them were nothing but thin sticks with black leaves. In another bit of creepy construction, there were no windows on the extension built on top of the single-car garage that was connected to the side of the house.
It looked like nobody was home, but I knocked on the front door, anyway, just to check. No answer. I tried the doorbell. It didn’t work. So I cut across the forgotten lawn and stood close enough to Ziggy to get Ruby’s attention. “I’m going to check out back,” I said in a half whisper.
Ruby rolled down her window. “What?” she asked loudly.
Now it was my turn to shoot her an annoyed look. “I’m going to check out back,” I said, speaking in my normal voice. I gave up trying to not appear conspicuous. It was obvious that we were both lacking in the detecting department.
“Be careful and keep your phone on,” she said.
The back of the house, like the Uretskys’, proved to be as ugly as the front. A dilapidated trampoline with one leg missing took up a good portion of the postage-stamp lawn. Rusty toolboxes were strewn about with no tools inside—none that I could see, anyway. The trees were cut down to stumps, and the stone birdbath next to one of them, cracked and ugly, held brown, dirty rainwater. The lawn was a dead patch of dirt where nothing, not even weeds, would grow. The basement door had a window covered by a curtain, and the other windows out back were too high for me to see inside without a stepladder.
I did a three-sixty and got the same feeling Ruth Shane had expressed the day before. The place felt poisoned.
I’d decided it was time for me to head back to Ziggy when my phone buzzed. I looked and saw a text message from Ruby. Some of the words were misspelled, but the content of her message told me that she had sent her text in great haste.
Woman wiith gunn run!
CHAPTER 28
Left or right—which way should I go? Wrong way, and chances were I’d run into an armed woman. Instead of bolting, I hesitated, overthinking and not reacting. For a few seconds my feet stayed rooted to the ground, with half my brain screaming to run and the other half debating which way.
Five seconds at most. That’s what it took to decide. Five quick ticks of the clock, but as it turned out, it was three ticks too many. When I broke left—which happened to be the right way to go—I almost made it to the side of the house when I heard a scratchy, hoarse-sounding female voice shout from behind me.
“You stop or I shoot!”
I stopped, all right. The world around me turned gray, as if all its color had gone swirling down a fast-draining tub. My eyes closed tightly, while my hands went unprompted above my head.
I heard footsteps approaching, slow moving. Either she was being cautious or she couldn’t move quickly. I kept my hands up and turned around . . . nice . . . and . . . slow. I can’t say which I saw first, the woman or the double-barreled shotgun pointed at my chest. We’ll call it a tie.
The woman, rollers in her hair, wore a faded white nightgown in mid-afternoon and had no shoes on her feet. Her cheeks were sunken, as though the bones beneath had dissolved over time. As for her face, she radiated toughness, a look enhanced by her leathery skin, which had crinkled the way a potato dries in the sun. Her lips creased back into a snarl, while her eyes, milky and blue, could not conceal the hatred that probably accompanied her every waking second.
“Who are you?” she said.
I could tell by the rasp that she inhaled at least three packs a day. She stood about twenty feet from me, but that gun shortened the distance between us considerably. This was probably how poor Giovanni felt, scared and cornered, though he had an aluminum bat stashed at his disposal, whereas I was unarmed.
The woman took a threatening step forward. “Who are you?” she asked again. “And what do you want?”
I kept my hands in the air and didn’t take a single step. I went rigid like the Tin Man, but I had a heart, and that organ was pounding away mightily.
“I’m looking for Carl Swain,” I said. My dry throat put a little crack in my voice.
“What for?” she asked. The word for came out sounding like “foah.”