An ordinary decent criminal by Michael Van Rooy

Author:Michael Van Rooy [Michael Van Rooy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9780312606282
Published: 2010-08-15T20:41:28+00:00

22

It was the next day, I’d talked with Claire and we had pretty much agreed that the cops, especially Walsh, looked good for at least some of our current difficulties. I was wandering around the front living room, thinking, when I heard someone coming up the path.

“Knock-Knock Ginger.”

I opened the door before the woman outside could touch the bell. She was unfamiliar to me and she stared bug-eyed with something between fear and abject stupidity. “Excuse me?”

She almost dropped the envelope she was holding.

“It was a game we played when I was a child.”

She just stared and pushed the envelope into my hands. “Here.”

She turned to walk away and her shoulders hunched as though to absorb a blow. At the sidewalk, she turned to see me standing with the unopened letter in my hands. I watched her with my head tilted to the side as she slipped behind the wheel of a new-model car and drove away fast.

Claire came up behind me while I was reading and I handed over the letter without a word. She read it quickly and snorted. “Evicted?”

Fred was wrestling with another pillow under the coffee table and the dog was chewing on a piece of rawhide shaped like a bone. I brushed my hair back with the side of my hand and headed into the kitchen for some water. Claire followed, looking at the envelope.

“There’s no postage. Who sent it?”

While the water ran to cold, I answered. “A short woman with green eyes and brown hair. She was wearing a light green pantsuit and driving a silver Lexus sedan.”

Claire made a motion with her hands.

“Did she have a lot up here?”

I grinned at the implied chest. “No. Not at all.”

“That was Ms. Gantz, our landlord. That means it’s official.”

I drank the glass of water and filled it again while I read the letter again. “So what are we going to do?”

“I’m going to work in the backyard. You wanna come?”

Baby and dog came with us, one going into a playpen and the other ending up tied to a stake by a long length of strong rope. Claire made me rearrange them and then looked around and pulled on canvas gardening gloves before tossing me a bright pink pair of rubber ones.

“Lots of work to do yet.”

I slapped the gloves against my thigh and nodded in agreement. The yard was a mess. Earlier tenants had reshingled the roof and left the trash in big piles all over the yard, where it killed off the grass and the flowers. Someone had tried to grow wildflowers in a big bed along one fence and now that corner was full of weeds and thistles. The lawn that did remain was mostly crabgrass mixed with dandelions and scarred with the treads of cars and trucks, many of them quite deep.

“Where do you want to start?”

“Nowhere. We’ve been evicted, remember?”

Claire nodded politely and went to work in the flowerbed, ripping the weeds out and stuffing them in a garbage bag at her feet.

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