King Maybe (2 page)

“I have no idea,” I said—except of, course, I did, and my stomach muscles tightened as though someone were about to punch me in the gut.

“One word, putz,” Whelan said. “Clay.”

Bad, bad,
bad
. I said, “As in
feet of
?”

“As in Paul, funny man,
Paul
Klee.”

“Oh,” I said, stalling to give inspiration a little more time to drop by. “It's funny, you know, 'cause when you said
clay
, I wasn't thinking of K-L-E-E, which I used pronounce
klee
, to rhyme with that TV show where everyone's singing all the—”

“You're going to need a
lot
of money,” Whelan said, “if you want to buy off the guy I've paid to put a couple through you.”

“Put a couple through you” was twenty-four-karat Jake Whelan, the kind of clenched-teeth, popped-sweat excess that had ruined dozens of otherwise perfectly good scripts. No one ever just got shot in a Jake Whelan movie. They got “stitched up” or “nailed to the wall” or they “caught twice their weight in lead” or got “ventilated like a nursery” or something.

But still.

I said, “You've hired someone to do me?”

“Keep your eyes in back of you, Junior.”

I started to explain that I'd get a stiff neck, but there was a click on the line, a real one this time, and I looked to see
ronnie
on the screen.

“Hang on,” I said as Jake's voice scaled up. I hit a button.

“Incoming,” Ronnie said. “And fast.”

“On the way.” I clicked back to Jake, said, “Gotta run,” and hung up. The phone vibrated again instantly, but by then I was on my hands and knees on an extremely soft carpet—scented, swear to God, with lavender, so maybe its owner spent more time on the floor than I did—with my little penlight between my teeth again, looking for the stamp. Since it was nowhere in sight, I had time to register that the fragrant carpet was that kind of mealy-mouthed beige favored by people who are afraid of color, so the Vuillard, or even a Paul Klee for that matter, would have been lost on this guy. He deserved his damn stamps.

It had
wafted
, the stamp had, naturally. Had to fall fancy with frills on, had to catch the merest suggestion of a breeze, couldn't just drop like a rock. It had wafted well beneath the circular mahogany table on which I'd put the stamp album and, like a mook, the nail file with the fake on it. I picked up the fake, a bit hurriedly, and made a faint crease across the upper right corner, which, when I got it back onto the table, I immediately began to smooth on the blank side. I heard a metallic squeal that I recognized instantly as a bad hinge on the gates, about thirty yards away, at the other end of a curving driveway. I'd heard it from around the corner when he left.

The Slugger was home. The Slugger ate babies for breakfast.

Smooth the crease in the stamp, put the stamp on the nail file, ease the whole thing into the Hawid mount,
don't hurry
, center it, square it off, work the nail file out without moving the stamp.
Not enough perforations
. Close the album, make it third in the pile, which was where it was before, pick up the pile of albums—

A car door opened and then closed, the resolutely untinny thunk of a good, solid, six-figure vehicle, a Bentley, in fact.

—slide the albums back into the safe, close the safe, and lock it. Figure out which door he was going to head for.

He was
whistling
out there. Not—not . . . no, it couldn't be, not—yes, it was—“Achy Breaky Heart,” regularly voted the worst earworm in the history of ears, just completely indelible, so now in addition to going to prison I was going to get beat up regularly for whistling “Achy Breaky Heart.”

Well, what did I expect from a guy who collected mistakes?

The Slugger usually traveled armed, according to Stinky, and with good reason, since when he wasn't poring over his collection of misprints, he collected debts for the kind of people from whom one should never, ever borrow money. He'd started small, working for local bookies, and then demonstrated the pep and zip that define the American character by building himself into a kind of nationwide brand, a sort of chain operation contracting beatings (and the occasional pop off when a client ran out of patience), carried out by a handpicked squad of broad-shouldered, short-necked local sadists who could be depended upon to deliver precisely the quantity of pain selected on the sliding scale that Daddy set up for his customers, a one-to-five spectrum in which “one” was a couple of black eyes and a new nose, and “five” was a week in intensive care. Five-point-one was the old “sleeps with the fishes” option, which cost extra.

