Shopping for a gun at the pawn shop was a bit of a disappointment. Unbeknownst to me, one of my favorite shops had been forced to close down sometime since my last visit a few months back. Usually pawn shops did reasonably well during recessions, or 'economic downturns' like the one we were in, but I'm not familiar with all the facts that govern the profitability of the pawn shop industry.

It was too bad, really. Quoon's guns were top quality, and he'd always had at least a dozen or so 'lost' guns that he'd allow to disappear from his store if the price was right. If I'd known he was going out of business, I would have done a bunch of shopping there first.

As it was I had to settle for my backup pawn shop, picking up a forty-caliber Smith and Wesson with only a little bit of trouble. It was the only gun there that looked to be well taken care of, which was a shame, because once I was ready to head back to my building I'd probably just end up tossing it into the ocean anyways.

Of course, that wasn't the only thing that was a bit of a disappointment. There was also the piano shop itself.

I'd directed the taxi driver to within about two blocks of the place, paying him in cash and tipping him well, but not so well that he might remember me for it. That done, I headed in a random direction until he was out of sight, and then turned around and headed for the piano shop. It wasn't long before I was standing in front of it, feeling even more disappointed than I'd been at the pawn shop.

Gutted. The whole store was freshly gutted from a fairly recent fire, it looked like. I could make out the black calligraphic lettering that spelled 'Willenskraft and Sons' on the badly damaged wood. The entire front of the building still had evidence of fire damage that the rain hadn't yet been able to wash away, including black soot stains directly above all the windows. Most of the roof was gone near the front. Window panes were empty holes, and the door had vanished as well, with no effort made to keep anyone out of the building or protect its contents. I wasn't an expert on such things, but it looked like the fire itself had been a few weeks ago. No more than a couple of months, tops.

I sighed, and stood on the road just staring at the building for a while.

I'm not a detective, okay? I mean, sure, I'm good with logic and I can figure stuff out when I need to. Laying a good trap for someone or coming up with an elegant solution for a problem is sometimes necessary in my line of work, and I do well enough. Mostly though, I'm handed a whole bunch of information that's been gathered by a bunch of people who were much more detective-like than I am, and I'm told, "Here's everything you need to get the job done. Go to it."

That being said, I do have my detective-like moments.

So, standing there in front of this recently burned-out building, it occurred to me that there was probably a link between this building and my junkie. Connecting a burning building to organized crime didn't require a whole lot of mental gymnastics, and I got a very strong feeling that the burning of this particular building was somehow connected to everything that I was being asked to take care of.

Too much of a coincidence, when you stop and think about it. Same last name, building catches fire, junkie goes berserk and kills a bunch of guys who have been known to burn down the occasional building from time to time. Not too many lines needed to connect those dots.

I was also beginning to realize that stumbling upon all these little bits of information that had been 'left out' of the file I'd been given . . . well, it was starting to piss me off. More than a little.

Here's a tip, and yes, I already know it seems obvious. It's simply this - do not piss off a professional killer if you're able to help it.

After standing there long enough to realize I should be doing something more productive than simply standing there, I decided to head inside and check the rest of the building out. I didn't know what I'd find, but then I hadn't known what I'd find by coming down here in the first place, and it seemed that no matter what I ended up finding out lately it turned out to be something I needed to know.

I walked through the badly blackened door frame, and into what was probably once a very quaint, well cared for piano store.

Not just a store, I noticed, but a shop as well. It was about half the size of a modest warehouse, and I could see evidence of an impressive wood shop near the back, wood planers and table saws, all that stuff. They hadn't just sold pianos, they'd manufactured them. All the equipment was still there, saw blades blackened and useless, the plastic safety guards once meant to protect fingers and arms now drooping and melted, like clocks in a Salvidor Dali painting. It had been a hot fire, likely. Soot covered most of the stuff that still had burned-out remnants of roof shielding it from the elements.

