son of a bitch,” Joss muttered suddenly. Taking two steps to a cabinet on the wall, she yanked out her purse. “Give me your car keys.”
“Where are you going?” Gwen demanded, rising.
“To find Jerry.”
“I DON’T THINK THIS IS A GOOD idea.”
“It’s your chance to live on the edge,” Joss snapped, driving so quickly that Gwen’s silver Camry bottomed out at the base of the hill.
Gwen winced. “So how do you know where he lives?”
“We went out to see a band while you were gone. He invited me back for a drink.”
Gwen looked at her in horror. “You didn’t…”
“Of course not,” Joss told her impatiently, following the streets into the Mission district. “I saw his building and thought I could probably live without seeing the inside.”
Gwen nodded. “I thought you were sure he didn’t do it. So why are you flying off the handle?”
“I want to find out.” Joss scanned the street for an opening and started to whip into a space to park.
“Why don’t you get out and let me do it?” Gwen couldn’t bear Joss’s Braille-style approach to parallel parking. Still, even with her experience, it took several tries to get the car in place. “Okay, it’s probably smart to see if he’s around,” she said aloud as she got out of the car. “If there’s a reasonable explanation, maybe we’ll find it out and then we’ll know to look somewhere else.” Where else, she had no idea, but she knew in her gut that it came down to tracking the stamps stolen from the store inventory.
They stood on cracked sidewalk looking up at a sagging Victorian that had seen better days. “He might have been a snappy dresser, but he sure lived in a pit,” Gwen commented, studying the peeling gray paint on the shingled building.
“Now you know why I decided not to go in.”
It was a residence hotel, the kind of place that catered to the transient trade. Gwen’s stomach began to gnaw on itself. She’d never bothered to check to see how long he’d been living at the address he’d given. Then again, at a place like this, twenty dollars to the front desk clerk would pretty much get the person to say whatever he wanted.
And, with luck, twenty dollars would get them into his room.
It took forty. “Why do you want him?” An unsmiling dark-eyed woman, her hair skinned back from her face, stared at them from behind the desk.
“He’s got something of ours,” Gwen told her.
“Yeah, well, he’s got something of ours, too,” the woman said sourly. “He skipped on the rent.” She studied the folded twenties Gwen had slipped her and the line between her brows lessened. Abruptly she jerked a thumb at the hall. “I’m cleaning out his room right now. Wait for me at the top of the stairs.”
The dim stairwell held the musty smell of a building that had seen too many anonymous people pass through. The paper on the walls might have been flocked forty or fifty years before. Now it was dingy and scarred. At the end of the hall a parallelogram of light from an open door slanted across a cleaning cart sitting on the bare pine floorboards.
Gwen glanced at Joss. Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind them. “Over here,” the woman said briskly, walking past them toward the open door.
It was less grim than the hallway only because of the weak late-afternoon sunlight that streamed in through the single window onto the dirty beige carpet. What little of it that wasn’t covered by the bed and bureau and uncomfortable-looking chair that constituted the main furnishings, anyway.
“I ask him for his rent and he says tomorrow.” The woman stood nearby. “Always ‘tomorrow’ with him.”
Empty drawers gaped open in the scarred bureau. No clothes hung on the open steel rack in the corner that served as a closet. Gwen drifted to the window. She itched to pull out the drawers, look underneath them and on the ends for hidden envelopes, to check under the mattress, but she didn’t think the forty dollars would get her that far. Instead she poked her head into the tiny bathroom.
“You have a lot of business?” Joss asked, squinting into the cloudy square of mirror fastened to the wall.
The woman shrugged. “Hey, I’m just the desk clerk. Trust me, if I owned this dump, it would look a lot nicer.”
“No idea where he went?” Gwen asked, walking over to stare out the window across to the neighboring building.
“Nope. We don’t exactly get a lot of forwarding addresses around here.” The woman dragged a vacuum cleaner in from the cleaning cart.
“Mind if I look in this?” Gwen asked, gesturing at the trash can.
“As long as you’ve had your shots.” She jerked her head toward it. “A real pig, this guy. Nothing in the trash can if it could go on the floor.”
Gwen poked gingerly through the refuse. Cigarette cartons, an empty toothbrush wrapper, a screwed-up McDonald’s bag that still held the scent of stale grease. Then her eyes widened. In the bottom of the bin were scraps of cardboard, the thin type that came on the back of a pad of paper.
The type that could be used to make a stiff pocket for a stamp.
She pulled some out of the waste bin, staring at Joss. In her eyes Gwen saw knowledge and acceptance.
And a bright flare of anger.
The woman picked up the bin. “Okay, you guys had your chance to look around. I got to get back to work.”
Gwen nodded slowly. “So do we,” she said and turned toward the door. Her foot scuffed against something. An open matchbook. Clement Street Liquors, it said—the business next door to the stamp shop. She leaned down to pick it up.
And glimpsed writing on the inside. Excitement pumped through her. Maybe it was nothing but maybe, just maybe…
“What’s that?” the woman asked.
“Matches.” Gwen held them up. “I could use some. All right with you?”
“Sure, whatever.”
“Thanks for letting us look around,” Gwen told her, already walking out. She didn’t say a word to Joss about it until they were outside, waited in fact until they were in the car. Hope formed a lump in her throat.
“Jerry buys his cigarettes at Clement Street Liquors,” Joss told her.
“Bought. Jerry’s long gone.”
“The question is where?”
Gwen opened up the matchbook and showed Joss the writing. “Maybe Rennie will know.” It was just a name and a phone number, but maybe it would lead them to a guy who’d know where to find Jerry. She dialed the number on her cell phone, her heart thudding.
“Thank you for calling the Versailles Resort and Casino,
