Fire Lake by Jonathan Valin Read Free Book Online Page A

around the room. A big wad of it was
hanging from a lamp by the door. I swiped it off with the gun barrel.
    "Lonnie?" I called out.
    Nobody answered.
    I walked into the bedroom and flipped on the light.
The bureau drawers had been emptied and the mattress had been ripped
open.
    I walked back into the living room. Karen Jackowski
was standing in the doorway, surveying the damage with an aghast look
on her face.
    "Did Lonnie do this?" she said with horror.
    "I don't know. He's not here now."
    "He must be completely out of his mind,"
she said, giving me a helpless look. "God, what are we going to
do?"
    I put the safety on and stuck the gun back in my
holster.
    "Find him," I said.
 

    9
    I searched the apartment to see if Lonnie had left
anything behind that might tell us where he was headed. But the
closer I looked, the less certain I was that Lonnie had done the
damage. There was something unmistakably methodical about the way the
place had been tossed--bureau drawers emptied, mattress slashed, the
shoe boxes and clothes bags in the closets opened and rifled. Very
little had been broken; and that seemed strange too. No broken
mirrors, no broken dishes, no broken lamps or glasses. It seemed to
me that a man in a frenzy, a man enraged enough to tear open the
mattress and the cushions on the couch, should have been a little
less careful about what he broke or didn't break. It almost looked as
if the apartment had been tossed by professionals. Of course, the
fact that I didn't want to believe that Lonnie had wrecked my
apartment colored my judgment. And thirty bucks was missing from a
glass tray on the bedroom bureau, along with Lonnie's Missouri
license, the photograph, and the return bus ticket to St. Louis.
Still, the rest of the mess made me dubious and more than a little
worried about what might have happened to Lonnie. Although it was
hard to believe that he could have involved himself in drug trouble
so soon after he'd been released from Lexington, that was what the
evidence suggested. Karen herself saw that.
    As I came back into the living room, she looked up
from where she was kneeling on the floor and said, "It looks
like a bust."
    I nodded grimly. "Yes, it does."
    Stuffing a handful of loose wadding back into the
sofa, she asked, "Why would he do this?"
    "I don't know," I said. "If this was
somebody else's apartment, I'd say that it had been searched by
pros."
    "Pros?" she said, dropping the wadding she
was holding.
    "Looking for what?"
    I shrugged. "For whatever you might conceal in a
cushion, a mattress, a desk drawer, or a shoe box."
    "Drugs?" Karen said, with a frown.
    "That would be my first guess."
    Karen shook her head. "I don't understand any of
this. Did Lonnie have drugs on him when you found him last night?"
    "No."
    "Then what . . . ?"
    "I don't know, Karen. I don't know what he's
been up to since he got out of jail. I don't know why he came back to
Cincinnati yesterday. I don't know what he was doing at that
godforsaken motel. Or why he did this."
    "Maybe he didn't do this," she said with a
tremor in her voice. "That's what you're implying, isn't it?"
    "I don't know," I said, trying not to sound
overly concerned. "It's possible."
    She gave me a nervous look. "Then what happened
to Lonnie, while these . . . people were searching for drugs?"
    "I don't know that, either." I walked over
to the desk and started to pick up the phone.
    "Who are you calling?" Karen said.
    "The police. I think we can use their help
tracking Lonnie down."
    "No!" she said sharply. "Don't do
that!"
    I turned back to her. "Look," I said, "be
reasonable, Karen. Either Lonnie did this, which means that he's gone
over the edge and may try to kill himself again. Or somebody else
came looking for him and did this, which means that he's in deep shit
with the worst kind of people."
    "People who did what? Ransacked your apartment
and kidnapped Lonnie?" she said it facetiously, as if she were
trying to make herself believe the possibility was