It didn't take me long to make my way to the back room - there wasn't exactly a lot of stuff sitting between me and it. Some papers were still strewn across the floor, some burned, some not. I stopped periodically to pick up the occasional note, but didn't find much of interest. Just scorched brochures, work orders, and the occasional invoice from the mid nineteen-eighties. The sort of papers you'd expect to be lying on the floor of a burned-out, gutted piano store.

Yeah, this wasn't a waste of time at all.

It dawned on me that there was something I could be doing - looking for a name. Obviously this place had an owner, and that owner's last name was very likely Willenskraft. With a name like 'Willenskraft and Sons', chances are I would find two or three such names. I looked around for someplace that might have housed a lot of paper at some point, or been an office. There didn't appear to be an office, but there was what was once a fairly nice desk that was sitting in the back corner, near where you would imagine the bathrooms would be. Part of that area looked to curve around a wall.

I got closer. The desk was parked in front of an alcove, and I was able to make out a door, probably for some sort of storage closet. I waded through the fire-blackened debris, making my way over to the desk and door both.

The door was a fire door - a heavy, metal door that had been built with the express purpose of minimizing the spread of fire inside of a building. I just about thanked my lucky stars. The handle turned easily, and the door swung open with an agonized groan.

It was indeed a storage area. It was a small-ish, square room, and it was currently storing nothing but great piles of ash. I scowled. Me getting a break just didn't appear to be in the cards.

There was something interesting about the inside of the room, however. The fire door appeared to be more burned on the storage-closet side. The side facing me was relatively untouched, but inside the ash-laden room both the fire door and the walls enclosing it looked as though they'd been used to insulate a blast furnace.

So, a fire was likely set inside of this room, specifically. That was sort of interesting. It's where I gravitated to when searching for paper records, because it seemed like a logical sort of place to keep them. More damage inside it meant that a fire had been lit in this particular room. Records, a history of the place, burned up.

Evidence maybe? But evidence of what?

I finished a lap of the place, and found many similar uninteresting bits of nothing important. The only real thing of note that was left in the entire building were the remnants of six pianos. They were in various states of disarray, but for reasons other than the fire. One lay in pieces - not the sort of pieces that were a result of violent hacking or smashing, but pieces of the more delicate and precise dismantling variety. Piano repair, or building. It made sense . . . a piano got built, didn't it? Once you had all the pieces, you had to put it together. Funny, I'd never once in my life really considered that a piano was composed of small, mechanical pieces that had all been fitted together by someone. A piano had always just been . . . well, a piano.

The very back of the shop managed to recapture my interest. There was a door, and there was a large, multi-panel sliding door beside it, one meant to allow delivery vehicles into the shop, obviously. There was also a sort of long, above-ground tunnel structure, like a covered bridged turned into a hallway that began in the back shop area. It seemed like its only purpose was to connect the piano shop and a second building nearby. Both buildings had very different characteristics, and the wooden structure that joined them seemed to have nothing in common with either of them.

The other building hadn't been touched by the fire. There was a car that was parked outside of it, one that looked like it hadn't been driven in a while. Kind of interesting.

Well, it wasn't like I'd found anything in this building. Time to go check out that one, perhaps, see if there was any connection aside from the obvious literal one.

I was just about to walk through the empty parking lot and approach the house head-on, when I started asking myself questions. There might actually be someone there - I mean, a car was parked outside, right? It may not have been driven around for a while, but it did still point to the possibility of someone being in that particular building. If I went over there, and there was someone there who spotted me, what would I say? What was my reason for being here? If someone saw me right now, what was my reason for wandering around this hollowed-out husk of a building?

Shit, I hadn't even prepared myself with a proper excuse for visiting a piano shop in the first place! What, did I figure that since I out-smarted a couple of FBI agents, I was allowed to be a complete dumb-ass the rest of the day? This wouldn't do at all.

Brushing off most of the soot from a nearby workbench, I sat down on it and pondered.

Maybe I'd be able to claim curiosity. This wasn't restricted or private property - there had been no signs or tape saying, "Please do not enter." Maybe I was just a guy who used to work in this neighborhood, came back to visit my old stomping grounds, saw evidence of a fire and came to inspect it, muttering stuff like "It's such a shame" all the while. Feasible, right?

