Everyone stood awkwardly for a moment in the doorway till Mayberry said, “Well, now you know. Price went up. Take it or leave it.”

“Can I see it?”

Arthur could feel an icy stare from his wife, standing just next to him. Bernice was generally more suspicious of people than was Arthur, and considering Arthur didn’t really believe this man’s story, he assumed his wife was ready to kick the door shut in the man’s face.

But Arthur was thinking about the three hundred bucks now, as well as the fact this guy could go and get a lawyer and make trouble if some black landlord refused to rent to him.

Mayberry snatched his keys off the wall and headed out onto the porch. Bernice followed close behind silently, but Arthur felt her misgivings. He knew if he rented the room to the man she’d tell him he was a fool, because the man was probably out of work and on drugs.

With a fatalistic sigh he led his wife and the white man down to the driveway.

—

Court almost didn’t give a damn what the inside of the room looked like, because the outside was as close to perfect as he could hope to find from an operational security perspective. The entrance to the basement room was off the driveway, just six steps down to a tiny patio with a storm door that looked substantial, and on the other side of that was a wooden door that looked sturdy enough. There was just a small slit window at eye level, but it afforded a full view of the driveway and, since this was a corner lot, he could use the window to see a good distance to the south, east, and north.

Court and the Mayberrys stepped into the basement room, and with three people there was little space to move around. It occurred to Court that there would be a bit more room to move if the heavyset lady took off her huge hat, but he made no mention of it. Instead he checked the space over quickly. It was just ten feet by ten feet with a tiny bathroom off the back, a kitchen counter that ran across the rear wall, and a knee-high refrigerator taking up floor space.

It was obvious this setup had been built by hand. The cheap linoleum flooring buckled from water damage and the paneling on the walls looked like a weekend project by the homeowner, and a water pipe ran across the middle of the room so that anyone over five-six would have to dip his head to move from the bed to the bathroom. But even with these limitations, it was as nice a place as any other Court had lived in the past few years, and better than most.