Page 47 of It Takes a Thief

The indoor air was stale with the lingering scent of aftershave and gas. Someone had left a stove burner on, making me wonder if he planned on blowing the place up. I had to open the few windows that would. Again, the “toon porn” was displayed tacked to the wall, but all evidence of meth was gone. A bottle of Windex sat near the upturned mirror where the meth had been.

“Here, use these,” I said, handing Galileo a pair of hair coloring gloves.

“Oo,” he said, eyes shining. “Just like on CSI.”

“Exactly. You search the kitchen and living room, I’ll search the bedroom. Whoa.”

“What?” Galileo called from the kitchen. “Wow, he sure likes to use chili powder.”

Moss Empire had not been able to hide his enormous stash of, well, foot porn. Maybe because there was too much of it. Manikin feet were strewn across the bed. Plastic feet made for modeling pumps or sandals were placed on a shelf in poses whose meaning was known only to the user. Moss Empire owned a couple of bendable sex dolls, not very expensive ones with very few moveable parts, just “inanimate” faces with gaping mouths. But that wasn’t the important part for ol’ Moss. He’d been painting toenails, removing nail polish, and painting a new color for who knew how long.

“Eyew, God,” cried Galileo. “Something died in this fridge.”

“Are you looking in the fridge?” I shouted. “Remember, we’re looking for a murder weapon, not some spoiled egg salad.”

“How would you feel if I said there was a Tupperware full of eyeballs?”

I froze. A Tupperware full of eyeballs might do it.

In a few long strides, I was in the kitchen. Unperturbed, Galileo had removed the lid from the plastic container and was gazing into it, eyeball to eyeball. They sure looked like human eyeballs to me, maybe ten of them, and a few were blue. They sat looking about to pulsate in their primordial ooze. I could tell a couple pairs were fairly old. Being cold in the fridge would preserve them only so long.

I whispered, “We need to find out from Ellis if Ashlynne was missing her eyeballs.”

“You’d think he would’ve told us that.”

“You know how people leave out details known only to a couple of people. We didn’t need to know about her eyeballs.”

“It’s like he doesn’t want the girls to see…”

“What he’s doing to their feet. Oh, shit!”

We paused with heads held high like deer, listening. Yes. The roar of bike pipes was getting closer.

“Take the eyeballs!” I cried, smashing the plastic box to Galileo’s chest.

“In what?”

“Close it and put it under your shirt! There’s no fucking time to get in our car. Let’s try to make it into the front yard at least so we can pretend we were never inside. Oh, and take off your gloves!”

As we fumbled our way out the front door, Moss’ pipes were alarmingly close. By the time he rounded the corner of the trailer and saw us, I had barely closed the front door. Galileo was grinning statically ear to ear like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He’d shoved the box under his secondhand pullover sweater, but was still holding the blue plastic gloves.

Moss wouldn’t take his eyes off Galileo. He didn’t wear a helmet, as though he’d left in a big hurry. “Well, well,” he said, as though he’d caught Galileo urinating on the side of his trailer. “To what do I owe this visit?”

I spoke first. Sometimes Galileo had trouble expressing himself succinctly. “Hi, Moss. I was having lunch with Galileo when he got a call there might be a gas leak in your trailer. The person was right. Don’t you smell gas? We just got here. Shall we check inside?”

Moss thumped his boot on the bottom metal step of the little staircase we stood on. We both vibrated with the impact. He had a piece, maybe a.45 pistol, stuck in the waistband of his jeans. “And you brought me a tin of cookies? What’s that under your shirt, Gal?”

“Yes!” I cried. “Only it’s not cookies, it’s some leftover boeuf bourguignon and I’m afraid the wine used has gone a little rancid. Too vinegary, I said to Gal. Don’t give him that. It’s just from the hospital canteen. No good.”

“Well, well,” said Moss, his eyes slitted. “How thoughtful of you. I get so few home cooked meals I wouldn’t mind some vinegary wine.”

“No!” I cried, reaching out to block Moss’ hand from Galileo’s sweater. Stepping halfway in front of the whacky half-Navajo sonofabitch, I said, “It’s really gruesome, Moss. I swear, the cooking at that canteen just gets worse and worse. Last week the canned string beans were so overcooked they turned into soup.”

“We get canned string beans here on the Rez,” said Moss, as though this fact was pertinent to whatever the hell it was he was doing. “I don’t mind. Hand it over, Gal.”

Galileo looked mournfully at me. “I have to do this, Maddy.”

I exhaled deeply. We had no choice. Moss would extract the Tupperware at gunpoint if need be.