Crashed jb-1 Read online

  Not for the first time, I asked myself what Mr. and/or Mrs. Huston did for a living.

  Despite the museum-like grandeur of the entry, there was a homely smell that took me back years and years, to my grandmother’s house. I needed a second to identify it as camphor, the active ingredient in mothballs. We don’t use mothballs so much any more, maybe because we have fewer natural fabrics, but they were being used here. The odor suggested a certain strained fussiness, not an attitude that would be comfortable with Rottweilers leaving piles on the rugs.

  The camphor seemed to come from my right, where a set of steps led up to the living room, so perhaps the mothballs were intended to protect the carpets. Straight ahead, a set of five steps led up to the rest of the first floor, accounting for the high front windows. The piece I had been sent for was all the way upstairs, in what Janice had described as the marital theme park.

  As I climbed the curving stairway, the dogs reached a new pitch of frenzy, and I began to think about accelerating the process. Some neighbor might get pissed off and call the cops, and the cops, in turn, might wonder why the Fidos were so manic. I took the stairs two at a time.

  The master bedroom was bigger than Versailles. Three things about its occupants were immediately obvious. First, they were sexually adventurous and willing to pay for it. The ceiling was mirrored, the bedspread was some sort of black fur, a shelf recessed in the wall above the head of the bed held a garish assortment of toys, lubricants, and, for all I could tell, hors d’oeuvres. There were at least a dozen little bottles of amyl nitrate under different brand names, and a crystal bowl of white powder on a mirror, with a razor gleaming beside it. Over against one wall was an actual gynecologist’s table. The stirrups had sequins on them.

  The second thing that was apparent was that they both thought Mrs. Huston was a knockout. There were at least a dozen large color photos of her, blond, a little over-vibrant, and seriously under-dressed, along the wall to the right of the bed. She didn’t look like someone who puts mothballs on her carpets, if only because they’d aggravate carpet burn. Of course, it was an assumption that the woman wearing, in some of the pictures, no more than a coat of baby oil, was Mrs. Huston, but if she wasn’t, the relationship was even stranger than the bedroom would suggest. The odd energy she was projecting in some of the pictures might have owed something to the bowl of white powder on the shelf. Even without the energy, even without the baby oil, she had a kind of raw, slightly crude appeal that probably interested men whose tastes were coarser than mine.

  The third obvious thing was that-while they might have been unanimous in their admiration of Mrs. Huston-they had very different tastes in art. On the far wall were five, count them if you can bear to look at them long enough, five of those flesh-puckering big-eyed children painted in the 1950s by Mr. Keane or Mrs. Keane: waifs of the chilly dawn with dreadful days awaiting them, days they will meet with eyes as big as doorknobs, but not as expressive. It had always amazed me that Mr. and Mrs. Keane went to court to establish which of them was responsible for these remorseless reiterations of elementary-school bathos. If I’d been the judge, I’d have yanked their artistic licenses in perpetuity and sentenced them to a lifetime twelve-step program in which all twelve steps consisted of spending fourteen hours a day watching real children through a foot-thick pane of glass.

  By contrast, on the wall directly opposite the door was the Paul Klee painting that was the object of Janice’s client’s lust. Even at this distance, I hated it, although not as much as I hated the Keanes. Full of thin angular shapes and flat 1950s colors that looked like they were inspired by Formica, it looked to me like something painted with a coat hanger. Klee despised color in his early career, so I didn’t feel so bad about despising the ones he’d used here. I looked back at the Keanes, thinking that when I came back to the Klee I’d like it better through sheer contrast, but it didn’t work. It still looked like a watch-spring’s daydream.

  Now that I was all the way inside the room, I saw a small surprise on the wall into which the door was set: another Klee, this one smaller and maybe, just marginally, not as ugly. I’d been told only about the one for some reason, and I wasted a brief moment wondering whether to bag both of them, then rejected the thought. I was in no position to fence a Klee. Fine art fencing was a specialty, and a perilously risky specialty at that. I’d take the one I’d been sent to take, and let my employer worry about handing it off to someone.

