Baltimore 03 - Did You Miss Me?

again.
    But permanently. She’d taken her own life. That had been eight years ago and it still made Mitch’s chest so damn tight . . .
    Mitch drew a breath, then another, until he could breathe normally once again.
    Time had passed. His grief had dimmed and he’d gone on, taking care of Cole.
    But Mitch had made some mistakes. Some worse than others. For those he’d paid. Dearly. And when things had become more than he could bear, he’d followed in his mother’s footsteps. He’d brought Cole back here. I came home .
    There’d been changes, of course. The property had been whittled away over the years, Aunt Betty having sold it to pay her bills, but they were still surrounded by five acres. Lots of privacy.
    After sharing a mega-tent in Iraq with forty guys for most of his army deployment, Mitch had developed a real appreciation for privacy. Later, after sharing a six-by-eight for three years with another convicted drug dealer, Mitch had come to crave it.
    Betty had understood that, which was why she’d left the old house solely to Mitch in her will. Not to share with his brothers Mutt or Cole. Just to me . Mine .
    Pulling the van into his garage alongside his old Jeep, he shut off the engine. He got out of the van and stretched his neck, grimacing. He wasn’t even thirty yet – too young to feel this damn old .
    But revenge had a revitalizing side-effect. His back might be killing him and his neck might be stiff, but his heart was beating fast and strong, his mind still crystal clear. A painkiller chased by a quick nap would take care of the aches.
    But first, he had a job to do. He pulled at the shelves on the far wall of his garage, smiling when the entire unit swung out effortlessly. Perfectly balanced, the false wall could still be moved with the strength in his pinkie, almost sixty years after it was built.
    Mitch’s great-grandfather Myron Douglas had been one hell of an artisan.
    This garage was a later addition to the property, built by his great-grandfather in the 1950s. Back when Aunt Betty and her friends were taught to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear bomb. And back when a man built a bomb shelter for his family, but didn’t want the neighbors to know. Only so much room down there. So much air.
    So his great-grandfather had built the shelter, then slapped a garage on top of it, hid the doorway behind the swinging bookshelf, and swore his daughters to silence.
    Betty had told Mitch about the shelter and given him the entry combinations on his sixteenth birthday. It had been her gift to him, indicating he was now man of the house.
    His middle brother Mutt knew nothing about the shelter and that always made Mitch feel good. Cole knew about the place, but Mitch didn’t worry about his brother coming down here. Cole’s first and last visit to the shelter had been a horrific one. Even if his little brother did remember the combination, he wasn’t coming down here anytime soon.
    Mitch twisted the dial on the lock that secured the latch and climbed into the access tube, hopped off the bottom of the ladder and went in. About eight by eight, it contained a desk and chair and three vintage army cots circa 1957. Shelves covered three of the walls, laden with canned goods. Two of the shelves were hinged, replicas of the one in the garage. Both hid doors that led to tunnels.
    One escaped to the outside, ending fifty yards from the house. The other tunnel led to the existing basement, specifically to a room that had been originally used for storage when the house was built. His great-grandfather had hidden the basement access by yet another swinging bookshelf.
    If an idea worked, his great-granddad had run with it. Not a bad approach, all in all.
    The shelter was how Betty had left it, which was how Mitch’s mother had left it.
    Minus the blood and brains, of course . Mitch had done the cleanup and it had not been pleasant. He remembered it every time he came down here. Given the room wasn’t much bigger than his prison cell had been, that wasn’t all that often. But each time his hate was renewed.
    His mother had killed herself in this room. He still had the gun she used, eventually returned by the police. He’d hidden it where his younger brother couldn’t find it. Cole had enough bad memories of that time, because, at only five years old, Cole had found her.
    Mitch had been twenty-one, stationed in Iraq. It had taken him a week to get home for her funeral. A week that the mess