The hardware store was bright, full, smelling of old wood and rot-like mulch.
Sarah disliked it.
Not for an existential reason, or even a specific reason for why she was there. She just disliked the smell of mildew, sawdust, and dirt that filled the building. It was cloying in an obnoxious way, toeing the line of what she expected burning bodies to smell like, mixed with the smell of three-day-old corpse dirt. She unfortunately knew what the latter did smell like.
Even in the hardware section, away from the carpentry and landscaping areas and surrounded by walls upon walls of heavy forged metal, the smell still reached her. It was distracting, and poorly timed, especially at a moment where she had to be listening intently to Michael discussing the makeup of various door locks.
To say he had invited her there would have been inaccurate, since the lessons weren’t typically social affairs. It was a lesson, obviously, and now that they were no longer investigating Jane or attempting to find out who had attacked her they could resume their usual schedule. Somehow, she found herself even more eager to take in whatever he knew now that some kind of connection had been established. It was ambition, she knew, the knowledge that there really was something there. She had discovered a handhold, and she would leverage it for all she could, driving her fingers into the crack and praying it open. If it required her to learn more about things she might have been skeptical of before, to get herself deeper into the weeds of Ravenville, that made sense. That was where the truth would be, after all.
Michael paused mid-sentence and turned away from the shelf to look at her. “Are you listening?”
“Yeah. I just didn’t bring a notebook.”
“Lock construction is generally simple. If you would need a notebook, then you haven’t been paying attention.”
“No, I have, I’m listening.” She nodded her assent as she spoke. “You stick the lockpick in, push the pins up, and you keep it in place with the turning tool.”
“Correct,” he answered. “There is also the question of the number of pins in the lock, as well as possible security measures. Some pins may be cut in unique ways so that when you attempt to move them into place, you receive a false positive, resulting in a far longer time to pick the lock.”
“Which is bad.”
“It is very bad.” He gestured to a padlock sitting on the shelf. “Ideally, you want to get through a lock as quickly as possible. Lockpicking cannot just be slow, but it is incredibly obvious to any witnesses what you are doing. As such, it works out that the faster you can pick a lock, the better a given situation will resolve for you.”
“I did have the impression that speed was good no matter what it was in,” she said with a shrug.
“That impression is correct. Lockpicking especially benefits from this. There are situations where it is more desirable to be slow in your lockpicking, such as when you are attempting to minimize noise or are prioritizing stealth above everything, but those environments are few and far between.”
Sarah hmmed, nodding. “You know, I’ve got a bit of a question.”
He gestured an open hand towards her. “What is it?”
“You said earlier than any lock could be picked. So then what’s the point of having more secure locks than others?”
Michael took a small breath and stretched his back out, letting out a small groan of satisfaction before straightening up. “Locks are deterrents. There is a saying that locks only work to keep out the honest and the opportunists, and it is correct. We went over our earlier lessons of the importance of information, and locks serve to keep information hidden in a physical way. Additionally, regardless of how long a lock takes to pick, it still takes time. Some locks are so complex that they would require specialized tools, which itself will always give away evidence, and even those that are simple will have some sort of delaying factor. No lock is foolproof, but they are not designed to be foolproof. They are designed to be temporary obstacles to the unprepared or the overeager.”
“But what if the lock is just that good and I can’t get out? Like, what if I need to get out of a room locked from the outside?”
Michael’s gaze had a hint of humor in it. “Do you have to unlock the door to open it?”
“Yes?”
“Wrong.” He pointed to the stacked siding further down the aisle. “The architect’s fallacy, that there are only the entrances and exits to a room where doors are placed. There are not. Any window is only glass, and a lock is only in a small part of the door.”
Well, that was a point she hadn’t quite considered before. She could even see the utility. If you needed to be fast in a timeframe that couldn’t even leave space to pick a lock, you could just break a window. Whether or not she was able to kick a door open was an entirely different question, and one that she wasn’t sure she was willing to test soon. But if she had to, she would. Whatever the investigation required.