  The room was bright with the sun banging on the big windows, the light filtered white through semi-opaque curtains of organdy or something diaphanous. The bed was to the left, and beyond it was an open door. I slogged my way across a carpet about five inches deep and checked out the door. It led to a sort of sitting room, all mirrored, with a makeup table big enough for the Rockettes on one wall. Beyond that yawned an enormous bathroom. The bathroom, in turn, had two doors leading off it, one into a chamber built just to hold the toilet, and the other into a room that could have slept four but was filled entirely with women’s clothes. There was a door at the far end that undoubtedly led back to the hallway.

  I went back into the bedroom. The other door, to the right of the wall, was a closet, obviously his unless she liked to wear men’s suits to spice things up from time to time. Content that I had the floor plan stored where I could find it if I needed it suddenly, I approached the painting.

  God, it was ugly. I checked behind it, found no evidence of an alarm or any cute little locking mechanisms that would prevent its being lifted from the wall. In fact, it seemed to be hanging on a regular old picture hanger like the ones you can buy in the supermarket, although a little heavier. I centered myself in front of the picture, grasped the frame by the sides, and lifted it. It came up easily, weighing only four or five pounds, and I pulled it away and lowered it to the floor.

  Without, as I said, looking at it.

  And there it was, that circle cut into the wall.

  Everything the Klee hadn’t done for me, that circle did. My heart embarked on a little triple skip, my face was suddenly warmer, and I found I was breathing shallowly. The kind of reaction I would imagine a prospector might experience when he discovers that the rock he just tripped over is a five-pound gold nugget … but.

  But Janice hadn’t mentioned the safe. Presumably, therefore, she didn’t know about the safe, even though the information she’d handed me was detailed and accurate right down to the alarm code.

  So. What else hadn’t Janice known about?

  And at that precise moment I felt the telltale prickling on the back of my neck.

  A little late, I covered the bottom half of my face with my forearm as though wiping sweat away and turned to survey the room, unfocused and trying to take it all in. There it was, at the edge of my vision, high up near the join of wall and ceiling: a little hole the size of a dime.

  Well, shit.

  Wiping my face with both hands, I walked briskly across the room, detouring around the bed and finding something on the carpet to look down at, and straight into the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet I found a travel-size can of shaving gel, popped the cap, and gave it a pointless shake. Then, edging along the wall, presumably out of sight of the little lens that was certain to be right behind that hole, I positioned myself until I was directly below it, flexed my knees, and jumped, my arm stretched above me. When the can’s nozzle was even with the hole, I pushed it. One more jump, and I had a nice little billow of foam filling the hole.

  I tossed the can onto the bed and charged across the room to my bag. A second later I had a hammer and a chisel and I was dragging behind me a chair that had been sitting peacefully all by itself to the right of the paintings. I shoved it against the wall with the camera behind it and jumped up onto it.

  Time was not on my side. I’d been in the house almost too long already, but there was no choice. I had to do this, and it almost didn’t matter how long it was going to take. But I was sweating for real now, my hands slippery inside the gloves.


  The question with surveillance cameras, if you’re unlucky enough to be caught on one, is where the images are being stored. If they’re on-site and you can find the storage device, you’re good to go-just take the whole thing with you. If the images are being stored off-site, then you’re-

  I hammered the chisel for the third time and levered it right, and a chunk of chalky-edged drywall broke off and fell to the floor and I realized I was-

  Screwed, because it was the worst possible scenario. The lines leading away from the camera jacks were telephone cable.

  So, either (1) the storage was off-site and I could give up looking for it or (2) the storage was off-site and I could give up looking for it, and the live feed was being watched by several not-easily-amused men who were at that very moment dispatching an armed response team.

  Well, the good news was that I didn’t have to waste any time looking for the storage. The bad news was everything else.

