Parts Unknown by Rex Burns

Author:Rex Burns [Burns, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4800-3
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com / Open Road
Published: 2012-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

“YOU SURE IT was the bikers?” Bunch wandered from one corner of the office to the other, stepping over scattered sheets of paper from the file drawers, strewn envelopes with their canceled stamps, detritus from desk drawers that had been tipped upside down. His concern had been first for the electronics gear stowed in the air-conditioned closet that served as his workroom, then for the rest of the office, then for me.

“I’m sure. And why the hell don’t you help clean up instead of just standing around with your thumb up.”

“Touchy! For one thing, you said the dudes didn’t have beards. All the bikers I saw looked like bench warmers on the House of David baseball team.”

“I don’t think they had beards. It was dark.”

“For another, if it was the bikers, they’d have whacked you. They tried once already. They would have come here with a piece and used it when you showed up.”

“Maybe they want me alive to tell them where their dog is.” I wrestled a metal drawer back into its slides and gathered up the folders, one emptied, that held past cases and old correspondence. Behind me, the teeth-setting scrape of steel on glass said the glazier was busy replacing the broken window. “They didn’t expect me to show up. And I didn’t expect two of them—the bum only mentioned one.”

The burglars hadn’t had time to pry open the old Mosler, where the active files were kept along with what little else we thought was confidential. Scratch marks around the hinges and lock showed they had started. But they didn’t have the tools to strip the safe quickly, and most likely the rock coming through the window interrupted them.

The exhilaration of combat had quickly ebbed the night before, and for some reason I couldn’t remember, my shoulder—the one hurt in the automobile wreck—began to ache. And I didn’t feel like facing a major salvage job that would last until five in the morning. I figured the cleanup could wait, and wait it did. Now we were trying to put the office back in some kind of order and come up with an idea about what the bikers were after.

“You say they didn’t have anything in their hands when they came out?”

“One of them had a pry bar.”

“Important stuff—papers, a folder.”

“The pry bar was pretty important at the time, Bunch. But no, neither one carried anything from the office that I could see.”

He ran a finger over the fresh tool marks glinting in the steel of the safe. “Then they must have thought it was in here. They looked through everything else first, found nothing, and tried to peel the safe.”

“Maybe they weren’t looking for anything specific. Maybe they just wanted to trash the place.”

Bunch shook his head. “I don’t know. If they wanted to do that, they’d have busted up the electronics gear. I mean, all they had to do was walk in and start shoving things off the shelves. But they didn’t. They went for papers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.