A sudden turn from Michael made her jolt in surprise, and she only just raised her hands in time to catch the padlock he tossed at her. It was light, she noticed, the metal looking unpolished and thin beneath the plastic case. The band of paint around the top of the lock’s main body was worn away, leaving only a few specks of blue behind. A key joined it inside the packaging, sharing the low quality appearance and roughshod quality of the brand engraving.
Michael lifted an identical lock for her to see. “Let’s go.”
She followed him down the aisle and towards the checkout, handing the lock back over to him. “What are these for?”
“Practice dummies, for you. Lockpicking is a less essential skill, if you wish to remain primarily defensive, but it is still something you are learning and would benefit you. Something to practice one would be very good for you. Not in the sense of learning to pick these specific locks, but in picking them, and then determining why you were successful, so that you can improve at lockpicking in general.”
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Sarah commented as he handed the locks to a bored cashier she recognized from her English class. “For some reason I kind of thought you would be a bad teacher.”
“A reasonable assumption,” he conceded. “I am simply relaying how I taught myself. Lockpicking was easier than some other subjects, as it has a definite technique. Other, less clear-cut subjects are likely to be far more difficult to explain.”
The cashier held out his hand, and Michael withdrew a handful of bills from his wallet to give him. He took them, sliding them into the register’s open drawer, and handed him back the locks with a receipt to go with them. Michael gave a polite nod and “thank you” and walked off, Sarah close behind him.
“I am not going to assign homework for this lesson, that would be stupid, but I do suggest you practice on these locks.” He continued through the sparsely populated parking lot towards where he and Sarah had parked next to each other. “You heard me earlier. It can be a simple exercise for your free time.”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “I thought you would like a demonstration.”
Michael paused mid-step before continuing on as if nothing had happened. “That is a good idea,” he said in the tone of a teacher that had been reminded of an essay he had to collect. “I brought along a set of lockpicks for practice. Acquiring an idea of your skill level would be a good place to begin.”
Sarah nodded, confusion slowly taking over her expression. “You know,” she began, “you’re being a lot more talkative and nicer to me than you usually are.”
“You have proven yourself to be more capable than initially seemed,” he replied simply. “You did good work in the Jane investigation, and I am giving you more benefit of the doubt as a result.”
“Was this some weird thing about proving myself?”
“No, that’s stupid. I’m not going to set up some arbitrary standard for respect. Also, you don’t annoy me as much as most other people.”
“I feel so flattered,” Sarah said with a light smile. Michael tossed a shrug over his shoulder and unlocked his car, opening the door and reaching inside for the glove compartment. She hadn’t really expected him to go for the idea of some sort of competition, really, it had mostly been a joke. It had just sort of seemed like the kind of thing that Michael would go for in this situation.
He emerged from his car with the set of lockpicks, several small and thin pieces of dark metal wrapped in a fabric bundle. Two of the pieces were protruding further than the others, and he held them out towards her. She took them and examined them, trying to understand the purpose. One was a turning tool, and the other a single-pronged pick. Michael removed the lock from the packaging and placed it on his car roof, tossing the plastic away into his backseat.
“You can leave it on the roof or hold it in your hand, but don’t worry about time. I’ll point out issues for you to begin working on.” He stepped aside, and Sarah picked up the lock, inserting the turning tool and holding it down at an angle where the same hand could hold the lock while applying tension to the turning tool. Michael hummed approvingly, and Sarah began to poke the pick into the lock, attempting to move any of the pins around.
“I’m going to be honest, I’m not particularly good at this,” she muttered as she attempted to push the first pin down again. “This is really really tricky.”
“You’re too aggressive about it. If you go slower, you’ll be able to respond to the feedback better.”
“Yeah but I–dammit–I don’t know what feedback I’m getting.”
“Primarily clicking noises, or the pick moving quite a distance and then reaching resistance. There is a tangible weight difference between moving the pick freely and pushing a tumbler.”
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
“Really tiny weight difference then, because I don’t feel shit.”
He sighed. “Give me the pick. I’ll demonstrate.”
“No, wait, I think I have it.” The lock let out a quiet click, and Sarah let out an excited hiss. “Got it. How many are in here again? Five?”
“For this model, yes, five.”
She dropped it onto the car. “This sucks.”