  I checked the hole and found the foam starting to drip down the wall, so I just yanked the cable from the camera jacks. Then I jumped down from the chair and went back to the safe.

  Since I was already in the red zone for time, I gave myself a count of sixty to get the thing open.

  It took me all of nine seconds to get my bag unzipped and remove the five-inch suction cup, designed for glass but useful on smooth walls. I had to rummage to locate the second item, a Windex spray bottle filled with tap water. Two shots with the sprayer got the wall nice and wet and then I placed the cup evenly against the cut-out, centered it, and pushed it in to secure the seal. Took hold of the handle, and pulled.

  The cut-out popped free like a loose cork. It had been cut on a slight bias so it was larger on the outside than on the inside, making it a snap to remove and replace. I put the whole thing down next to the painting, closed my eyes for a second in vague, generalized supplication, and opened them to look at the safe.

  Fourteen seconds.

  I saw nothing to diminish my enthusiasm. Expensive, yes, shiny and solid-looking, designed to inspire confidence, but nothing that a relatively talented duffer couldn’t pop, and I am not a duffer. Thirty-seven seconds of gentle persuasion later, it swung gently open. Something glittered at me.

  Fifty-one seconds.

  The glitter put an end to my internal argument, if I’d been having one. End of whatever wispy reluctance I might have felt about going another twenty or thirty seconds. Diamonds have a way of prevailing over logic.

  So I did it. I reached inside.

  And as my fingers closed over the cold fire and broke the beam of light that flowed from one side of the safe to the other, I heard three things. First, the squeal of something that needed oiling as it slid open downstairs. Second, a sudden increase in the volume of the dogs’ barking. Third, the sound of dogs’ toenails. On marble.

  Inside the house.

  2

  Dog day

  Diamonds in my pocket. Plug back in the wall. Suction cup in the bag. Picture under the arm. Heart in the throat.

  Dogs on the stairs.

  I ran to the bedroom door, dropped the picture and the bag beside it, and shoved the door with both hands to close it, but when it had only six or eight inches to go, a battering ram hit it from the other side. It was all I could do to keep hold of it. A black muzzle, richly furnished with teeth, shoved its way around the edge of the door, and I hauled off and booted its nose. The beast pulled back, and I got the door closed. I stood there with my back against it, feeling my heart carom around in my chest like a bad ricochet, and focused on counting my viable options.

  I couldn’t quite make it to one.

  No going out the window. That would put me in the dogs’ yard, with a nine-foot fence to scale. The door I was leaning against took me directly into Fangland. There was no way to get to the roof, even if I wanted to be up there, waving at the neighbors while carrying a Paul Klee painting in broad daylight. I double-checked to make sure the door’s latch was fully engaged and then scurried across the room to peer into the closet, hoping for a crawl-hole into whatever passed for an attic, but there wasn’t one.

  The bang on the door this time actually chipped paint off the inside. It wasn’t going to hold for long.

  No crawl-hole in the dressing room. No crawl-hole in the room full of women’s clothes. But the door from the bathroom into that room opened in, and that gave me a pale imitation of an idea. I pushed the door all the way open and left it that way. A dog slammed against the door that led from that room to the hall, so I wasn’t the only one with a mental floor plan. I headed back to the bedroom, hoping to get there before the hounds of Hell knocked the door off its hinges.

  As I approached the door, the snarling scaled up a couple of notches, and claws scrabbled at the paint on the other side. With all the money these people had sunk into this house, why did they choose doors that might as well have been made out of Saltines? Why did their contractors let them? Whatever happened to pride in building? Whatever happened to solid mahogany doors on heavy brass hinges? Where were the values that made this country great?

  The dog, or dogs, slammed the door again. Okay, dogs: there were definitely more than one. They were growling in a kind of homicidal harmony that did little to calm me. With my body pressed against the door, I surveyed the room for something, anything, I could use.

