Free Death, Taxes, and Hot Pink Leg Warmers by Diane Kelly Page A

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    Eddie pulled to a stop in front of a tiny wood-frame house. “Someone paid six hundred Gs for this shack? You’ve got to be shitting me.”
    The house was situated adjacent to the frontage road, the freeway looming over it. Its roof bore a massive hole where a large tree limb had fallen on it. Every window in the house was broken, dangerous shards of glass filling the frames. What siding remained had pulled loose, hanging at haphazard angles and exposing a thin layer of once-pink, now-gray insulation.
    Home sweet hovel.
    Two rats snuffled lazily along the porch, searching among the accumulated trash for a spare morsel to eat. When they found nothing tasty to munch on, they turned to other urges, one rat mounting the other from behind, giving the female some quick loving then scurrying off, another love ’em and leave ’em type, another deadbeat dad.
    We climbed out of the car to take a look around. Traffic on the freeway rushed loudly overhead, the roar of engines punctuated by the occasional blare of a horn. As we picked our way through assorted holes and garbage in the yard, a shadow appeared between us, growing larger. Instinctively, the three of us ducked, throwing our arms up to protect our heads.
    An enormous fountain drink cup plummeted like a missile to the ground directly in front of us, hitting the hard-packed dirt and exploding into a barrage of ice and brown liquid that splashed onto our shoes. A soda bomb. Some idiot on the freeway overhead must have tossed it from their car.
    We ventured bravely forth, keeping one eye on the overpass.
    “Does someone actually live in this house?” I asked.
    The most recent purchaser had been a sibling of one of the Racketeers, a sister who lived in California. Judging from the condition of the house, I’d bet the sister was a straw buyer who had never seen the property. I doubted she’d been able to rent the place. Was it even legal to rent a house in this condition? Wasn’t there some type of law to prevent slumlords from collecting rent on uninhabitable dwellings?
    Ackerman climbed onto the creaky porch and peeked through one of the broken windows. “It doesn’t look occupied.”
    I stepped up next to him while he accessed the Dallas Central Appraisal District site on his phone. He grunted. “Says here the house’s condition is ‘unsound.’ It’s valued at $22,000 for property tax purposes. All of the value is assigned to the land.”
    A crappy investment, for sure. I wondered out loud why anyone would agree to be a straw buyer.
    Ackerman shrugged. “Lots of reasons. To help a friend or family member. To get a piece of the pie. It’s also possible the sister in California has no idea about the condition of this property. The Racketeers may have lied to her, too, led her to believe the property was a good buy.”
    Unwittingly sucking their relatives into their scheme, subjecting their families to possible criminal charges? The Racketeers weren’t just scumbags. They were sleazy, slimy, skuzzy scumbags.
    Risking life and limb, we stepped through the front door, which bore no doorknob or dead bolt. Only a frayed piece of rope had been holding it closed.
    The inside of the house was even worse than the outside. The floor had rotted through in many places, exposing the pier and beam foundation, much of which was also rotting. The walls bore holes, too, the wiring exposed. Bugs, which I assumed to be termites, crawled around the edges of the holes, apparently eating their way through the wood. All of the appliances had been removed from the kitchen, most likely stolen after the last resident moved out. The floor was littered with the butts of joints, crushed beer cans, and broken liquor bottles, along with several used condoms. Urk. Looked like the home’s absentee owner had unknowingly hosted some wild parties.
    While Ackerman stopped to snap photos, Eddie and I continued to snoop around. In the corner of one of the bedrooms was a makeshift altar, a