He'd innovated, too, the Slugger had, offering punishment designed to damage the psyche as well as the bones and muscles: moving beyond crude force to inspired refinements involving spiders, snakes, rats, and in one widely described instance, two buckets full of garden worms, a rectal thermometer, a large funnel, and a recording of tango music. For targets with pathologically inflated concepts of their own masculinity, he'd retained three young women, chosen because they looked like someone with whom you might strike up a conversation in the checkout line at the library, who could begin a session with a blown kiss and end it with full-body trauma, all of it accompanied by a monologue on how a
real
man would defend himself.

He was called “the Slugger”
because his persuader of choice was a Louisville Slugger Prime 915, made entirely of “composite,” such an informative word, with what the company's advertising copy refers to as “a massive sweet spot” and a relatively light swing that gives the user “the best possible feel” when he brings the bat through the zone. I was pretty sure that “the best possible feel” was a one-sided experience, but the point was that the Prime 915 was the Slugger's preference when he decided to keep his hand in personally, and he ordered them in such quantities that the company engraved his name on the barrel, just like they do for Yasiel Puig.

Too much detail? Okay, in short, the Slugger was packing and willing to use it, and I wasn't. In keeping with sane burglary policy, I never went to work strapped because it automatically ups the charges into a zone where it's very difficult to avoid spending several years in jail, which is essentially a cage full of anger-management case histories who are just waiting to rip the ears off someone suicidal enough to whistle “Achy Breaky Heart.”

Which door? Front or back? (
Don't tell my heart
) Either way it made sense for me to get to the big room's single door, if only to be in a position to decide which direction to run.

I was most of the way there (
My achy breaky heart
) when I remembered that the combination of the outermost lock on the safe had been set to 9 when I opened it, and I'd left it on 4, which was the last number, the open-sesame number, in the combination. I was so anxious to fix it that I almost skipped over to the safe, risking my penlight once more to illuminate the dial and twirl it back to 9. (
Don't tell my heart 
. . .
)
T
he combination lock might seem like a trivial detail, but someone whose idea of a good evening after a day spent crushing kneecaps is poring over tiny, badly printed paper rectangles probably remembers which number he left the combination knob at.

And how many perforations
there should be on his Gandhi stamp.

Later for that. For the amount of time it took me to get back from the doorway to the safe and then back to the doorway, he'd stopped whistling. Now, where the hell
was
he?

When I first arrived, I'd walked the place as I always do before going to work, getting a sense of the space and identifying potential escape routes. It was, I'd discovered, a remarkably insensitive re-creation of a Mississippi plantation house, which is to say it was essentially a giant square, two generous stories tall, plus an attic I would have visited on a freelance basis if I'd had the time. Attics make a burglar's palms itch, because people so seldom check on the things they keep there. The grand rooms—living room and dining room downstairs, matching master-bedroom suites upstairs—were in front, and the relatively minor rooms—billiards room, den, book-free library, breakfast nook, lesser bedrooms—were toward the back. What made it unquestionably a plantation house were the gigantic marble stairway that curved up the right side of the grand entrance hall to a second-story landing straight out of
Gone with the Wind
and—behind and between all the fancy rooms—the wooden, unfinished servants' stairs that led up from the back of the house so that the slaves, in the old days, could get from level to level without even momentarily intruding on all that southern serenity.

The aristocracy of the Old South may have loved and nurtured their slaves as much as they claimed they did, but they didn't want to have to say hi on the stairs.

The big differences between the house I was in and the real thing were that the Slugger's monstrosity had cost a hundred times what the finest plantation homes of Georgia and Mississippi had gone for, even allowing for inflation, and the fact that the kitchen was inside, whereas in the antebellum houses it was in a separate room near the slaves' quarters, which both protected the big house from fire and generously gave the slaves a stove to shiver around in the winter. When I'd come in through the back, I'd also seen three tiny bedrooms at the very rear of the house, but Stinky had been right about the house being empty; the people who slept there were all out, possibly attending a neighborhood whipping.

The stamp room I was so anxious to vacate was one of the twin master-bedroom suites, the one on the left if you were inside looking toward the front. If the Slugger was heading for the front door, he'd be coming up the grand stairway. If he came in the back and he felt like slumming, he'd use the servants' stairs.

