Of course he'd changed the locks. Who didn't think to change the goddamn locks when they knew their housemate was back in town? Jami took a final glance at her old house key and tossed it down onto the ugly corrugated iron Vitto thought to craft into steps. If the clang of metal on metal didn't wake him up from sleeping past noon, the barrage of her choicest cuss words might.

"Vitto!" she yelled, rapping her knuckles on the darkened door glass. "Vittorio! Seriously, man!" She didn't care if he was holed up in his room sleeping off a lonely crate of organic beer, she'd bang on every piece of glass in the place if she had to. The bus journey had made her back ache and she'd been daydreaming about the lunchtime bento boxes from the little Japanese place down the road all morning. "Vitto!" Nothing stirred. "Fuck's sake."

She threw back her head and growled. If her cell phone hadn't already died two hours out of Denver she'd have called him until he had no choice but to pick up. It didn't help that Vitto's place was no more than a glorified trailer in his scrapyard on the edge of town and there wasn't another living human around for another mile. He'd always had a little bit of boastfulness in the way he told people how he 'lived the simple life', but it was only half true. He'd never made Jami's life simple, and today was no exception.

He might've locked the door, but the man never locked his windows. She swung off her heavy backpack and it landed with a sad thud on the ground beside her. She rolled her shoulders. If she was going to climb through the window she figured she'd better begin by loosening the knots in her back. For all his faults, Vitto hadn't made a half bad teacher at it either.

"Some welcome party this is," she muttered as she hiked herself up onto the nearest window ledge. Her combat boots made an already undignified task even more difficult, but she could at least count on not minding the ripped-jeans look if it came to that. She'd been right about her old friend not locking the windows; she knew him far too well for his own safety and security, it seemed.

She prised the window frame from its deteriorated seal and slipped inside, anchoring one foot in the basin beneath the window and breaking several unwashed dishes in the process. She made a mental note to replace them later, but knowing Vitto he'd insist on adding them to his list of items to repair. She rolled her eyes. Even the sound of a break-in didn't wake the guy. She wanted to know where he'd been keeping the strong stuff, if that was the case. Inside, she climbed down from the kitchen counter, making no efforts to disguise her arrival.

"Vitto!" Jami called again, banging the side of her fist on the cupboard she'd almost hit her head on. "Hey, asshole! Wake up call, sleeping beauty!"

The house was still. It occurred to her that Vitto might be out, but his old Dodge was parked up outside next to the other heaps of junk he couldn't let go of. Not that Vitto ever went anywhere before 1pm unless it was critical, unavoidable, or involved a peaceful protest.

A nagging pang set aside her anger. He'd said nothing about getting a job or a girlfriend, either. Despite the place being open plan enough for few hiding places, she poked her head around the bathroom door and bedroom doors before concluding she might have guessed wrong after all.

"Oh, come on. You haven't turned over that much of a new leaf, sunshine."

She found a spare door key in the bathroom cabinet — Vitto logic — and heaved her luggage up the steps and into the kitchen. Still hungry and aching from her seven hour bus ride, she helped herself to the only food in the house that wasn't on the turn or made out of soy — a bag of salted cashews — and sagged into the corner sofa in the living room. Her tired bones thanked her for the rest, but her nose didn't. A stale smell stirred in the place, one that she didn't remember being there before she'd left for Rome. Either that or she'd grown so used to it before that she hadn't noticed it.

Sawdust. Tobacco. Old food. She sat up. It wasn't like Vitto to have left dishes in the basin overnight either. The empty hook behind the front door suggested Vitto had taken his jacket with him, and his favourite pair of boots weren't lying around the floor either. Her frown deepened the more she searched for signs that her friend had even been home in the past few days. As if to confirm it, there came a soft ruffling above her and a feathered orange head poked out from the shelf edge.

"Hey, Wally," she muttered, getting to her feet on the sofa. The little lovebird puffed out his breast, eager for a taste of the cashews in her hand. Jami glanced over at the empty food tray in his cage. "Weird," she said, and the bird eyed her again. "He only ever lets you out when he's in. Right, Wally?"

She jumped down from the couch and took one final look around the tiny abode for any signs of her friend. Vitto had agreed to meet her at the bus stop in the middle of town. She'd been annoyed when, after forty minutes of waiting around, he hadn't shown up. It was like him to forget, so she was hardly surprised, but she hadn't been able to call him. Another bus had brought her close enough to the scrapyard to walk the rest of the way, but Vitto not being here just didn't add up. She paused and placed her hands on her hips, working it out.

"You left in a rush," she muttered, if only to make sense of it. "Didn't put Wally back in his cage, at least." She spun around towards the door. "But not so much of a rush that you'd leave your coat and the house unlocked. Where the fuck are you?"

Wherever he was, it was a small town, and Vitto couldn't have gone far without his truck. She could just imagine it: Vitto walking in in a couple of hours to find Jami camping on his sofa buying movies through cable, just because she could. The look on his face when he realised it was today Jami's flight landed from Rome... He'd say he got his days mixed up and then proceed to make it up to her by listening to her travel stories for the next few hours. Say nothing about the broken dishes or the movie bill, and then suggest her favourite Japanese restaurant.

Cheesy, she thought, how he'd kept a picture of them up on the shelf where Wally had found his new perch. Just a cheap, lime green frame he'd picked up from a thrift store somewhere. If she wasn't mistaken, he'd taken the photograph on the Great Wall of China, culture vultures that they were. That particular memory had been one her fondest too and she couldn't help smile at the sight of his face next to hers. He had the kind of smile that old ladies talked about, and wore his hair in a bun, though less so through conscious fashion choice. Her bushy platinum hair hadn't had so much of her black roots showing back then either. They looked good together, if she did say so herself.

She collapsed again into her corner, too exhausted to be angry or continue worrying about where the hell Vitto had got to without his truck.

As she nestled up and finally kicked off her combat boots, the stale smell hit her nose again. There was no doubt about it this time: it wasn't the room, it was something beneath the couch.