Page 30 of The Bad Weather Friend

“He hasn’t fired any shots.”

“No, he hasn’t. That’s good.”

“Maybe good, maybe not,” she said.

“You mean like someone could’ve taken his gun from him.”

“Nobody could take a gun from Bob.”

“So you mean it could be something worse happened.”

“Don’t say that. Why would you say that?”

“It’s a legitimate concern.”

“If you’re going to say things like that, just shut up.”

He shut up.

After a moment, she said, “We have an obligation here.”

“He’s a friend,” Benny agreed.

Harper stepped into the laundry room and opened a cabinet and studied the contents and chose a can of spray starch.

“What’re you doing?” Benny asked.

“Remember, I don’t have a gun.”

“You’re going to starch someone?”

“If I have to. In the face. Let him inhale some Niagara Luxe.”

Benny followed her into the laundry room. “I have the golf club. I’ll go first.”

“No you won’t. I’m the PI in training. I’ll go first,” she said and opened the door at the far end of the room.

Benny followed her into the garage, where something was wrong with the overhead fluorescent panels. They flickered, and shadows shuddered. All was still, too still, so still that Benny knew the hush was prelude to an event or discovery that wouldn’t improve the character of the day.

Harper whispered, “Bob,” but Bob didn’t answer and neither did anyone who might have done something terrible to Bob.

They passed the front of the Ford. Where the box ornamented with intricate scenes had once been flat on the floor, it now stood on end. Because of its shape, upright position, and ominous quality, it reminded Benny of a sarcophagus in one of those old mummy movies in which Mengistu Gidada had taken such delight. If the lid was hinged and it creaked open, however, the occupant would probably be a lot ickier and more menacing than Boris Karloff wound in tattered graveclothes, his pharaoh face as shriveled as a prune.

Spray starch at the ready, with the fully engaged intellect of a smart and highly efficient waitress determined to effect a career change into the glamorous world of private investigation, Harper went cautiously but not timidly to the big box from Boca Raton. She stood before it, marveling at the art, although she didn’t touch it and thereby risk being detached from reality and plunged into the scenes depicted.

Assuring himself, not entirely with success, that he would be more effective with the nine iron as a weapon than he was with it on a golf course, Benny was standing beside Harper when she whispered, “Hey, the lid is ajar.”

Even in the inconstant light of the flickering fluorescent panel, Benny could see that indeed the lid was ajar, although not more than a quarter of an inch. The hinges were evidently concealed in the frame, and now the crack along the right side began slowly to widen.

As he backed away from the box with Harper, Benny was more sure than he’d ever been that Colonel Talmadge Clerkenwell had not sent him a sarcophagus full of books. The crack became a cleft. The cleft became a gap. The gap became a two-inch-wide fissure. Carried faster and faster by its own weight, the heavy lid swung all the way open—and there he was.

“Fat Bob,” said Benny.

“Bob,” said Harper.

The detective stood in the box, wide-eyed, mouth open as if he might be about to speak, pistol firmly gripped in his right hand and pointed between his feet. He was breathing slow and deep and steady, his big chest rising and falling.

Harper stepped forward and waved her hand back and forth in front of Bob’s eyes, but he failed to track it. “Bob? Robert? Mr. Jericho?”

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