawers flush against their inserts. Checking one last time to make sure that he still had the disk in his pocket, he walked back up through the living room, locked the front door from