  Bad painting, five more bad paintings, photos of the Missus, big bed, fur bedspread, four pillows in black satin, gynecologist’s table, shelf of, uh, marital aids.

  Shelf of, uh, marital aids.

  RUSH, it said on the labels, which seemed like excellent advice: two little bottles about the size of Alice’s “drink me” but a lot more urban-looking. Standing right there on the shelf, next to a battery-powered something that defied sane speculation. What orifice? How? Under what circumstances? Why?

  Think about staying alive. The immediate goal was to make it down the stairs in one piece, as opposed to several.

  The Rush. I reluctantly stopped leaning against the door, which promptly shuddered on its hinges as I lunged for the bottles. I grabbed both of them, hurled myself back against the door, inspiring one of the beasts to actually bite the wood with a sound that practically folded the skin on the back of my neck. It took a couple of deep breaths to steady my hands to the point where I could unscrew the bottle tops, and then there I was, leaning against a cheap door, besieged by slavering, red-eyed carnivores, holding two bottles of amyl nitrate.

  Don’t think about it. Just do it.

  I took one step back, propped my foot behind the door, near the edge, and opened it an inch, then held it there with my knee. This time, two muzzles forced their way into the crack, fangs bared, tongues lolling and drool spooling down, and from a distance of about eight inches, I threw the contents of the RUSH bottles directly at the black noses.

  As the name Rush suggests, amyl nitrate is fast, but in my cranked-up state the dogs’ reaction seemed to happen in stalactite time: first, the growls shut down, then the noses stopped shoving inward, and then I heard a series of rewarding yelps as the amyl interacted with the astonishingly sensitive nasal apparatus that guided all those teeth. The yelps scaled into the soprano range, and the muzzles disappeared. To my infinite relief, I heard nails scrabbling down the stairs.

  But another dog was banging against the door to Mrs. Huston’s clothes room. I picked up my bag, which weighed about fifteen pounds, and put it against the door, which I’d left ajar. Then I took a peek through the crack in the door and saw the dog about fifteen feet away, hurling himself mindlessly against the closed door. I stuck my hand out, yelled “HEY!” and ran like hell.

  The dog hit the door as I hit the dressing room, but I could hear the door collide with my bag, giving me maybe two extra seconds, and by the time the door banged open I was most of the way through the bathroom. About a tenth of a second after I ducked behind the open door to Mrs. Huston’s Palace of Clothes, the dog shot into the room at fifty miles an hour. I could see it trying
to brake, putting on the skids with its rear legs, as I stepped around the door and slammed it behind me. Two seconds later, the dog’s body buckled the door from the other side, but it opened in that direction, so I didn’t waste a thought on it.

  In the bedroom, the hallway door still yawned open, and the small area of the hall I could see was miraculously dog-free. I grabbed the painting and my bag and headed into the hall. I was five feet from the top stair when the Rottweiler in Mrs. Huston’s mega-closet came straight through the door, just a black streak and a bunch of white wood chips.

  I slung the painting, keeping it as flat as possible, at the stairs, and heard it start to bump its way down. I tossed my bag over the banister. The dog covered the fifteen feet between it and me in less time than it takes to bite your tongue, gathered itself down on its haunches, and jumped.

  I jumped.

  I jumped straight for the top of the banister, where I wind-milled my arms for a sickeningly off-balance second, and then-with the dog three feet above the hardwood, teeth first, and closing fast-I shoved off and sailed into space, twenty feet above the gleaming marble floor of the entrance hall, flailing my way through the thinnest of thin air toward the thick gold chain that supported the crystal chandelier.

  And got my hands around it, but it was slick with grime, and I slid down it almost as fast as I’d been falling until I managed to hook a couple of fingers through the links in the chain. I nearly dislocated both shoulders, but it stopped me. I hung there, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth as the chandelier jingled like a full-scale carillon beneath me, and watched the dogs assemble below. The one who had burst through the door trotted downstairs to join the other two. And there they stood, looking up at me like I was a squirrel whose time was up.