Chapter 6 - Breaking the Locked Office Door
Inside the darkened house, desperation turned into criminal stupidity.
Ryan wasn't packing. While his relatives dragged sleeping bags and duffel bags toward their pickup trucks under Sheriff Boone’s watchful, predatory stare, Ryan had slipped back through the service corridor on the second floor.
I knew where he was going before he even got there.
On my phone, an urgent silent notification pulsed:
ZONE 4 BREACH ATTEMPT: MASTER STUDY SMART-LOCK.
FAIL COUNT: 3 PIN ATTEMPTS.
At the end of the east hallway, behind a reinforced oak door with a hidden steel core, was my private study. It contained my personal safe, my military commendations, my active operational dossiers, and the master server rack for the property’s offline security loops. It was the one room in the house that had never been opened to family.
Ryan was standing in front of the brass keyless keypad, repeatedly smashing in combinations. He tried Jessica’s birthday. He tried my birthday. He tried the last four digits of my cell number.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. The red LED flashed furiously, locking the mechanism out for five minutes.
"Dammit! Open up, you piece of trash!" Ryan snarled, his voice captured crisply by the hidden pinhole microphone embedded in the smoke detector above his head.
Through the live security feed on my phone screen, I watched him look left and right down the empty corridor. Then he walked to the fire extinguisher station mounted near the linen closet, unhooked the heavy red steel canister, and swung it with both hands like a baseball bat directly into the brass door handle.
CLANG!
The deadbolt held, but the decorative wood trim around the frame splintered.
Ryan was hunting for the deed. He was hunting for the title documents, the checkbooks, the banking files—anything he thought he could use to leverage a tenancy claim or fabricate an emergency ownership dispute before the Sheriff dragged him out. In his warped, narcissistic brain, if he could just find a paper that had his or Jessica’s name scribbled on a utility bill, he could force the Sheriff to treat this as a "civil matter" and buy himself forty-eight hours of squatting rights.
He swung the fire extinguisher a second time.
CRACK.
The brass latch gave way under the sheer brute force of the steel cylinder. Ryan kicked the door inward with the heel of his boot, panting heavily, sweat pouring down his forehead.
"Got you, you arrogant bitch," he muttered to himself, stepping across the threshold into the dark, pitch-black room.
May you like
He flicked the beam of his heavy metal flashlight across the walls, expecting to find file cabinets and desk drawers he could tear open.
Instead, the beam of his flashlight hit the far wall, and Ryan froze like a man who had just stepped onto an active landmine.
