Chapter 39

The kitchen proved unhelpful – unless you consider finding that Richard Charnock wasn't much of a cook or dishwasher helpful. I moved to the living room, and found little there. The couple of magazines stuck under the sofa cushions were disgusting, but probably a lot of houses would have the same sort of stuff in 'em. There was a bathroom in the hall, and here things got more interesting. The medicine cabinet showed only the usual male paraphernalia – shaving cream, razors, deodorant, that sort of thing – but when I pulled the lid off the toilet tank I found a 9mm automatic pistol. Charnock had wrapped it in several layers of plastic, and there wasn't any way I could unwrap it and wrap it back up without taking more time than I cared to spend in the effort to make it look untouched. I couldn't, therefore, determine the make or magazine capacity, and I was in fact guessing at the caliber, but I've been shooting a 9mm for years, and was pretty confident of my guess.

It isn't, of course, illegal to own a pistol, providing you register it. I thought about how that related to the actual language of the second amendment as I continued my search, but I wasn't there to be philosophical and my musings were at the back of my mind, while in the front of my mind I considered that while the gun might be legal, a hidden gun was less likely to be so than one which the owner stores openly.

There was nothing else in the bathroom, so I moved down the hall. It was a two bedroom house, and looking in the two rooms I saw that one appeared to be serving the same purpose as an attic – it was full of jumbled stuff that I couldn't categorize at a glance. I tackled the bedroom he slept in first.

Under the mattress I found more magazines – and these weren't just disgusting, they were nasty. It appeared that Charnock liked women in chains, or women under the lash ... bondage stuff. I know more about that kind of thing than I want to, due to the fact that I've been working with criminals and other people on the bottom side of society for 20 years or so. Pornography is, in and of itself, demeaning to women – it turns them into objects, into things, just as slavery turned blacks into things that their masters could buy and sell like cattle or cane bottom chairs. But when the porn treats the women involved like animals, putting them in leashes and employing whips – however fake it might be – it's beyond demeaning. Anyone who says that porn is a victimless crime has never been a woman in front of the camera.

Also under the bed I found some poorly-written and badly-printed pamphlets. They were anti-abortion, which was fine in and of itself, but they also advocated violence against abortionists, which wasn't. You don't make murder right by murdering the murderers. That just turns you into a murderer yourself. Of course fanatics and sociopaths don't employ reason in their decision-making; about all the reasoning they understand is the firm hand of the law. With them, it is true that – as Mao said – power comes from the barrel of a gun. Do away with laws, and the police, and the penal system, and such people would turn the rest of us into cowering victims ... either that or we'd have to become a universally armed society in order to keep the monsters from taking over.

The closet had a box full of similar pamphlets, and some books – showing equal evidence of authors and editors who weren't qualified to write or proofread a want ad – along the same lines. There were clothes as well – a couple of sets of Wal-Mart uniform shirts and pants, some jeans and khaki work shirts, and a couple of pairs of running shoes. Otherwise there was nothing remarkable there, though what I'd seen so far had me convinced that Charnock was almost certainly the one making the threats – and if he wasn't, he surely had to be connected with whoever it was. Coincidences happen, but this was too big a coincidence to actually be one.

I looked at my watch before tackling the junk bedroom. I had time, but I didn't know how thoroughly I'd be able to toss that room. It's much easier to search a neat room than a messy one, because you can proceed methodically, taking one thing at a time and putting it back where you got it when you're done.

I had to have some sort of system, so I started at the left and began working around. That comes naturally to me, since I'm extremely left-handed. I can barely write with my right hand, and the one time I tried to shoot right-handed I hit with five rounds out of 15 – the rest missed the target entirely.

What I found was mostly junk – old clothes; torn up magazines; boxes of papers which, as much as I wanted to, I didn't have time to search carefully; a couple of broken down chairs; and a big surprise – an old case of old glass Coke bottles. I hadn't seen anything like that since I was a kid.

I was about halfway around the room, and approaching my self-imposed deadline of 3 PM, when I hit pay dirt. Underneath a rotting canvas tarp that smelled like mildew, I found a plastic gallon bucket with a film of red paint cracked across the bottom. Next to it was an old style military field jacket – my brother Memphis wears one, with his old Air Force insignia still on it – that had splatters of red paint on the cuff of the right sleeve. When I lifted the field jacket I found a pair of work gloves, the right one also with spatters of red paint on it. I had found my paint thrower, no question.

I looked at my watch, and checked how much of the room I had left. There was no way on earth I could finish the room before I had to leave. Charnock wouldn't be off till four, according to what he'd told me, but I wasn't going to hang around till then. He might finish his work early. He might have to go home sick – which had been a risk from the moment I set foot on his property. He might take a short lunch, and get off early. I intended to be well out of the neighborhood before he ever left his job.

I sighed. I wanted to push it, but you don't get to be my age in my business without learning that you do not take unnecessary risks. When you make a traffic stop, you make sure you can get to your weapon in a flash if someone in the car has a gun. When you respond to a domestic disturbance, you keep your hands free until and unless you're certain that it's safe to remove your hat. When you're searching someone, you do a good job of it – even if it means having to touch someone in places that embarrass both of you – so that you don't miss something that could come back and bite you. And when you're tossing someone's house, you get out in plenty of time to keep the guy who lives there from knowing you were there.