King Maybe Page 3

  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.

  No problem, except for a little thump when my left palm hit the side of the house. With my knees locked and the rest of me deeply, deeply aware of the fall waiting patiently beneath me, I pulled my right hand away from the wall and felt in my pocket for the nail file, moving the razor aside to get to it. Beneath my left hand, the wall of the house vibrated very slightly, which my imagination translated into someone walking the second floor. I leaned a little closer to survey the master bedroom, which was still empty.

  But probably not for long. So I folded the elbow that was resting against the wall so my weight was being borne by my left forearm, which put me closer to the screen, and went to work. Slip the bent nail file through the slit cut into the screen, position the downward-bent tip over the little triangle of metal that needed to be popped down over the tiny upright post in the center of the sill. Press my fingertip down on the midpoint of the nail file as a fulcrum, meaning that both hands were engaged for a moment, which the space beneath me saw as an opportunity to fill my imagination with a cavernous-sounding Come on down, giving me a short but intense bout of head-spinning vertigo. I had to focus very closely on the edge of the windowsill to stop the world’s whirl, so I missed the moment at which Mr. Back Stairs came into the room.

  But there he was, slope shouldered, thin necked, and round headed, with a prison haircut, an extra-long upper lip that looked red and chafed, as though it got a lot of wiping, and the permanently puzzled expression that distinguished the members of Spinal Tap. All those unthreatening characteristics were sharply offset by the baseball bat in his left hand and the small automatic in his right. He was coming into the bedroom very slowly, the gun extended and the bat over his shoulder, and his gaze was directed at the floor beneath the beds.

  Anyone who (a) comes into a bedroom searching for someone, (b) thinks first of looking under the beds, and (c) is more than twelve years old is, charitably, someone it should not be difficult to outwit. Nevertheless, considering the gun and the bat, I rolled to my left to get clear of the window. In doing it I caught my right toe beneath a particularly ropy length of ivy, and my left knee bent beneath me as I fought to control the trip. I slammed both hands against the side of the house, got my knees straight and both feet on the wall, and hung there, as rigid as the hypotenuse of the world’s sweatiest right triangle, gasping for breath.

  I felt him hear me. Steps came closer, then stopped, and then a flashlight snapped on, pointed straight out the window. A bright circle brought the top of the wall out of the darkness, and right there, just below the perimeter of the circle was my left foot, in the black Chinese sneakers I use as work shoes. No choice: I pulled the foot off the wall and let it hang in space, my back and shoulders pressed against the house and all my weight on my right leg.

  Which began to tremble.

  A tap on the window glass announced that he’d put the end of the flashlight against it. He moved the circle of light up and down and then side to side, briefly illuminating my black-clad foot and the shaky leg above it, also in black, but the dark ivy apparently swallowed them up. It might also have been, I realized, that he was peering through the light reflected on the surface of the window, which had probably been cleaned by the same servant who didn’t flush the toilet. Then the light started to move left, toward the front of the house, and as I released a huge sigh, I was dazzled by the gleam of the nail file, sticking straight out of the bottom of the window screen, bright as a politician’s promise, winking at me as the light left it behind. When he brought the flashlight back in this direction, there was no way he was going to miss the nail file.

  I was reaching slowly for it, keeping my hand below the windowsill and hoping he wouldn’t sense the movement, when he turned the flashlight off. Until then the angle of the beam had told me which way he was looking, but now I had no idea, and there was nothing to do but freeze, one foot on the wall, one dangling down, one shoulder against the house and the oth
er contorted forward to let me extend my arm, like someone playing a game of three-dimensional Twister, until I felt him walking again. A moment later a light came on, pale and diluted, that I figured had to come from the hypermasculine bathroom I had briefly explored. I got my left foot back against the wall, wiggled my way back to the window, and managed to snap the little triangle down over the post. There. The screen was officially locked from inside.

  That meant one of two things, both good. First, if they hadn’t actually been certain I was there, if they’d been reacting to some little trigger, perhaps a glimmer from my penlight against a window, there would be no evidence that anyone had been in the house until some point in the distant, Junior-long-gone future, when the Slugger opened his album and counted the perforations on his damn stamp. Second, if they still believed that someone was inside or had been inside, or if they’d been tipped off after all, I had just eliminated the master-bedroom window from the list of possible escape routes. It’s always progress to eliminate the place where you are from the list of places people are likely to think you’ll be. Then I heard the toilet flush, and the bathroom light went out. No one came back into the bedroom. This was the most secure I’d felt since their car pulled in.

  So I screwed up.

  I got both feet on the wall, extended my arms, and pushed my center of gravity back toward the wall. After all, it was only eighteen inches, and I damn near made it. In fact, I made it and went past it by about three inches and found myself teetering backward on the wall, windmilling my hands but . . . definitely . . . going . . . over. Instead I stepped back and let myself fall.

  Dropped faster than I’d expected, but about four feet below the wall’s top I managed to grab some ivy with both hands. There was a tearing sound as quite a lot of ivy got yanked free of the wall that its tendrils had so assiduously woven themselves into. Part of the bit I was holding on to pulled away, dropping me another eighteen inches or so.

  Above me the light came on again in the bedroom.

  I panicked. Hand over hand I scrabbled monkey style along the side of the wall toward the gate, one yank of ivy after another, not wanting to go down to ground level and trip the motion sensors I’d seen fill the yard with light when a car pulled in to the drive about ninety minutes before I’d entered the Slugger’s house. I’d traveled four or five yards before I realized I should have gone in the other direction, toward the rear of the property, because they’d certainly assume I would head for the street.

