Page 63 of Prodigal Son

(A small voice in the back of his head chimed in:you don’t like empty houses because you’re afraid of being alone.)

“Stay close,” Fox called back to Evan. “Quit worrying about your shoes and keep up.”

There was some grumbling, but the squish of hurried footfalls through mud.

They picked their way through muck and filth, past bleating goats that stared at them with their off-putting, alien eyes, and reached the garage without spotting any signs of human life. The lorry’s tires were sunk deep in undisturbed sludge; it hadn’t been driven in at least a week. If Norris had left, he’d done so a while ago, long enough that the tire tracks had been washed away. Fox didn’t spot so much as a twitch of the drapes in the small house.

“Abe, wait,” he said as Abe reached the door of the garage, and moved up to join his former sensei. “Check for traps.”

“I’m not stupid, boy.” But he was a little wild-eyed, Fox saw. Nervous. For them, or for his old friend?

They walked the perimeter, careful, searching along the leaf-strewn ground, having to swat limbs and spider webs thick as cotton candy out of the way. Fox didn’t see any wires or sensors that would indicate the place had been rigged. Of course, there was no way to tell for certain, not without going in.

When they got back to the door, he saw that Evan and Eden were staring in through one of the oddly clean windows, their faces pale.

Evan swallowed hard, and then turned away.

“Norris is home,” Eden explained, voice faint.

Fox joined her at the window, and groaned.

~*~

Norris had been tied to his own workbench with thick polymer chord. Deep gouges in the skin of his wrists, the blood long-dried, marked a struggle. Both his knees were broken; something heavy and blunt, some sort of hammer, most like. Same for his fingers, warped claws frozen in a last scrabble for freedom. His face was untouched, though. You didn’t have to beat someone in the face to get them talking – howcouldthey talk when they’d bitten through their tongues and their jaws were cracked? Also, his killers wanted him recognized, clearly.

Fox straightened from his crouch and wiped his hands off on the legs of his jeans; he hadn’t touched the man, but he felt like he had.

When he turned, he found Eden standing in the open doorway of the workshop, gun still held casually in one hand, gaze moving around the interior of the building. The rest of the property was a complete sty, but the shelves here were surprisingly tidy: neat rows of varnish, paint, wood glue, nails, and sanding blocks. One wall of pegboard housed dozens of tools, some hand, some power. Albie would have appreciated them, Fox thought.

“I can’t test for prints or fibers or DNA,” Eden stated the obvious. “And I’m pretty sure this group is too professional to leave that stuff behind anyway.”

“Yeah.” He’d never met Norris, but he felt something like loss anyway. As he’d expected, Norris wasn’t a large man, instead wiry and slight, with hair gone white and a face deeply lined and tanned from the sun, hands that had doubtless been gnarled before someone took a hammer to them.

But unlike Abe, his land and house and loose herd of goats suggested someone who’d stopped maintaining his life. Maybe someone paranoid, or sick, or drunk.

“Where are the old guys?”

“They went to look in the house.”

They headed that way, passing Evan. The sniper stood in the middle of the yard, pitched forward at the waist, hands on his knees as he took deep, unsteady breaths through his mouth. A goat had come forward to study him, head cocked.

At another time, Fox might have snapped a photo of him to save for tormenting purposes later. But now, he slapped him on the back as he passed. “Get it together and come on.”

A few steps later, he heard the kid blow out one last deep breath and follow.

A set of rickety stairs led up to the back porch: a sad, sagging affair that dripped mildew so aggressive it had begun to look like moss. Maybe it was moss.

The steps, and then the porch groaned beneath their feet, though none of them was all that heavy, considering.

The smell hit him a pace away from the open back door. He took a fast breath in through his mouth and stepped over the threshold.

First was the kitchen, a cramped space with grimy lino and grimier cabinets, a sink full of dishes he thought were probably the source of the rotting-food stink. Flies buzzed around a sputtering overhead light fixture, eighties-era fluorescent.

Movement beyond the doorway drew his attention, and he stepped into the front, main room. It was…a lot to take in.

In the center, as expected, a sofa and armchair, an old TV on a cabinet. Ceiling fan.

But on the edges: file cabinets. One after the next, after the next, after the next.

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