I stood in the doorway of the stamp room, breathing the way Herbie Mott taught me to breathe, openmouthed with the tip of my tongue touching the roof of my mouth, by far the quietest mode of respiration, and trying not to listen to the chorus of “Achy Breaky Heart” ricocheting brightly around in my forebrain. Seen in a graphic rendering of my body, drawn to a scale that illustrated the extent to which any system was in use, I would have been a vertical line with ears like a fruit bat's and underarm sweat glands big enough to fill an Olympic-size pool. Listening and perspiring, perspiring and listening, I waited to see which door he was going to use so I could pick my stairway.

And heard nothing. I had heard no door open, which was, unfortunately, not the same thing as no door actually having
been
opened.

He could be anywhere, and this (
Don't tell my heart
)
was not good. My phone vibrated against my thigh, and I cupped my hand on top of it, frantically going over everything I'd done, now that I'd reset the combination lock, looking for other telltales that might tip him that someone was in the house. Couldn't think of anything: I'd relocked the back door, reset the alarm, not used any lights except the penlight, which I'd pointed away from windows, my back between it and anyone whose eye might be drawn by the gleam. I'd followed all the rules Herbie had laid down for me during my long apprenticeship. Except for overstaying my welcome.

And then I
did
hear something, a tapping sound (
My achy breaky heart
) that brought to mind the hollow, terrifying sound of Blind Pew's cane stubbing along on the pavement outside the Admiral Benbow Inn at the beginning of
Treasure Island
. It took no imagination whatsoever to identify the sound as the tip of a baseball bat being bounced lightly, even playfully, off the marble steps of the grand staircase as someone came, slowly and deliberately, up it.

2

Hypotenuse

Okay, so the bad news was that I'd broken the rule about how long to stay inside, and my carelessness had earned me the potential attention of a man with a gun and a baseball bat and expertise with both.

The good news was that he was coming up the front stairs. Which left the back stairs open.

Sliding my feet over the marble floor—I love marble floors: they never creak, you can't leave patterns in them as you do on carpets, and they're
great
for sliding—I made my way noiselessly and quickly down the hall to the door that led to the servants' stairs. I'd left it ajar, since I usually try to get out of a house the same way I get in. It was a surprise to hear the bat-tapping that was echoing off the marble stairs bounce back from the wooden ones, but then surprise turned to a faceful of black liquid dread as the tapping from the wooden stairs caught up with and then
passed
the tapping that came from behind me.

Echoes don't do that.

Two stairways,
two
guys, two bats. No other way down, at least not in the amount of time I had available to me. I'd identified an emergency exit on my walk-through, but it would take a good minute or even two to open it and close it again, and even then it might just turn out to be the shortest distance to a broken leg.

One coming up the front, one coming up the back. I needed to get to the right-hand bedroom, but not by running down the center hall to the landing, which would put me directly in the sight line, momentarily at least, of someone coming up the marble stairway. I peeked at the rear stairs, saw that he hadn't yet rounded the switchback, and darted straight across the hall to the door into the bathroom that connected to the bedroom I wanted.

Who was the second guy? How did they know I was inside the house? An answer to that question presented itself in my imagination, immediately and with such force that it ended the earworm in between “achy” and “breaky.” The answer—betrayal—had to be the right one, but there was nothing I could do about it now.

The bathroom was the architectural equivalent of a hairy calf, so male that it looked contrived. The wallpaper featured a pattern of green pine trees accented cleverly with brown log cabins and a few more-or-less taupe moose and mooselets, a design that might have been drawn personally by L.L. Bean on a bad day and intended for children's pajamas. The seat on the toilet was up, and the water in the bowl was suspect. A broad leather strap hung beside the oak-framed mirror, and it took me only a tenth of a second, which seemed like quite a long time, to identify it as an old-fashioned strop for a straight razor. I pulled open the mirrored door, which yielded with a sound that I would have spelled
bock
had I been in a spelling mood, and there it was, gleaming at me, so I took it out, steel folded into bone of some kind. I'd never used a razor on anyone, and I never wanted to use a razor on anyone, but it seemed like a good thing to keep away from the Slugger.

The tapping stopped, both front and back. The guy in front, whom I automatically assumed to be the Slugger, called out, “We gotcha. Come onto the landing
right now
, because if we have to look for you, you're gonna be horse glue.”

