We Know by Gregg Hurwitz Page B

ME, MY NAME is: RAz!, didn't match his apparent gravity. "You are cop?"
    "No, I'm not a cop."
    "You not can lie about, you know."
    "I know."
    "How do you know?"
    "Because I'm a cop."
    Raz eyed me, then smirked. "Listen, bro. Perhaps I get seven-pin key blank from Canada? Perhaps I copy, but it will cost extra, eh? The risk for illegal."
    "I actually don't need it copied. I was hoping you could just tell me what kind of key it is."
    He sighed, indignant, then knocked the key against the countertop. "It is good key, pure brass, not cheap alloy."
    "I just found it. It was my stepfather's. What do you think it goes to?"
    He screwed up his mouth, his mustache arching like a displeased caterpillar. "I have to guess, I say post-office box."
    "Thank you."
    "You want to copy, you come back here."
    I shook his warm, oversize hand and came away with his business card. I said, "I promise, bro."
    Crime-scene tape had been strung across the smashed-through garage door of the run-down little house in Culver City, and bullet holes pockmarked the soft wood of the facade. I'd parked a few blocks away and come over on foot, feeling safely anonymous in the thickening dusk.
    I kept to the far side of the street and walked past the house, keeping my head down and my pace swift. In the footage I'd watched on the hospital room's TV, the reporter had positioned herself by the front walk where the yellow tape had come unmoored and was fluttering provocatively.
    I went around the block and came back, pausing behind an empty van. The parked vehicles appeared to be empty, and I spotted no one lingering or watching the house. I wasn't surprised that the media had decamped after shooting their soft leads last night. But no ongoing surveillance from the cops? That pretty much confirmed that the terrorist story sold to the press was the flimsy cover I'd suspected it to be.
    I remembered a lesson I'd learned in another life on the bleached-white tundra. Liffman's Rules: When you don't know what to do, wait longer.
    It was a fairly busy street, so I walked to the corner gas station, drank a cup of dense coffee, and returned to see if anything had changed. As I turned the corner, a police car appeared, slowed a bit in front of the house, and continued on its way. They were making a cursory show of keeping an eye on the place, at least, but it still hardly felt like a terrorist watch. I wondered who made those decisions and at what level.
    I stuck my hand in my pocket, clenched it around Charlie's key. I'd checked it at the five closest post offices, starting with the one for the house's zip
    code. The key was appropriately sized for the P.O. box locks, giving me a stab of excitement each time it slid home, but it had refused to turn. Even if my locksmith bro had guessed right, there were countless other P.O. Box 229s in Los Angeles, let alone the country.
    To figure out whatever Charlie wanted me to know, I wasn't sure what else I could do. Besides break into a crime scene.
    Back in my hiding spot behind the van, I realized that I was balking because I was scared. This just wasn't the kind of thing a reasonable person did. But nothing about this situation felt reasonable.
    I walked briskly up the sidewalk toward the house, timing my arrival with a break in traffic. I slipped through the crime-scene tape blocking the gaping hole the Jeep had made when it had blasted through the garage door, and I crouched in the silence, listening for shouts or approaching footsteps. I heard nothing but the drip of a faucet in the rust-stained sink, rats moving in the walls, the sound of my quickened breathing. By ducking under that tape, I'd crossed a line. In the dark quiet, the danger seemed suddenly more tangible.
    After ten minutes, or twenty, I rose and poked around the garage, careful to keep back in the shadows. Several jars on a warped shelf held dried industrial glue. A jackhammer tilted in the corner, its red handle gleaming. A few oil-slick wrenches beneath a dusty