Death Notes

little kid she’d spawned and left down at Malone Junk - stupid and soulless. I waited the better part of a minute for her to respond. But she nodded off instead.
    I touched the gun I’d stuffed into my jacket earlier, just to make sure it was still there. Then I went to the roll-top desk in the corner and rummaged through it.
    Nothing more exciting than PG&E bills, a stack of receipts from Frederick’s of Hollywood and K-Mart, loan papers on the house, and a pair of checkbooks. The balance on one showed $103.02. The other one was the one she’d emptied to pay Toby for the alarm.
    I went through all the drawers and found nothing significant. In the meantime, Sharon had slumped down on the couch and was snoring. It seemed safe to leave her and nose around upstairs.
    There were two bedrooms - his and hers - connected by a bathroom. Again, nothing.
    On my way back down, in the hall upstairs, I noticed a tall Oriental chest against the wall. When I opened the top drawer, I had to smile. Persistence pays. Always.
    I was looking at important papers: tax returns, check stubs, marriage certificates, 1099s, Sharon’s W-2s from before Sharon and Match married. And a copy of a mortgage insurance policy that covered the debt on their house. If anything happened to Match, the company would pay off the mortgage.
    Granted, this was San Francisco, where property values had gone through the roof, but I couldn’t imagine somebody would kill just to cancel a mortgage. Even no-class Sharon.
    I didn’t find an insurance policy on the sax, but I dug deeper in the next drawer down, under some yellowed papers, and found a thick bundle wrapped in brown paper and fastened with a rubber band. I knew what it was before I unwrapped it.
    There wasn’t time to count it all but there had to be at least two hundred hundred-dollar bills. Twenty thousand dollars. Great. Why did Match borrow it if he wasn’t going to spend it?
    I put the money back in the envelope, fastened the rubber band around it, stuffed everything back just the way I’d found it, and closed the drawer.
    When I got back down to the living room, I tried to rouse Sharon, but she was slouched on the sofa like a slab of meat loaf, head lolled to one side, snoring as loud as a freight train.
    I dumped the empty gun onto the table in front of her and didn’t even bother to tiptoe on my way out.
     

44
     
    I nsult to injury. That’s all I could think when I got home and found my apartment tossed. Whoever it was hadn’t even bothered to try to pick the lock this time. He’d just pried the door open with a crowbar and left it ajar.
    I don’t own much, but the little bit of junk that is mine was scattered all over the floor - drawers emptied and boxes turned upside down. Even my box of stale Cheerios had been gutted and sprinkled across the room. The little round Os crunched under my feet when I walked in.
    Standing in the center of the room, surveying the damage, I couldn’t figure what I’d done to deserve such a rotten day.
    Nothing I owned was worth stealing. The answering machine and the stereo were the only things anybody could possibly consider top-end consumer goods. They hadn’t even been touched.
    I checked the closet. Everything that had been on hangers was now in a pile on the floor, buried under the crushed boxes of office supplies I kept on the top shelf.
    The minute I flipped the switch on in the bathroom, I regretted it. There was blood everywhere. The floor and the walls were smeared with it. My towels, bloodied, were strewn across the floor and the entire contents of my medicine cabinet was dumped in the toilet.
    Abby’s article from The Explorer lay on the floor, a thick blood-red X slashed across its face. I took it all in with one sweeping glance, then caught the reflection of something in the bathroom mirror.
    I stepped gingerly into the bathroom, avoiding the stains on the floor, to get a better look.
    The shower curtain was pulled back and there, scrawled in blood across the shiny white tiles, was a message, the reason behind the mess:
     
    S T O P O R T H I S W I L L B E Y O U
     
    A bloody arrow sketched on the tile pointed toward what had caught my eye in the first place. Dangling by a string from the shower spout was a dead rat, disemboweled, sad, nasty. My kitchen paring knife stuck out from his tiny belly. His lips, drawn back over narrow yellow fangs in a silent death scream, were bloodless and white. Something hung by a red thread from the