Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(58)

—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

No one answered when I knocked on the door to Sarge’s second-floor apartment.

I counted to twenty, then used the key Sherri had given me. Clyde and I slipped in, and I closed and locked the door behind us.

Clyde gave no indication that anyone else was in the small apartment. But I signaled, and we went fast together through the space, clearing it. The apartment was deserted.

It was also a wreck. Someone had gotten here first.

The other time Clyde and I had been here, the place had been a misery of dirty clothes, dirty dishes, and takeout boxes. There had been a sense of desolation I found depressingly familiar. Maybe without the stabilizing influence of Grams, my childhood home would have looked like Sarge’s.

Lonely knows lonely. And Sarge—Max Udell—seemed pretty damn lonely.

But now that I knew a little about him, I had to wonder if the version of extreme bachelorhood he’d created was a mirage. A cover for this man who claimed to work for the CIA.

The current wreckage of his home, though, wasn’t part of any cover. Someone had torn the place apart.

Clyde and I did a second walk-through.

The same kind of pizza boxes and empty beer bottles that had covered the kitchen counter on our last visit were on the floor, crushed and broken. The sofa had been gutted, the mattress and box springs dismantled, the contents of the closets rifled and tossed to the floor.

Once again I had the sense that mysterious forces swirled around us. Invisible, but active and dangerous. If this were a chess match, Clyde and I were unquestionably the pawns. I wasn’t sure what piece Sarge played.

I returned to the front room and signaled Clyde to guard the door. Then I went back through the rooms a third time, searching more slowly. I scrutinized the living room, kitchen, and the first bedroom before heading into the last room.

This second bedroom served as Sarge’s office and a place to exhibit the artifacts he’d collected in Iraq. On my last visit, it had been the only clean and organized space in the apartment.

Now it was a ruin. The bookshelves had been toppled, the clay pots and cuneiform tablets smashed. Copies of National Geographic and Archaeology Magazine covered the floor. I yanked open the drawers to the filing cabinet, which had been packed full of folders. Now, all that remained were utility bills, a rental agreement for the apartment, and a few flyers. Sarge’s desk was likewise empty, the drawers wrenched out and thrown to the floor.

Above the desk, where Sarge had pinned hundreds of photographs, rose a wall empty of everything except a constellation of pinprick-size holes. The wall of memories was now mute.

My hope of finding Malik’s phone or a copy of the video vanished. In all the mess there were no phones, no media disks, no thumb drives. Not even an old VHS tape.

But there wouldn’t be. Whoever had torn the place apart was probably after the same thing.

On my way out, I stopped to scope out the bathroom.

The linoleum floor was covered with broken bottles of cold medicine and mouthwash. The air reeked of cough syrup and hydrogen peroxide. But now that I was in the room, I detected something else beneath the medicinal odors. A sharp, familiar stench.

I looked at the blue-plaid curtain hiding the bathtub.

Unease slithered through my stomach. There was no one, living or dead, hiding behind the curtain. Clyde would have let me know.

But there was something.

My eyes went to a splash of reddish brown on the bottom corner of the curtain.

Reluctantly, I reached out a hand and drew back the fabric.

The tub was filled with an inch of dried blood. More blood spattered the tiles, halfway to the ceiling. Smears painted the inside of the curtain.

I dropped the curtain and backed out of the room, my boots crunching over the debris.

Unless Sarge had slaughtered an animal, someone had died in that bathtub. You could not bleed that much and live.

But was Sarge the victim? Or the perpetrator?



In light of that discovery, I decided Clyde and I should head to Joe’s Tavern in the Royer district.

I told myself it wasn’t because I needed a drink. Clyde and I wanted a safe place to work, and I needed the company of normal.

I kept an eye on the rearview mirror, but we appeared to be traveling solo.

Joe’s was the kind of neighborhood bar where the regular clientele showed up year after year, aging quietly like books fading in the sun. The place had a soft patina, as if the patrons’ hopes and dreams and sometimes their ruin had rubbed into the tables and floors. I’d gone to Joe’s first as a child towed by my parents, then later with the kids I’d grown up with. Now Clyde and I were regulars.

Paul Porter, a Royer local and the latest in a long line of owners, had kept the familiar wood paneling and red-vinyl booths when he took over five years earlier. But he’d brought in free Wi-Fi, replaced the felt on the pool tables, and introduced a pretzel-and-wasabi mix to go with the popcorn. The old guard groused about the changes until Paul hired a short-order cook and added a bar menu. With the addition of a grill and a prep line, the hard-liners didn’t even have to leave to eat, which made drinking all the easier.

As Clyde and I walked in, Paul glanced up from his stool behind the bar. Hitting the far end of his fourth decade, he had kept the cool, casual hip of someone twenty years younger. Today he wore his trademark look—skinny jeans, an untucked button-down, a small earring in his left lobe, and a permanent five o’clock shadow. He looked like he belonged behind the mic at a poetry slam.