your freckled ass are staying behind me until I’m one-hundred percent satisfied that the house is clear, because I’m not very useful but I do have a small skillset that might apply in this situation, let me guess…. You’d tell me to… fuck off?”
“Hypothetically speaking? There is a distinct possibility of that, yes.”
“Did you at least bring a gun?”
Rufus held both hands up. “I don’t own a gun.”
“How about this, then? You at least try not to step right in my way when I’m shooting. Deal?”
Rufus saluted Sam. “Oui, mon capitaine.”
“If I die with a smartass,” Sam said as he moved toward the archway on the left, “do I have to spend eternity with a smartass?” Without looking back, he added, “Don’t answer that.”
They moved through the main floor room by room. Without furniture or rugs to muffle any of the sound, the wood floors made every movement louder, and no matter how hard Sam tried, he couldn’t keep their progress through the house completely silent. Ancient joists creaked and groaned. Hinges protested. In the kitchen, Sam’s foot caught a plastic bowl that was the exact same color as the tile underfoot, and it clattered away explosively, the noise making Sam’s breath hitch. Rufus smirked about it for two more rooms until the redhead started hissing and batting at the air and stumbled into a French door.
“Jesus Christ,” Sam growled. “We might as well have brought your whole fucking tap-dance studio with us.”
Rufus at least had the decency to look chagrined as he whispered, “It was a big spider.”
They found nothing on the main floor that corroborated Juliana’s story. As they completed the circuit, Sam caught Rufus’s eye and pointed a finger up, then down.
A visible shiver shook Rufus’s body. He worked the material of his beanie with one hand, like he wanted to yank it off and tug at his hair in a nervous method. He eventually pointed up.
The stairs, which didn’t look structurally sound, creaked under their weight. Carpet strips, probably intended to prevent slips and falls, had been glued on at some point, but many had been ripped away, leaving only trails of resin or, in a few cases, a few patches of carpet fiber. At least one of the risers was missing, and Sam pointed it out so Rufus wouldn’t accidentally put a foot through the empty space. Halfway up, Sam caught a whiff of something foul, and he pulled his tee up over his nose. It wasn’t rot, not exactly. But it made him think of death, and cold sweat broke out on his back, his shoulders, his forehead.
The first two rooms upstairs were just like the downstairs: completely empty. But the bathroom was another story. Someone had ripped out one side of the shower curtain rod, and it now hung across the tub at an angle. Another wounded wing, Sam thought, picturing the aluminum slant of the carport. Whatever had caused it had happened recently; plaster dust lay fresh on top of the toilet tank. As Sam got closer, he could see the rust-colored stains on the shower curtain, and more of the stains on the aging grout. Balancing himself, Sam leaned over the fallen curtain rod for a closer look and grunted. A tiny web of cracks worked through the ceramic. Something had hit the tile hard.
Stepping back, he glanced at Rufus and jerked a thumb at the destruction, eyebrows raised in a question.
Rufus first inspected the side of the bathroom door. He ran his knuckles lightly against wood around the locks, freshly splintered. He slipped around Sam next to study the tub stains and then the tiny window that’d been left open a sliver. It was like watching a man take apart the world around him, piece by piece, Sam thought. Rufus deconstructed a situation, studied each portion of the whole, then put it together again to see how it functioned as a singular moment. The problem with that: Sam was becoming more certain that Rufus’s understanding of these studies in brutality came from a place of practical experience.
And that was shattering.
“Someone was hiding in here,” Rufus said, voice still low. “Put up a fight, but couldn’t make it out the window in time.”
With a nod, Sam motioned out of the bathroom. They followed a hallway toward the back of the house; like the floors below, this one creaked, and so Sam kept his steps close to the wall, where he was least likely to put stress on the protesting boards and