Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(49)

Rainier Avenue was a commercial strip four lanes wide, lined with big apartments, commercial buildings in their second or third incarnation, and a surprising number of Vietnamese restaurants. SafeSecure’s address was an older single-story brick building, the kind of place that might have once held a small machine shop repairing logging equipment, or making specialty parts for Boeing. Now it was semi-affordable square footage for whatever the tenant needed. The original concrete loading dock had been turned into the main entrance, with a faded awning to keep the rain off and a group of big clay pots overgrown with plants. There was no name on the door, but the street address was displayed above it. June cranked the minivan into a parking space.

Peter said, “I thought you said this was going to be some kind of a PO box.”

June shrugged and turned off the engine. “Let’s go see.”

They stepped through the glass entrance into a long narrow reception area, where a middle-aged woman sat behind a reception counter.

Peter felt the white static flare up immediately. The place was like a shooting gallery, with a solid pair of double doors at the far end and no cover between them. He reminded himself there were no armed insurgents in Seattle, at least not to his knowledge. And not likely at this address. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s not going to kill you, remember?

The woman was large but not soft, and her face was set in a permanent frown. As if she didn’t get many visitors and liked it that way. She wore jeans and a faded blue man’s dress shirt. Ornate tattoos peeked out past the ends of her rolled-up sleeves.

Behind her was a long wall with numbered slots, well over a hundred of them. The slots were wide enough for large envelopes, but Peter couldn’t read the numbers from the far side of the counter. He imagined an array of mail bins behind the slots. A vast low hum came through the wall behind her. The doors at the far end of the room would lead to the rest of the operation.

“Hi there,” June said brightly, walking up to the counter. “I’m looking for a company called SafeSecure. One of their employees gave me this address.”

The permanent frown got deeper. “I’d have to look them up,” said the large woman. She rolled her chair over to her computer and tapped on the keyboard. “Yep, they’re a customer. Although I don’t know why they’d send you here. We’re just a mail forwarding service.”

“Where do you forward their mail to?”

“We don’t physically forward anything,” said the woman. “We just scan everything and put it online. The customer logs on with a password.”

“Can you give me a billing address?”

The large woman shook her head. “Everything’s electronic, paid automatically by credit card. They could be on the moon for all I know.”

Peter said, “What about a mailing address for the credit card?”

“I can’t tell you that,” the woman said sharply. Her frown had turned into a scowl. “Our customers pay us for their privacy. It’s time for you to go.”

“One of their people left something at our house,” said Peter. “We’re just trying to return it. Is the mailing address on the credit card the same as the mailing address here?” That’s how Peter would have set it up. A closed loop, leading nowhere.

The large woman’s eyes dropped to the computer screen. “Yep,” she said. And she must have pushed a button somewhere, because the door at the end of the long room opened and a man came through. He was tall, dark, and ugly, and about three sizes larger than Peter. He wore a skin-tight T-shirt that showed off his muscles, and he glared at Peter like he was having a bad day.

“Evah’ting okay, Trish?” He sounded like Ziggy Marley’s mean uncle.

“These people were just leaving.”

So they did.

? ? ?

BACK ON THE ROAD, June said, “Pretty slick back there, asking about the credit card.”

“I was curious,” said Peter. “It seemed like something I might use someday.”

“You never told me where you live.”

Peter looked out the window. “I move around a lot.”

“Do you have a family?”

“My mom and dad live in northern Wisconsin. No brothers or sisters.”

Peter knew she wasn’t exactly asking about his parents. It was part of this thing they were dancing around. “My folks took in stray kids,” he said, “ever since I was little.”

“What, like a halfway house?”

“Nothing official. More like small-town gravity, an invisible force attracting troubled kids. A few were really wild, but most of them just had shitty parents. This kid Tommy, he was eight years old and his mom burned him with her cigarettes. He lived at the farm behind our property. And Deidre, she was fifteen and pregnant and her dad kicked her out of the house.” He shook his head. “January in northern Wisconsin, ten below and the wind howling off Lake Superior.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Sounds like an education.”

“Definitely.” He smiled then, remembering Deidre. “Pretty exciting for a twelve-year-old boy, having a pregnant teenager in your house. I fell pretty hard for Deidre.”

She gave him a look. “This isn’t some kind of fetish, is it?”

“No,” he said, laughing. “Part of it was knowing what she’d done to get pregnant, the whole idea of sex. But mostly she was just, you know, beautiful. The way all pregnant women are beautiful.”