Blood and Bone by Austin Camacho Page B

margin was razor thin. Hannibal shared his concern, since he helped finance the business.
    But Hannibal felt he knew those young men playing cops and robbers down the street. They had noreason to attack this car, or any other foreign intruder, as long as it did nothing to disturb them.
    â€œWell, here we are again,” Ray said, flicking his cigarette out the window. “The place has been condemned for almost seventeen years. Nobody’s been here since that long, including Bobby, or Jake, or whatever he called himself. Everybody says he just disappeared.”
    Hannibal popped his door open. “I told you, nobody vanishes without a trace. You never know what might give you a clue where somebody is. A matchbook, piece of letterhead paper, even an envelope with a return address. Odds are nobody’s cleaned up in there.”
    Hannibal handed Ray one of the long handled flashlights he picked up on their way and headed for the house. Ornate sandstone banisters climbed up either side of the wide steps leading into Jacob Mortimer’s old apartment building. Hannibal thought the building must have been beautiful when it was new, the kind of classy brownstone home that upper class genteel urbanites lived in half a century ago. Long before some enterprising soul figured out there was money to be made by housing a dozen families in what was once a single family dwelling.
    The door was nailed shut, but one hard yank wrenched it open. Nails squealed as they pulled loose, and the smell of the tomb belched out at them. Ray stared into the shadows dubiously.
    â€œYou know, Chico, what Doctor Cummings said about Jake having another daughter that could make this whole thing pointless.”
    â€œMaybe,” Hannibal said stepping into the apartment house. “But I don’t trust that kind of coincidence. The missing heir routine is one of the oldest and mostpopular scams, because families in search of long lost relatives want to believe. They don’t question things closely.”
    â€œBut Jacob Mortimer was cut out of his father’s will,” Ray said, while looking through the kitchen.
    â€œHe was,” Hannibal said, sweeping bits of paper and dirt from under a ragged couch, “but do you really think a previously unknown granddaughter would be?”
    Hannibal and Ray looked under every piece of worn furniture, and opened every drawer and cabinet. They searched the crumbling wallpaper for written notes. Hannibal looked inside the toilet tank and the medicine cabinet. With Ray’s help, he dragged the moldy bedroom rug aside.
    â€œLook at that stain,” Ray said, shining his light on a shapeless blotch on the linoleum. “It could be blood, eh?”
    â€œSure,” Hannibal said, “or Kool-aid. I don’t think there’s anything here, Pizo. I’m going to check downstairs.”
    â€œDownstairs? What the hell for?”
    â€œBecause,” Hannibal said on his way, “people hide things in the cellar.”
    Narrow, street level windows actually made the cellar brighter than the rooms upstairs with their boarded up windows. The sound of scurrying rats made Hannibal move slowly. They would not attack, he knew, but he would hate to surprise one. The space had cement walls and a dirt floor, with an ancient boiler in one corner which was converted from coal to oil in some distant past. Stacks of boxes occupied him for a few minutes, until he realized he was alone.
    â€œRay?”
    â€œRight here, Hannibal. Top of the stairs.”
    Hannibal smiled and continued his search. The boxes in the far corner turned out to be empty. The air was so still he could smell cardboard rotting. When he moved the last box he saw the dirt was not as smooth as elsewhere in the cellar. Something had been buried here. Irrational hope swelled his heart. If he left in a great hurry, Bobby Newton might have left something of real value here, planning to return later.
    â€œRay, I think