Page 12 of The Proving Ground

It took almost forty minutes in traffic to get there, and true to Cisco’s concern, there was no parking to be had anywhere near Breeze Avenue. I finally gave up and parked in a beach lot off Speedway. We legged it five blocks back to Patel’s bungalow, which was in aneighborhood where the houses faced each other across a paved walkway and no vehicles were allowed.

As we walked down Breeze, I got a text from Lorna.

“Shit,” I said when I’d read it.

“What is it?” Cisco said.

“The Masons already filed an appeal and Ruhlin wants to hear arguments at three this afternoon on their request for a stay.”

“So we can’t talk to Patel?”

“Technically, no. But I’d turned my phone off and didn’t get the text from Lorna.”

I did just that as we approached 25 Breeze.

The house was behind a line of unkempt jasmine bushes that spilled over a short perimeter fence. Past an unlocked half gate were the steps of a small bungalow with a full covered porch. The wood decking, long exposed to sea air, creaked and sagged under our combined weight of four hundred–plus pounds. Before we even knocked on the door, Cisco made an eerie observation.

“Somebody’s dead.”

“What?”

“You smell that?”

“Yeah, that’s the jasmine.”

“That ain’t jasmine, Mick. We open this door and you’ll get it.”

He looked over at the porch’s furnishings. There was a cushioned couch, two chairs, and a low table. It was set up like an outdoor living room. There were decorative pillows on the couch, and Cisco grabbed two of them and tossed one to me.

“Use that.”

“For what?”

“The smell.”

He approached the front door. There was a glass inset in theupper half. He cupped his hands over his eyes and leaned toward the glass, looking past the reflection of outside light. It was dark inside.

“There’s a note,” he said. “On the floor.”

I stepped up next to him and looked through the glass. There was a loose piece of paper on the floor, waiting for whoever entered.

“Can you make out what it says?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Cisco said. “Says ‘rear bedroom.’ It came from a printer.”

“That’s it? Just ‘rear bedroom’?”

“That’s it.”

I knocked on the glass.

“Nobody’s going to answer, Mick,” Cisco said.

He seemed sure. I knocked again anyway. Cisco didn’t wait for a response. He tried the door handle, a brass loop with a thumb lever below a dead bolt. It was unlocked, and he pushed the door open. It swept the note on the entry rug to the side.

Then the odor hit us fully. I was immediately revolted by the smell of death. I almost gagged. In unison, we held our pillows up to our mouths and noses.

“Jesus,” I said.