a deep breath. “Can we go up? Do you have a key?”
“I know the landlord.”
We walked onto the wooden porch, and I rang James’s doorbell. He answered. I told him what we wanted.
James said, “The cops told me not to let anyone up there.”
“We have to feed the cat.”
“There’s no cat. The police said—”
I pulled sixty bucks of the two hundred I’d taken from the stack of five thousand. Gave it to James. It was real easy to throw around.
“You’re not going to let the cat starve, are you?”
He unlocked the door and let us in. We had to duck under crime-scene tape.
Climbing the stairs, I got the same smell of lemon as the last time I was there, just a bit stronger. Tracy pushed the door open.
“I’m going to check the kitchen. I want to make sure he was eating right.” The words were laced with sarcasm, and I had the feeling she really wanted to look for bottles.
I was confident she wouldn’t find any.
I decided to make a sweep of the apartment. I started with the bathroom, which was crowded, small, claustrophobic. The color, a deep brown, made the walls seem closer than they actually were. There was a sink, a toilet against one wall, with about three feet between the end of the fixtures and the wall. The opposite wall held a radiator and a tall closet. A walk-in shower took up the wall opposite the door. I pushed the door closed and relieved myself.
Next, I washed my hands and checked the medicine cabinet. Nothing unusual: two bottles of Sudafed, a bottle of Advil, toothpaste, nail clipper, shaving cream, and a razor. Crouching, I checked behind the toilet and the sink. Nothing but floor tiles. I pulled open the shower and found a leaky faucet and a wet floor. Soap and shampoo rested on a shelf. Finally, I turned and opened the closet. What I saw made me catch my breath, though I wasn’t sure why.
The bottom shelf of the closet had a stack of bath towels. The shelf above it was filled with packages of lithium batteries, fifteen, twenty, maybe more. Very odd to be stored in a bathroom closet. On the shelf above that were about twenty bottles of Sudafed. Something started tickling the back of my brain, something from my days on the police force. Something I knew, something that if I wasn’t out of practice would have registered with me immediately.
I closed the closet door and found Tracy waiting in the living room.
“Did you go through all the cabinets?” I asked. “Yeah.”
“Did you see anything unusual?”
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing unusual?”
Tracy paused, as if thinking about it.
“He has a lot of matches. But I think that’s to start the oven.”
“Show me.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked, leading me into the kitchen.
“I’m not sure.” It wasn’t clear, but unless Gerry collected the items—which would be odd—something wasn’t right.
I checked the oven in the kitchen and saw it was autostart. No matches needed. Tracy, meanwhile, found a closet under the sink. It was filled with red-and-blue boxes of matches, the wooden kind with the sulfur tip. Next to it were two boxes of coffee filters. My brain was cramping. I was missing something, some connection. Sudafed, sulfur matches, and lithium batteries.
“What’s wrong?” Tracy asked. “Why does he have all these matches?”
I took a deep breath. Slowly it started to come together in my brain. I just had to talk it through.
“When I was on the police force, I was a narcotics cop. We used to go to workshops, where they’d teach us different ways to make different drugs. That way when we went to take someone down, a dealer, someone trying to make shit out of their bathtub, we knew what to look for.”
“What does that have to do with matches?”
“Sulfur, pseudoephedrine, and lithium. Each ingredient is tracked by the DEA, you can’t buy it in large portions. You do that, the DEA will be at your door in no time. But you can find sulfur in matches, lithium in batteries, and pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in Sudafed. I found Sudafed and a ton of batteries in the bathroom closet. Plenty of matches here.”
Tracy took a step back, covered her mouth. “These are the ingredients of crystal meth.”
Tracy’s face turned pale. She pushed past me and slammed the door to the bathroom. I could hear her crying, even as I tried not to listen. Deciding to give her privacy, I took the stairs out to the street. The air was cool and the faint breeze had picked up into a stiff wind. Heavy clouds hung overhead.
***
The clouds had opened and rain poured, my windshield wipers fighting to keep up. Traffic on Route 18 had slowed to a crawl, and we hit all the lights red. Ahead of us, a trailer truck kicked up puddles of water, which splattered over the windshield. The storm had hit quickly, soaking the asphalt and shocking the rush-hour drivers.
Except for the rain tapping on the roof, the ride so far was silent, Tracy looking out the passenger window, me squinting to watch for brake lights. My Honda Prelude didn’t handle too well in the rain, and I didn’t want to push it. Questions about Gerry were just starting to come to the forefront of my mind, but I had to push them aside in order to focus on the road. It was slick and the first time I stepped on the brakes, I felt them lock and I had to struggle to control the car.
“Do you mind if I put on the radio?” Tracy asked.
“Go for it,” I said, swinging into the left lane. Passing the trailer would make it easier to see, I hoped.
Tracy spun the dial on the radio and came across a hip-hop tune. She whispered the lyrics to herself as she turned back toward the passenger window.
I passed the trailer, pulled back into the right lane, and said, “You okay?”
“Are you sure about what you saw in there?”
I nodded. “We found meth labs all the time on the force.”
“You know, when I was a kid, Gerry was the guy who gave me the drug talk. Not my dad, not my mom, but Uncle Gerry.”
“What did he tell you?”
“You know, the usual stuff you tell a kid. The stuff that goes through your head the first time you smoke a joint in college. You’ll get hooked, no one in their right mind does the stuff. It’ll kill you. Your future will be screwed. The scary shit.”
“Why did Gerry give you the talk?”
“My parents were always working. My mom was a teacher, my dad was in business. After school was over, when my mom was still working remedial or driving home, Gerry was still around before he went to act. Steve came home from first grade and was talking about some kid