Close enough. And if I was interested enough to inspect the remains of the building, I might be interested enough to poke around other places that happened to be connected. That was a fairly passable excuse. Whoops, sorry buddy . . . didn't know anybody was around. Say, do you know what happened here? Last I saw this place was still standing upright.

Yeah, that would probably work. There wasn't anything particularly noble or compassionate about people snooping around the shattered wreckage of other people's hopes and dreams, but what the hell . . . this was America. We do that sort of thing often enough.

Standing up, I was about to head over to the adjacent building when something occurred to me.

This place manufactured pianos in addition to selling them. Judging from the hardware lying around, they weren't set up for making them in large quantities, which meant their differentiator would be quality. In any sort of high-level artisan craft, such as pianos or violins, good craftspeople developed reputations for the work they did, and, like any artist, made a point of signing or stamping their product. I didn't know if it held true in this particular case, but since I didn't really have anything else to look for, it was worth a shot.

The tidy pieces on the floor weren't marked with anything that I could see, but that sort of made sense. If you were valued for how you put something together, you wouldn't tag individual pieces before they'd been assembled, you'd do it after. On a completed piece.

There was a piano that was mostly intact and sitting next to the wall. There was some fire damage, and some water damage, making it look as though it might have sustained little more than a light toasting before the firefighters arrived to put out the blaze. I opened up the front, exposing the multitude of hammers and strings that the fire-blistered frame concealed. It looked more or less okay. I hit a key on the keyboard - middle-c - but got no answering note.

After several minutes inspecting the interior panels I found what I was looking for. There was a ink-stained recession that had been stamped into the upper right corner of one of the inside panels. It resembled a script font, or signature, and appeared to read 'L. Willenskraft'.

An initial of 'L', huh? Well, it was more than I had when I first walked into this place. Enough to maybe research later. That felt better than leaving this burned-out place empty handed. Score - me, one; abandoned piano shop, zero.

I jotted it down on my pad of notepaper, not that it was really necessary. How hard was it to remember the initial 'L'?

Once I'd done that, I walked over to the planks leading up to the covered-bridge walkway and headed inside.

It was a little on the dark side, but halfway to the building small, outdoor socket lights appeared in the ceiling at regular intervals, providing enough light for me not to trip over the uneven wooden floorboards. After about thirty yards, the hallway ended at two doors, one directly in front of me, and one to my right. The right-hand door was built into the hallway itself, and would probably take me outside, to where I'd seen the car. The one in front of me was quite obviously built as a foyer for the building I was interested in. Everything looked old, but sturdy. Good wood. I tried the handle on the building's entrance, which was locked.

Well, now what?

I started panning through some viable excuses for being there, so I'd have a reason to knock on the door. An amusing one came up - photography. I could say I was an amateur photographer looking for some stock shots. I was walking around, saw this place, and decided to ask for permission to take pictures. I didn't have a camera with me, or even a release form, but I could always say that I lived nearby and merely wanted to check with the owner before hauling my stuff over here. Perfect.

There didn't appear to be a doorbell, or even a door knocker. I balled up my fist and gave three sharp raps with the tip of my knuckle.

I can't adequately describe what happened next.

I was spun around bodily and slammed sideways into the nearby wall of the hallway. Rough hands grabbed the front of my shirt and threw me in the other direction. I hit the other wall soundly, breath exploding from my chest.

Then, those same hands grabbed my shirt a second time, lifting me up off the ground and smashing me against the solid timbers of the wall beside the door, a mere foot away from where I'd started.

After a few seconds of dazed surprise, I realized about three things at once.

First, I noticed I couldn't breathe. This was rather distressing.

Second, I noticed my feet weren't touching the ground. That sounded uncomfortably familiar.

Third, and most importantly, I noticed that Stevie was pinning me to the wall with a single outstretched arm, staring up at me, his eyes brimming with a baleful hatred.

"Can't feel it," I heard him say in a deep, rumbling voice, though his lips barely moved at all. "Not one of 'em." He tilted his head at me in an approximation of idle curiosity. "Who the hell are you?"