I knew with absolute certainty that I was not going onto the landing. Unfortunately, that was the only thing I knew with absolute certainty. The alternatives—and I was sure there were dozens of them—refused to line up and say hi. I stood there in that bathroom wondering why none of the servants had lowered the seat or flushed the toilet, and then three things happened at the same time. “Achy Breaky Heart” started up in my head again, and the guy in front slammed his bat against the floor with a bang like a pistol shot, but that was instantly drowned out by a crashing noise of industrial proportions, a sound that could only have been caused by something the size of a cruise ship taking the gate outside right off its hinges. I actually heard both stages: first the crash with the attendant shriek of hinges being torn away and then the clatter of the gate, probably flung backward, hitting the driveway.

“What the
fuck
?”

That was the guy in front, the Slugger, and the words were still echoing when I heard him sprint down the steps. The one behind me called a question, but I wasn't paying attention to the words: I was already in the right front bedroom, opening the window on the right-hand wall as quietly as I could.

It had an old-fashioned twist-lock at the top, so that slowed me down a second, but then I had it undone and I'd eased the window up about half an inch and retwisted the lock to the secured position, meaning that the window would look to anyone who didn't take the time to come over for an up-close inspection as though it had been closed from the inside.
Then I stood absolutely still, breathing openmouthed, back in fruit-bat mode, listening.

I heard the guy in back call another question but couldn't make out the words, except for “Morrie,” which made sense, since the actual name of the Slugger was Morrie, or perhaps Maury, depending on whether it was short for Morris or Maurice, and my guess would be Morris, because—

Stop
it. Not germane.
Listen.

Nothing. Goddamn marble floors, can't hear anyone who's smart enough to slide his feet over them. The whole USC marching band could be sliding down the hall, heavily armed and wearing taps, and I wouldn't hear them. I
hate
marble floors. Then, over the silent marching band, I heard a sound that I attributed to a shoe on wood and then a squeak, which I identified as the fifth stair down—it had creaked beneath my weight when I came up. Then another foot on wood and then another, getting softer, not louder. Going away.

Mr. Back Stairs wasn't so brave without Morrie or Maury to tag team with. Moving as quickly as I could without making noise, I slid the window the rest of the way open. Then I pried up the little V-shaped metal piece at the bottom of the screen, the one that snapped down over the post set into the windowsill to lock the screen in place, and, holding on to the V with my left hand, I used the straight razor in my right to make a cut about two inches inch long in the mesh, exactly where the screen met its wooden frame. It would be invisible unless someone pushed out on the screen.

It was time to listen again, but the Slugger was making it hard for me to hear anything by screaming at the entire neighborhood as a way of expressing wrath over whoever had battered his gates, since that person had seemingly fled the scene. I personally knew and had used every single word in the Slugger's stream of invective but had never heard them grouped in so many short strings of such force and elegance. It had a rare kind of public-restroom eloquence to it
.

Then I heard the second man's voice, and it came through the open window, which meant he'd gone outside. This was the best news I'd had in some time. For half a second, I thought about running down those back stairs and out the door, but once I was on ground level, the only way off the lot was through the large space where the gates had been and where the Slugger was now. Instead I stuck with Plan B. I pushed the window all the way up and then angled the screen, which hung from hinges at its upper corners, away from the building. I climbed out onto the windowsill, holding the screen open above me, and found myself looking down at a drop of about eighteen feet to a flagstone path that ran beside the house. Chez Slugger was a relatively recent build, in a style that in the late 1990s was referred to as an “Iranian teardown,”
meaning that a very nice house of standard size for the neighborhood—say, 12,000 square feet—had been bulldozed and replaced by a self-conscious, oversize architectural boil that could barely be shoehorned onto the lot, stopping only about eighteen inches from the property lines on the left and right. It also lowered the tone of the entire block.

The original house had been surrounded by a serious wall, still standing and fourteen feet high, into which the now apparently destroyed gates had been set. The wall was about a foot wide, and the thickness of its ivy cover—the kind of verdant overachievement that British universities put on postcards—testified to the age of the house that had been knocked down; it had probably been built in the 1940s. As close as the wall was, if I jumped from the window and missed it, I would be falling past the ghost of a stately home that had undoubtedly housed several generations of interesting people, none of whom would be around to sympathize when I hit the flagstone.

I was crouched on the windowsill, putting a little bend in the nail file—which is harder than it sounds—when the Slugger started hollering at Mr. Back Stairs, telling him to get various parts of his anatomy back inside. That supplied a spike of energy that made the bend a bit easier, and, holding the nail file in my left hand, I backed all the way out onto the sill, still in a crouch, until I was clear of the window's path.

