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no longer had the energy to do anything else. It had been a long
day and I needed to rest soon. I was rarely conscious for more than a few hours
at a time, and this morning’s activity had all but wiped me out. Looking for
clues was going to have to wait for a bit.
    Back
home I thought about telling poor Todd to wait for me again, but I decided I
could drive myself around once I was ready to go. I had a few things I wanted
to do at the house beforehand, though.
    The
briefcase Alan Davies had given me was stashed exactly where I’d left it. I
opened it and dumped the contents out onto the bed. The ten thousand dollars
turned out to be one stack of hundred-dollar bills bound together with a rubber
band. There was no reason to have put it in a briefcase in the first place. A
thick envelope would have worked just as well. Maybe Davies just didn’t like
this briefcase and had wanted to get rid of it.
    The
bills themselves were in good condition, but they were definitely used and had
none of the crispness you saw when someone opened a briefcase full of cash in a
gangster movie. Actually seeing the money was remarkably anticlimactic.
Everything looked better on film.
    I
thumbed through the stack of bills. Impressive looking or not, it was more
money than I’d seen in a very long time. And I’d earned it just by listening to
a guy talk and drinking his alcohol. It was nice work, if you could get it.
    Then
there was the matter of the twenty thousand dollars he wanted to pay me to find
his family. I’d been right when I’d told Dan the money was excessive. If he
hadn’t wanted to hire a private investigator that was his prerogative, but he
probably could have hired someone to do this job for a few hundred dollars. I’d
have done it for a few thousand, to be honest. I’d been gouging him earlier
more to amuse myself than anything else. And judging from the speed with which
he acquiesced, I probably could have taken him for a lot more.
    What
wasn’t Davies telling me? He had to be holding something back. I still wondered
whether he could be abusing his family. If he was, he’d chosen the wrong person
to send to find them. There wasn’t any amount of money that would make me give
up his wife’s location if she asked me not to. I’d just call Dan and he’d send an
army of police officers to Davies’s estate to tear the place apart. Or maybe
I’d leave the police out of it and pay Davies a visit myself. It would probably
depend a lot on how much I’d had to drink at the time.
    I went
into the kitchen and poured an inch of vodka into a tumbler. If I didn’t do a
certain amount of maintenance, withdrawal was sure to hit me hard. I didn’t
know if I was so far gone that delirium tremens would take hold and I’d
start having hallucinations and seizures, and I had no interest in finding out.
    It was
time to do something about the smell in my living room. I took a large Hefty
bag out of a kitchen cabinet and spent twenty minutes picking up old bottles
and moldy garbage. When the bag was full I took it outside to the dumpster. I opened
two of the living room windows to let fresh air in. I didn’t have any kind of air
freshener, but I could pick up a can of something when I went out. Maybe I
could make the place smell like a person actually lived here.
    When the
cleaning was done I poured myself another inch of vodka and took it into my
bedroom. I needed to lie down. I’d promised Dan I would eat today, and I would.
I’d go out and get some food soon. But first I needed a little nap. Then I’d
eat, and get to work, but first…
    The sun
was going down when I woke up. I lay on my bed for a moment, torn between the
need to use the bathroom and the desire not to move. In the end, the bathroom
won out. When I was done I washed my hands and cupped some cold water into my
mouth. How long had it been since I’d actually drank any water? I couldn’t
remember. I’d nearly forgotten what it tasted like.
    The
reflection in my