Inherit the Dead

Cultural Preservation and Protection League, Congressional Reform Action Program, the Montauk Medical Charities Foundation. Other groups with more vaguely purposed names. All at that land address, but each with a different “suite” number, so any search engine “exact match” profile of one group would not link them.
    Fourteen organizations plus a coffee shop and Tweed’s official state office.
    All at one address.
    Perry rechecked the Google Street View: a few rooms above a coffee shop.
    As long as he had his phone in his hand, he looked at the e-mail of Tweed trapping Angel’s face in his hands. Tweed mauling her. Angel laughing. The shower photo where her blue eyes were closed.
    He clipped his phone onto his belt, started the car. Hit Seek on the FM radio and landed on the local station’s slogan singing “the place to be since 1963,” back when we murdered presidents and Perry’s parents were teenagers. He was sure this same oldies sound had blared back in that gas station. Not his music. But something about the beat,the rhythm, the dark urgency of what wasn’t being said in that song from yesterdays he’d never known captured Perry’s mood. He drove down Main Street. Traffic was scarce, parking places plentiful, and he just knew he could handle any nor’easter from the climate change monster hiding in the late afternoon’s heavy gray sky.
    Vibrations rumbled his right hip where once he’d holstered his 9 millimeter.
    Cell phone: e-mail or text message . Illegal to check while driving.
    He coasted the car into a parking place in front of a white wooden storefront with a display window painted with ornate script: BETTER DAZE BOOKSHOPPE—NEW & ANTIQUE COLLECTIBLES.
    No cynical laugh came from him. This emporium fit with other shops and boutiques on this Main Street. Some stores were closed behind SEE YOU NEXT SEASON! notices. Other sported signs that read: SALE . The “bookshoppe” where he parked had two coffee table books in the window under a SPECIAL DISCOUNT LIMITED EDITIONS sign: photography collections, one a colorful-jacketed volume called Sand Sea Sky by Tria Giovan, and the other a black-jacketed volume called Out of the Sixties by iconic dead Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper, who’d of course been “a close personal friend” to oh so many of the town’s seasonal residents.
    The cell phone buzz was a pro forma e-mail update from a Manhattan law firm whose client Perry’d helped shelter from a federal corruption probe of Wall Street.
    Nothing about Angel.
    Two quaint coin-operated newspaper kiosks stood outside the “bookshoppe,” a blue kiosk for New York Times traditionalists, a yellow kiosk for a local weekly paper.
    Perry fed the yellow metal kiosk quarters for last week’s local news.
    A bell dinged as an old woman left the bookstore. She seemed toosmall for her red-and-black-checked wool coat. Her bird hands tied the strap of a clear plastic rain cap under her chin as she told no one in particular: “I hate it when the weather gets like this. Feels like a whole lot of lonely.”
    The cold wind blew her down Main Street.
    He drove to the far edge of town.
    The two-story building fit its googled image. Perry circled the block, spotted the pine trees he thought Randy had hidden behind when he took those rear parking lot pictures of a creep and Angel, wanted to check the photos to be sure, but didn’t. Christo didn’t look at any of the photos. Then. He parked on Samadi Street, where he could see the front of the building. Surveilled its door to upstairs and the front windows of the espresso café.
    Ten minutes came and went without anyone entering the expensive coffee shop. The café windows showed him three bored employees and no customers.
    No one used the door to the upstairs rooms where lights shone in the windows.
    He drove his car to the rear lot, walked around to the Main Street front. The doorknob to the upstairs suites turned in his hand and put Perry in a yellow-walled vestibule with brown wooden stairs. A sign tacked on the vestibule wall read: NO HANDICAP ACCESS—SORRY! A label that read NEWSPAPERS was stuck on a wicker basket on the vestibule floor.
    That means the door probably stays unlocked. Anybody could drop something in the wicker basket any time of the day or night. Or into the steel box the size of an airplane carry-on suitcase bolted to the vestibule wall. The box lid had a flap big enough for a coffee table book to be dropped through and a built-in lock