Now for the first hard part.

The window casing was a good, thick, dependable two-by-six, and the wall was shingled, giving me little spaces between the casing and the tops of the overlapping shingles into which I could insert my fingertips. With nothing but that and the four inches of windowsill beneath my feet to support me, I leaned in just far enough to reach up and pull the window down. It wouldn't go
all
the way down, because the latch on the inside was in the closed position, but at least it would look locked. I was breathing heavily when the realization hit that I had just eliminated my only quick and easy route back into the house, and the psychological effect was instantaneous: the space beneath me suddenly yawned, darkened, and deepened until those eighteen feet between me and the flagstones felt like eighty.

Now for the second hard part.
And
wouldn't it be cool
, I thought,
to be able to climb a rope?

But I couldn't, and I didn't have one anyway, so it was jump or die, or perhaps jump
and
die. A step four feet down and eighteen inches out separated me from the top of that ivy-clad, one-foot-wide wall.
Piece of cake
, I thought. On level ground it would be a long step. Of course, on level ground it's not such a
deep
step. I thought of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, my father's favorite cartoon character and one of the few things we both enjoyed, Dad and me watching reruns of good old Rocket J. Squirrel together, me laughing whenever he did.

Rocky flew with his arms spread wide, and I thought,
Who am I to argue with Rocky?
I slid the nail file into my pocket, turned around very carefully, opened my arms, and pushed off. In midair I spread my legs, too, guiding myself to the top of the wall along an imaginary path of the sheerest, purest yearning and landing flat on my belly on top of it, gripping it for dear life with my arms and my knees. I knotted my fingers into the ivy in case of . . . I don't know, an earthquake and just lay there, thinking briefly about breaking into tears but remembered that I wasn't finished yet. I still had to lock the window screen.

As I got onto my hands and knees, I reviewed my next steps and found them wanting, an unsettling blend of high risk and low value. I was ninety-nine percent certain that what I was about to do, like having reset the combination dial and making sure that the bedroom window looked locked—all the time-consuming precautions that distinguish the skilled burglar from the chemically addled smash-and-grab, soon-to-be ward-of-the-state thug—was pointless. It had sounded from the beginning as though they'd known I was there. As though I had, in short, been betrayed.

But there was that one-percent chance that I was wrong, that in fact I hadn't wasted my time making the replacement stamp to delay discovery of the theft and doing all that other tradecraft, and then there's also habit. When you can, says Herbie Mott's unwritten masterwork,
The Burglar's Handbook
, you leave the scene exactly as you found it. The longer it takes the mark to discover the theft, the colder the trail.

So what the hell. The Slugger's unwearying stream of invective had ranged off to my right, as though he'd jogged in that direction to try to locate the vehicle that had taken out his gate, and now it was swinging left again, as he came back down the street. The other guy was presumably inside the house by now, although he might be skulking behind a couch or something, waiting to spring into courageous action until the Slugger arrived. Of course, he might also be more frightened of the Slugger than he was of me—I knew
I
would have been—and might be diligently searching the second floor by now. Time to move.

Under normal circumstances, getting from one's knees to one's feet is a skill learned in toddlerhood, requiring little preparation and less courage, but doing it on top of a one-foot-wide wall some twelve feet in the air, above an unforgiving flagstone surface, when you're a guy who couldn't learn to climb a rope and whose phone is once again vibrating insistently in his pocket, turned the whole maneuver into an Olympic-caliber feat: The Rise and Fall or something.

Both my knees and my palms told me that the wall was an uneven, somewhat treacherous surface, a tangle of ivy vines, some of them as thick as my thumb, designed by a malignant God to trip people up and make them turn their ankles just before they fell to their death. I crawled back and forth within an eighteen-inch stretch until my knees found a couple of places where they could actually feel the cinder blocks on top of the wall. One at a time, I slid my feet into those flat spots, and then I rose to a crouch and very, very slowly straightened.

I'm about six feet two, so all I had to do to get to the window was lean forward a foot and a half and break my fall with my hands. It sounds so
easy
, put that way. Once I was standing, I spread my feet on top of the wall, widened the space between my hands to miss the plate glass, filled my lungs just to remind myself what it felt like in case this turned out to be the last time, and leaned toward the house.