“I’d be surprised if it was made.”
Jase pushed the door wide open, flat against the wall. Nothing
“No obvious signs of struggle.”
“Just the everyday fight to keep in beer, cigarettes, and lotto tickets,” Hunter said. “No sign of any artifacts either.”
“Man, I really don’t want to wreck this place to find them,” Jase muttered. “Just standing here makes me want to wash my hands.”
He pulled a wad of exam gloves from his jacket pocket and handed a pair to Hunter. Both men snapped them on. Jase opened what he could of the closet’s sliding door before it jammed on the gritty rails.
“A few shirts, pants, some of the clothes have DeWatt janitorial service logos,” Jase said quietly. “Ratty tennis shoes. Flip-flops. Dirty socks.”
Hunter was glancing around the coffin-size bathroom. No cupboards. Drawers half open, empty of everything but used razors and crusty soap. The bathtub held the rest of the dirty laundry, but there wasn’t enough of it to hide anything interesting underneath.
“Do we toss the place?” Hunter asked neutrally.
“Son of a bitch,” Jase snarled, ripping off his hat and slamming it onto the dirty linoleum floor near the bed. A faint ring of dust rose and spread from the impact.
“Take it easy,” Hunter said, approaching Jase. “We’ll find the artifacts. If not here, somewhere else.”
He crouched down, reaching for Jase’s hat. As he grabbed it, he spotted something.
“We need a warrant to take anything from under the bed?” Hunter asked.
“You thought you saw a scorpion run across your shoe, stomped, and crouched down to make sure you nailed it,” Jase said instantly.
“Oh, right. Huh, the bug got away. But lookee here.”
Hunter hauled out a dark blue duffel bag.
“He can’t have had it long,” Jase said. “It’s clean.”
Manufactured by some company called Elite, the duffel was crisply cut from a thick, woven nylon that looked like it could stop a bullet. A cardboard sales tag still hung on one of the handles, fastened by thin nylon line. Academy Sports.
“About a mile from here,” Jase said. “Big place. Sells cheap. Open the damn thing.”
“The artifacts won’t be inside. Not heavy enough,” Hunter said, turning the top flap over.
Jase kneeled down and rooted around in the bag. He pulled out wadded-up paper towels. All of it came in three-sheet segments.
“Spread it out,” Hunter said. He took a double handful of the stuff and smoothed it over the dirty floor. “We’re not going to have the time or money to CSI this stuff, are we?”
“That’s only for big murder cases, not my-ass-is-in-traction moments.”
Hunter looked over the towels. There wasn’t much to see. “Even if the artifacts were wrapped up in these, there wouldn’t be much evidence of it. The obsidian wouldn’t shed and…”
“What?” Jase demanded when Hunter’s voice died.
“Most worked obsidian is sharp. It would tear the paper towels. See? This bunch of towels has little slits, like maybe they were wrapped around something sharp and it cut through.”
“Hey, there’s some dirt or something on this one!” Jase said, pouncing.
“Dial it down,” Hunter said. “The walls are listening. What do you have?”
“Looks like a piece of…pottery?”
“Wrap it up. I know an expert who can tell us.”
While Jase took care of the find, Hunter undid all seven zipper compartments in the duffel and ran his hands around the slick interior of the nylon. He found nothing but an inspection card and tissue paper put in by the original manufacturer to make the duffel look solid.
“This bag is really new,” Hunter said.
Jase scooped up everything but the tissue paper, pulled clean plastic bags from his wind jacket, and folded all the paper towels away. Everything disappeared into his pockets.
“I’d really like to talk to LeRoy Landry,” Jase said.
“I’d like to help.”
Hunter stuffed the tissue paper back in the seven compartments, zipped everything, and shoved the bag back under the bed. Together he and Jase did a fast, discreet search of the apartment. No cell phone, no regular phone. Nothing in plain sight, and no place to hide anything in the empty cupboards. The refrigerator held two beers and a few moldy lumps of something organic. There was a piece of paper halfway under the trash can. The top of the paper had an ICE logo. The rest was blank.
“Short of pulling up the floor, tearing apart the mattress, and axing the walls, we’re done,” Jase said. “Let’s haul—”
Squeaky brakes came to an ear-ringing stop in front of the apartment.
Hunter eased over to the side of the window in the main room, looked out carefully at the street, and held up two fingers.
“We’re outta here,” Jase said. “I don’t like jail food.”
Hunter followed Jase out the apartment door, pulling it almost closed, just the way they had found it. They shucked the exam gloves and crossed the concrete balcony to the top of the stairs just before company appeared.
Two well-dressed men, relaxed and hard-eyed, stepped through the useless security door and headed up to the second floor. In the sun, their long black hair was shiny, straight, their features more Maya than Mexican, and their cowboy boots blindingly expensive. Though neither man was above medium height, they carried themselves like they were ten feet tall.
One of the men showed a flash of recognition when he saw Hunter. Then the man’s face became expressionless again. Silently the two men climbed the stairs and stepped past Jase and Hunter, going single file.
Jase started down the stairs in a hurry.
Hunter swore loudly in Tex-Mex Spanish and grabbed the rail. “Damn cramp is back,” he said in the same dialect. He clung to the railing and flexed his left leg violently. His face was a grimace of pain.
Jase started to say something, then thought better of it.
The two strangers hesitated outside Landry’s door. They spoke in a language that sounded like one of the many native dialects that pocked Mexico, words from a time before Spanish sails had ever been seen in the New World.
Hunter couldn’t figure out a damn word.
“You okay, man?” Jase asked clearly in the same kind of border Spanish Hunter had used.
“Yeah, I’ll live,” Hunter answered in the same language, kneading his left calf and knee. “I’m too old to get beaten up in soccer scrums.”
Jase understood Hunter’s game immediately. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump you on your ass.”
“Yeah, yeah. Help me down. If we’re late to pick up your sister, she’ll kick my other leg.”
Both he and Jase were careful to keep their back to Landry’s door, but Hunter had unusually good peripheral vision.
One of the men knocked hard on Landry’s broken door.
“You want to lean on me?” Jase asked.
“I’ll walk. You get ready to catch me.” Hunter took a tentative first step and then hobbled very slowly down the steps, toward the busted street door.
Behind them Landry’s apartment door scraped open.
As soon as Hunter and Jase got out of sight of the building, they walked quickly to his Jeep.
“Let’s keep an eye on this place,” Hunter said softly in English. “The liquor-store parking lot down and across the way should work.”
“You like those dudes for something? They sure were too expensive for around here.”
“No crime to be a dude. But if their business is with Landry, then hell yeah, I like them.”
Hunter waited in the parking lot while Jase went inside. He came back out with a box of incredibly greasy
