wall before finding a light and switching it on. It was barely bright enough to illuminate the staircase. “Just spiders,” he concluded.
Sam hooked a finger in one of Rufus’s belt loops, hoisting him up an inch with an improvised wedgie, and said, “This is one of those times when I’m going to gently remind you that I prefer you stay behind me until you have your own gun.”
Rufus squirmed out of Sam’s hold and tugged at his underwear through his jeans. “That was not gentle.”
Raising an eyebrow, Sam slipped past him and started down the stairs, adding quietly over his shoulder, “Later, I’ll kiss it and make it better.”
The stairs were wood, open on both sides, with a single wobbly rail that probably was supposed to offer some kind of support. Sam took his hand off it after the second step; it was loose in the wall, and the tremors in his hand made the handrail rattle.
The basement was dark and smelled like cold cement; only as Sam’s eyes adjusted could he make out the papered-over windows. He took out his phone, turned on the flashlight, and swept the light in an arc.
The basement was ‘finished’ in that half-hearted way of so many older homes: exposed support beams spray painted black, a few metal columns, the cement floor painted and sealed, and from what Sam could see, the sealant yellowed with age. No effort had been made to divide up the space into rooms. He spotted a washer-and-dryer combo straight out of the ’70s, one of the big plastic water barrels people used to collect rain, and a behemoth of an oil furnace. The weak glow from the flashlight didn’t reach all the way across the basement, so Sam’s first move was to walk the perimeter again, playing the light in wide arcs, making sure he got an initial look at every inch of the room.
By the time he got back to the stairs, Rufus had his head in the washing machine, his bony butt in the air. Sam sighed and moved to check the furnace. It wasn’t like a wood-burning stove, though, so he didn’t find any doors that opened where someone might have burned incriminating evidence. Unfortunately. He moved back over to join Rufus and saw that the redhead was picking through the plastic barrel.
“Shit,” Sam said, “what reeks? That smells like gasoline.”
Pinching cloth between two fingers, Rufus held something up from the barrel.
“A blanket?” Sam said.
Rufus nodded and dropped it back in before warily plucking at the rest of the contents. “Bedding. Old sheets, nasty blankets.” He wiped his hand on his jeans. “Guess they planned on burning it all.”
“In a plastic barrel?”
Rufus shrugged and rubbed his jaw. “Human traffickers are monsters—no one said anything about being evil geniuses.”
“Jesus Christ. We’re dealing with morons. All we have to do is keep following them, and the dumbfucks will back themselves into a corner. They’re probably too stupid to have any sort of exit strategy.”
The sound of the front door opening ran through the house, and steps moved above them. At the same time, Sam and Rufus both looked at the stairs, which were the only way out of the basement, and then at each other.
“You were saying?” Rufus said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rufus crept toward the rickety staircase and looked up at the partially open door. He listened to the sounds overhead—steps, weight, and tread distinctly two individuals—cautiously moving from the home’s entrance to the empty room on the left. Rufus pictured the strangers making a circuit like he and Sam had done, poking their heads into what might have been a sitting room and eventually ending their search in the maybe-dining room with the… French doors.
Rufus climbed the rickety steps without a word, quieter than Sam had managed on the descent. In the threshold he poked his head into the kitchen, confirmed it was still empty, and turned to Sam, who was starting to come up behind him. Rufus held his hand out, motioned for Sam to stop, then vanished into the kitchen and around the corner. Hugging the wall, Rufus drew closer to the doors he’d previously smacked into after flailing around with the spider. He grabbed the handle to one of the doors and not-so-gently slammed it shut, the glass rattling in the frame and bouncing off the empty walls and wood floor.
Rufus fled to the kitchen as the intruders returned to the home’s foyer and continued onward to inspect the commotion in the dining room. Sam stepped