Monkey on a Chain by Harlen Campbell Page B

asleep. She slept like a kitten, limp and sprawled over the bed. A lot limper than I was, anyway.
    I put on a pot of coffee and showered, then stepped outdoors for a tour of the land. There was nothing obvious to see in the parking area. I walked around the house, keeping my eyes on the ground. Someone else had taken the same tour within the past day or two. There were footprints leading from the parking area to the stairs that came down off the deck behind the house.
    I ran quickly back to the front and into the bedroom. April smiled up at me and stretched. “Good morning,” she said. I told her to get up and get dressed, and to do it quickly. Then I checked the door from the deck more closely than I had been able to in the dark the night before. It was scratched around the lock, but there was no indication that anyone had entered. The house was all right.
    April padded into the kitchen while I was pouring coffee. I handed her a cup and surprised myself by telling her what I’d found. Normally I don’t like to tell people a thing until I know what to tell them to do about it. But she was different. Or I was. I wasn’t sure which.
    She put her feet on a free stool and asked, “No one’s here now?”
    “No, but we can’t count on that for long.”
    “Maybe it was a prowler.”
    “We don’t get prowlers out here. I may be the only person on the road who bothers to lock a door.”
    She nodded. “You think it was Roy,” she said flatly.
    “I don’t know who it was. But it wasn’t a friend.”
    “Are you scared?”
    “Aren’t you?” Her attitude didn’t make sense.
    “Not as long as you’re here. You’ll take care of me.”
    “If I can,” I said grimly. “But we have to leave. The trouble followed us. Somehow.”
    She stared at me over her cup. “Doesn’t Roy know where you live? He wouldn’t have had to follow us.”
    I liked that. She was thinking, maybe for the first time since she had walked back to her house and found the place torn apart. “He could have found out easily enough,” I admitted. “Besides, it doesn’t look like this trouble followed us. It preceded us.”
    “So where do we go now?”
    “We find Roy. But first, we’ve got some errands to run.”
    “You’re the errand boy,” she said.
    I grimaced. “Watch your tongue. And hit the shower before you make me mad.”
    “Are you going to watch again?”
    That surprised me. She must have seen me in her room when I searched her luggage the day she arrived. “No,” I told her. “I’ve got better things to do.”
    There was no way I could trust the phone, so my calls would have to wait. While April showered, I burned some of my records, packed up others, and erased a few computer files. I pulled a package from the safe under the house. I threw everything that might spoil in the refrigerator into a box and carried it to the car. I packed another suitcase, this time for an extended trip. By the time April was dressed, I was ready to go.
    We locked the house and took off. I pulled into the driveway next to mine, the one with MURPHY on the mailbox. Jenny came to the door looking surprised to see me, but she took the groceries with a smile when I told her I would be going out of town for a couple of weeks and didn’t want them to spoil. I didn’t have to ask the question I’d really stopped to ask. She asked me if my friends had gotten in touch with me.
    “What friends?”
    “They didn’t leave names,” she said. “They came by yesterday. Two of them. Short and dark.”
    “Mexican?” I asked. She wasn’t sure. They could have been, but the accents weren’t right. She thought they might have been Filipino. They had asked how to find the house and had thanked her when she told them, then driven off down the road.
    She looked at April a couple of times, but I didn’t introduce them and she politely ignored her after that. I looked as puzzled as I could manage. “Well, they didn’t leave a note,” I said. “They’ll