Michael let out an exhale that seemed to sit somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “Why are you being so reticent now?”
“I’m not being reticent, this is just annoying.” An idea struck her, and she whipped around to fully face him with a smile. “Actually, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we do a race?”
Michael raised an eyebrow. Sarah continued hastily. “Just to see how difficult this lock is. It feels pretty bad.”
He reached back into his car for the other lock and tore it out of the packaging, removing a slightly larger turning tool and pick from the bundle and setting it all up in his own hand. “Would you like to retain the head start, or reset?”
“No, no, leave me the head start.” She wasn’t stupid, and would need any advantage. “We’ll actually go and start on my mark, okay? Three, two, one, mark.”
Sarah shut her mouth in focus as she resumed moving the lockpick around, searching for the tumblers inside the lock. The second one was closer to the first, clicking on the first try, but the others began to elude her. Pins she thought were all the way up would fall back down as she missed, her grip on the turning tool would slacken and she would have to re-check the initial pins, and whether or not she was even pushing the pins was hard to tell, her own lack of skill showing itself as she failed to pick out the feedback from heavier loads. The difference between smacking into the top of the lock and moving any of the pins was lost on her.
She risked a glance over to Michael, who was moving through the lock with practiced ease, cycling the pick through positions in algorithmic precision. He was moving slowly, but without as much caution as Sarah suspected he would usually have, and paused for a moment at one spot before the lockpick in his hand seemed to go further up than before and he moved it down to the next pin.
Shit. He had at least one down, and she didn’t know how many more he had, apart from not winning. She tried to get back to it, but the pins still didn’t feel like they were moving, she could barely tell where they were, and while she managed to get another click out of the lock she was sure that Michael had more than three already. She snuck another glance over, and he was alternating between two positions in the lock rapidly, poking the lockpick around as if he was on the final barrier.
He was about to win, and even if it was pointless, she had started the race. It was never cool to lose a game that you started. There had to be some way of cheating the lock. If she could find the pins easily, then that could work, but she didn’t have immediate options or the time to explore more options. She just really wanted to win this game.
Michael had mentioned that you could always just go around a lock. And this particular lock felt cheap, light and thinly walled.
It took Sarah all of a second to pull the pick and turner out of the lock and throw it at the asphalt.
Michael whipped his head around at the motion in time to see her lock pop open from the impact, bouncing off the ground once before rattling to a stop. He looked over to her, and she smiled, snapping and pointing at the lock.
“Guess I won that one.”
He stared at her for a moment, expression blank, before the corners of his eyes relaxed and he finished off opening his lock without looking. “We never said you couldn’t do that,” he commented as his own lock swung open.
“Hey, you said no lock is unpickable. Maybe I’ll just hit them really hard when I find them.”
“That’s very noisy and probably less practical than actually picking them, but in a pinch, it will work.” He re-latched his lock and handed it to her as she picked up her own, letting her slip the both of them into one of the pockets on her coat. “It’s getting late, and I feel like I should leave soon. I think this was enough of a lesson for today.”
“Yeah, I’ll definitely start practicing on these.” She looked around. “Do you want to get some dinner, though?”
He had shrugged, ambivalent, and a few minutes later the two of them were several minutes away, in Jimmy Win’s Fast Food parking lot, with Sarah eating her burger perched on the trunk of her car while Michael slowly picked through a box of chicken nuggets, standing upright in front of his own car.
“I’m really glad that this place is good,” she mumbled through a full mouth. “We have two fast food options and Pinfeather Wings just sucks. Do they drug their chicken or something to make it taste worse?”
“Yes. It’s actually pigeons from Cleveland.”
“WHAT–” Her roar of indignation was cut off as she began choking on a piece of tomato. Michael reached over and smacked her on the back once, dislodging it. She winced at the taste of partially-pulverized-and-retched-back-up tomato on her tongue, spitting it out onto the ground before looking at him in horror.
“Seriously?”
“No. It’s chicken. They just have a subpar frying batter.”
She let out a cry of disappointment. “How do you even know about what frying batter they use? That’s such a specific thing to figure out.”
