“I don’t see Uncle Bob in your contacts.”
Jesus. “Siri, show me Uncle Bobs in Massachusetts!”
“Okay, here’s what I found.”
Jenny looked at the list. At the top was “Uncle Bob’s Storage, North Andover.”
She grabbed the slicker, her car fob, her phone, and the key. She was out the door in five seconds.
* * * *
It was a huge, three-story tan corrugated metal building at the end of a road at the edge of a forest. The sides gleamed with drenching rain under the pale wash of floodlights. A few moving trucks were parked in the lot but no other regular cars. Jenny hurried into the office entrance, where a college girl with big glasses sat behind a high octagonal counter surrounded by plastic plants.
“Hi.” Jenny swept her soaked slicker hood back and smiled. “I need to get something out of our locker, but I forgot the number.”
“Do you have the key?”
Jenny fished in her pocket and pulled it out. “Right here.”
The girl took it from her, turned it over and showed her the back of the thumb grip. “It’s right here, three twenty-six.” Her expression said, “Poor old folks.”
“Oh, of course! Thanks!”
“You bet. It’s down the first hall all the way to the end, then turn right.”
But there were no lockers in the building, per se. They were all big, corrugated, garage-like doors, one after the other. She found 326, the last one at the end of a hallway of smooth concrete floors. A huge padlock hung from its hasp. She held her breath as she slipped the key inside, turned it, and the lock popped open. She bent down and hauled the door up.
A light flicked on, automatically. The space was huge, and it was filled with...junk. There were boxes and old chairs, a wooden table turned up on its side, old lamps, rubber tires, steel wheels, and hubcaps, and they were all piled up and impassable. Right in front was a tall French closet. Jenny stepped inside the space, pulled the garage door back down, and then perused the mess with a shake of her head. How am I supposed to find anything in here?
She reached over and pulled the closet doors open. Nothing but a tightly packed row of old clothes, like Salvation Army finds. Maybe Dan’s big secret was that he watched Hoarders too much. She pushed some of the clothing aside, just out of curiosity, and saw nothing behind but the back wall of the closet. Just for the hell of it, she pushed it...and it opened. She gasped as another light clicked on, deeper.
She scrambled her way through the closet and the clothes, and then she was standing inside some sort of container, like one of those “pods” people used for storage or moving. It was totally pristine, with shiny aluminum walls, standing filing cabinets, a small metal desk in the center, and behind that, a tall and wide heavy green safe of some sort. It had a digital lock. Her fingers trembled as she punched in the same code she’d just used for the one in Dan’s office. The door hissed open.
Guns. Of all kinds. There were automatic pistols arranged on steel pegs on both side walls, and in the back stood racks of longer guns, mostly black and scary-looking—some of them in cases. At the top was a shelf of ammunition boxes in all sorts of colors, with numbers and names like Remington. A small leather satchel hung from one peg, right in the middle. Jenny unslung it and opened it.
Inside was Dan’s CIA diary. At one point he mentioned that Zeta thought they had found it, but then he’d just smiled. This one was nothing more than a small black leather notebook, but he’d also mentioned before that it was something he’d kept throughout the years, a habit that was strictly forbidden as an intelligence operative. But Dan had a mind of his own, as she knew only too well. This was his “insurance policy.”
She flipped it open and scanned through some pages. His writing was careful and legible, but none of it meant anything to her. The pages had dates at the top, but the rest of it was just code words and numbers and phrases she couldn’t possibly decipher. She flipped through the yellowed pages, looking for the latest entry. And then she found it.
Yesterday’s date, and below that, two words: Collins and Tomahawks. Neither one meant anything. But wait...Collins. That was someone, a person Dan knew. And Tomahawks? She’d have to ask Siri. Below those words was a weird sort of message.
“Need to find me? Call the Civil War president.”
And below that was something that looked like a phone number, no dashes. She took out her iPhone and tapped the number into her Notes. She thought about taking Dan’s diary with her, but somehow that seemed like going too far. She put it back in the satchel, hung it back up, got ready to go, then stopped, and looked at the gun rack.
That one there. The ugly-looking one with the wide black tube and wooden grip underneath—like the one on her gardening trowel. That was a shotgun, the kind Dan always said was a “showstopper.” She pulled it out of the rack, holding it like it was a hissing cobra, and stuffed it nose first into one of the empty black canvas cases, zipped it shut, and looked up at the shelf. She took a box that said “12 Gauge Shot,” stuffed it into her slicker pocket, crawled back through the closet, closed the secret door, and reordered the clothes. She went out, pulled the big metal door down with a clang, and locked it up.
The shotgun case was heavy and menacing, and just holding it made her feel like a bank robber. She held it alongside her leg as she passed through the office again, hoping the girl wouldn’t ask any questions. But the kid was head-down in her phone and only mumbled, “Good night.”
“Thanks. See ya.”
The rain
