“Hey, that’s more than I’ve gotten out of her,” Heather said, “and we used to live together.”
“So Sebastian Miller,” I said.
“I bet he’s at Dawson’s right now. The diner or grocery store or whatever. He’s there most weekdays. Only opens the gift shop on the weekends.”
“Do we go to Dawson’s or the gift shop?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” Brynn asked. “Isola was pretty clear about that. We’ll go to his place, now, while he’s not home.”
“And just break in?” Heather asked.
“Yeah,” Brynn said.
Heather seemed to think that over for a minute.
“Alright.”
* * *
We had to bike down side streets to avoid Dawson’s, but it still didn’t take us longer than maybe ten minutes.
Everyone we passed looked friendly, but riding through town during the day you could tell the town was poor. Destitute, maybe. About a third of the houses were abandoned, and most of the rest were poorly maintained. Every road but the main one was full of potholes. They were probably maintaining the main road for the sake of tourists, if one day the tourists came back. Or maybe they were maintaining the main road for their own sake, for their own dignity. It was hard to tell.
We cut through an alley, the small-town kind that goes between backyards instead of brick buildings, to approach the gift shop from the back. It was easy to pick out the right place: a twenty-foot-tall brontosaurus, with purple paint chipping off its concrete, kept watch over the backyard.
“How will we get in?” Heather asked.
“What are we looking for?” I asked.
“Don’t know and don’t know,” Brynn said. “We’ll know it when we see it, to both questions.”
The building was a plain cube, two stories tall and peppered with windows. I went to the closest one, popped the screen out, and tried to lift the glass. Locked. I put the screen back in and went to the next one.
“You get much crime in Pendleton?” Brynn asked.
“No, not really,” Heather answered. “No cops in town either. Sometimes the county sheriff comes in to handle something, but we’re pretty much on our own.”
“People usually lock their windows?” I asked. The next window was locked too.
“No,” Heather said.
“Asshole has something to hide,” Brynn said.
“I mean, we are trying to break in,” I said. “Kind of justifies his paranoia.”
“Help me up this apatosaurus,” Brynn said. It was deceptively hard to get ahold of, since the ridge of its back was just out of reach from the ground and the whole belly of the thing was round.
“I think it’s a brontosaurus,” I said. I gave her a boost with my good arm and she straddled the beast like she was riding it. Vulture would have wanted a photo for his Instagram. Hell, I wanted a photo, because Brynn looked awesome as a crust punk dino-riding cowboy. But, you know, you’re not supposed to take pictures of yourselves at the scene of any given crime in progress.
“I thought brontos weren’t real?” Brynn said. “I thought they were all apatosauruses now?”
“Nope.” My youngest niece had been obsessed with dinosaurs, last time I’d gone to see her in Illinois. She’d schooled me good when I’d tried to say brontos weren’t real. “They count as real dinosaurs again.”
“Next thing you’ll tell me that Pluto is a planet.” Brynn reached down to help me up, but I waved her away. My shoulder was way too still-stitched-up to climb something like that.
Brynn started to climb up the beast’s neck, toward the building.
“You think it’ll hold?” I asked. By which I meant: I don’t think it’ll hold.
But in a second, she had scrambled up the little bronto head and was looking at the wall of the building, about five, maybe six feet away.
She was going to jump. She would have to cross the distance and get ahold of the narrow window ledge, pull herself up, then hope the window was unlocked because there was no other logical way down.
“Hey, uh,” I started.
“I’d really rather you didn’t!” Heather shouted.
Brynn jumped.
Time didn’t slow down or anything. Maybe it sped up. One second I was yelling, and the next second . . . no, the same second . . . Brynn was clinging to the windowsill, which couldn’t have been more than three inches deep. She pulled herself up and crouched on the sill.
Brynn should have been a cat burglar. Actually, for all I knew, she was a cat burglar.
She got the window open and disappeared inside.
“What do we do?” Heather asked. Unspoken: “Do we try to follow her? Because I don’t want to.”
“No,” I said, answering her unspoken question instead of her spoken one. I went to the closest window. About ten seconds later, Brynn was on the other side and let us in.
* * *
I wonder what was going through the head of the person who decided the world needed hundreds of shot glasses with the words “Pendleton, Montana” emblazoned on the side. Because I didn’t share that particular opinion. But what do I know? Maybe they’d moved thousands of them already.
I pocketed one, then spent a full minute having an ethical argument with myself. I don’t have any particular issue justifying theft of necessities or from big box stores. But a shot glass wasn’t food, and this wasn’t exactly a Walmart. The store looked like any roadside bullshit gift store anywhere.
On the other hand, the guy who owned this place was probably a bad man. Isn’t that why we’d broken into his place?
That was terrible logic. That was state logic. A man wasn’t guilty just because he was being investigated.
I put the shot glass back. I’m pretty sure eighteen-year-old me would have laughed at twenty-eight-year-old me. But eighteen-year-old me was kind of an asshole, so I didn’t really hold myself responsible to her. I also didn’t need a shot glass.
There wasn’t much we could imagine him hiding inside the store itself, so after the briefest of searches we went up the stairs to his apartment. Heather took watch by the front