“Somebody attempted to kill somebody while they were working a shift there once. I unfortunately witnessed it. It left me with far more understanding of their frying process than I, frankly, want.”
Sarah gave a fake shudder, playing up her reaction for fun, but the mention of another killing attempt had her thinking. Michael had seen a lot over the years, she was sure. Not just from the kills he’d done, but from investigations for payback and things he was wrapped up in. He’d know some things about this. And he was being a bit more open now. Not that she suspected him to have lied to her originally, but there was curiosity in her that she needed to satisfy.
“Speaking of attempted murder,” she began, attempting to sway the conversation, “Do you really think there’s some sort of connection between what happened to Jane and what happened to me?”
“What brought this on?” He asked between nuggets.
“I’m still curious. I definitely feel like there’s a connection of some kind.” Her burger was finished, down to only a scrap of bun and cheese, and she tossed it back into the bag. “It could be nothing, it’s not like I was targeted twice, but they are all friends and Brad had to have known something about both attacks. It really feels like there’s something here.”
Michael dropped his empty food container back into the bag. “I can agree with you. There is evidently some sort of connection between events, but to what extent, I cannot say. The full breadth of evidence isn’t there yet.”
“But you think there’s something wrong here?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“I knew it.” She fist-pumped. “I knew it! I knew there was something wrong there! It’s so—there’s so much proof! I knew that there was some way to find it out. This, this was exactly why I even went in for that investigation. There’s always some kernel of truth lying around in there, that’s the whole thing about investigations, they always go somewhere. I knew it.”
That hope from all the way back in Jane’s basement had been right. This hadn’t just been an investigation she could practice on, it was something she could use to find out more. There really was something deeper here. And if it went deep enough to organize multiple murder attempts and a deeper plot that had some sort of intention, then it might go even deeper. Down to the source of it all.
There was silence in the parking lot as she thought, her concentration snapping as Michael asked a question in a voice that sounded closer to his usual closed-off tone. “Then where do you think this one goes?”
“Oh, all the way to the bottom.” She smiled broadly and eagerly. “There’s more than three people involved in this, I can tell. Brad’s friends were there when I was attacked, you said that a bunch of them were waiting for you when you killed Joe, and of course Brad had that whole thing with the wooden knife handoff. They’re all connected somehow. We still don’t know the full scope or the reason behind that, we’re going to have to wait for them to make another move, but I can live with that because any step they take will create evidence, and that’s evidence we can follow.”
Her words were flowing out now, the elation of knowing that they were on the right track fueling her. “But they have a motive. They always have a motive. They wouldn’t need to put all that effort into just another murder, would they? There wouldn’t be so much coordination and secrecy and work if they were just killing for normal clout. There’s a deeper reason, I’m sure of it.”
She turned to him. “You don’t have any ideas on what their motivation is, do you?”
Michael didn’t say anything. He just looked at her, standing straight, focused on a spot inside her head but behind her eyes. His shoulders moved in the barest of shrugs, and the corner of his mouth twitched downwards before turning to a flat expression.
Sarah didn’t really know what that meant. Maybe he just didn’t want to admit he didn’t have any ideas.
“Eh, whatever,” she joked. “I’ll figure it out myself. Even if I’ve got to get down and dirty about it.”
“I thought you wanted to leave without getting involved.”
“I want to leave, and I don’t want to start killing people for clout, that’s stupid.” The air was cold, and she stretched in the night. “But I’m not leaving before I find out the truth.”
“The truth?”
“About Ravenville.”
Michael’s expression didn’t change, but she smiled at him anyway.
“You might not think something’s wrong, but there is. I’m going to chase this lead as far as I can, and then even further. I’m going to find out what’s wrong with Ravenville, and what all this death is for.”
The memory of a body in the woods flashed before her eyes, and her burger almost came back up her throat before she swallowed it back down. That was why she was doing this. She was going to avoid that, to make sure that people at least knew why there was violence. The deaths would all have to mean something.
Even if this lead didn’t turn into anything, there was something to here, and she would find it. She would find out what was wrong with Ravenville before she left, no matter what.
Michael didn’t say a word.
She’d find it all out.