  And they had. Flashlights traveled the top of the wall, reflecting off the windows of the house behind me, and I figured it was just moments before the owners of that house would be out to see who was shining lights into their windows. Thus far, though, the place was dark, so maybe I was in luck and everyone who lived there was in their nineties and they’d all been asleep for hours, and maybe they were insomniacs who took sleeping pills of veterinary dosages and sank into a nightly coma or were under a witch’s spell, and maybe they all bunked on the far side of the house, so even if one of them were pulled from his stupor by the demands of an aging bladder, he’d be way over there and wouldn’t see or hear any—

  Something bumped my leg, hard, from behind.

  My feet were about two yards above the ground, and I turned my head, expecting to see a human face staring up at me, perhaps a human face attached to an arm that ended in a hand with a gun in it, but I didn’t see anything at all. From the other side of the wall, the Slugger shouted, “HEY!” but I figured it was a lot more tentative than it sounded. I was a good fifteen feet from the window I’d gone out through, and he was still about eight, ten feet behind me, if the light was any indication.

  Whatever it was, it hit my leg again, harder this time, and I looked straight down and saw my assailant, front feet spread wide, rump in the air, brown eyes looking up at me hopefully: a chocolate Labrador retriever, tail whisking back and forth like a windshield wiper, hoping desperately that this strange human traveling sideways along the wall would come down and play.

  My phone started to vibrate again.

  I like dogs that don’t want to kill me, and I particularly like Labs, but this was not the time for a romp. I whispered a sharp No, and the dog sat down and regarded me critically. My stock with the dog was dropping, my phone had massaged my thigh for so long that it was beginning to hurt, and from the far side of the wall I heard a clank of metal on stone that it took me no time at all to identify as a ladder.

  I decided to go hell for leather through the ivy in the direction of the front gate. For a second the dog stayed put, but then it made its will known: it barked. Just once, but quite loudly.

  Once was enough. There was an urgent little windstorm of whispers from the other side of the wall, and the ladder clanked again, this time much closer to me. And a light went on in the house the dog lived in.

  I let go of the ivy and fell, landing on my feet. The dog promptly jumped high enough to rest its front paws on my shoulders and lick my face, giving me a quality sniff of dog breath, but then it furrowed its brow questioningly and looked back over its shoulder, which meant to me that the front door was about to open.

  I dropped to my knees and grabbed two huge handfuls of ivy and tore it upward, away from the wall, but only about eighteen inches of it came free, so I put a foot against the wall and yanked again. The dog barked joyously and took off for the door. I lifted the ivy in as intact a sheet as I could manage and crawled behind on hands and knees. I had my right side pressed against the wall, and I was facing the house the dog had run to.

  Up until this point, I’d avoided tripping the lights, but now they came on with the intensity of klieg lights at a Hollywood premiere. Motionless, I peered between a couple of big leaves to see an old dude with fierce eyebrows and a nose like an eagle’s beak step onto his front porch. He wore a shapeless white T-shirt and a pair of gray gym shorts and had something black and hard looking in his hand, and my stomach muscles did a little tango step at the sight of it. He glared in my direction and shouted, “You!” Then he pointed the black thing toward me.

  I said, “Uhhhh,” and a couple of the many-legged things that live in ivy dropped down the back of my shirt and started trying to dig their way into my skin. The sheer shock of it choked off my reply, which was a good thing, because from above me and to my right a familiar voice said, “What, you old fart?”

  “What the hell are you doing up there?” Eagle Beak said.

  “I’m looking at my wall. Whaddaya think I’m doing?”

  “I think you’re shining your fucking flashlight through my windows, is what I think you’re doing, trying to get a look at Lizzie in her nightie and making my dog bark in the goddamn middle of the night.”

  “I got a burglar,” the Slugger said, “and he’s in your yard.”

  “Yeah?” Eagle Beak called back into the house, “Moron thinks we’ve got a burglar in our yard.” To the Slugger, he said, “You see any burglars down here? Jeezus peezus, burglars. Any burglars in this neighborhood, they’d be waiting in line for your autograph. Now, get offa that wall.”

  “It’s my wall.”

  “Like fuck it is. Seven inches of it is on my property, and that’s the seven inches you’re hanging your big fat face over right now. And I’m tired of looking at it.” He raised the dark cylinder, and a supernova of hard white light erupted from the end that was pointed at the Slugger.

  Above me the ivy shivered and trembled, and the Slugger said, “You blinded me, you old clown!”

  “Shine lights in my window, will you?” Eagle Beak shouted. He wiggled the black cylinder, which I recognized belatedly as a Streamlight UltraStinger 1100, the agonizingly brilliant flashlight favored by cops in dicey areas all over the country. “Here, take a good look at this.” He made tiny circles with the Streamlight, and I heard a scrape of metal followed by a much longer scrape of metal, then a despairing scream cut short by a heartfelt yelp and a
really rewarding compound sound, half the clatter of aluminum and half the dull thud of human muscle, both striking the unforgiving surface of flagstone.

  “And stay down there!” Eagle Beak shouted. “Asshole!” He stepped back and slammed his door.

  If it hadn’t been for the whimpering from the other side of the wall, the night would have been blessedly silent. On the other hand, the whimpering had a kind of plaintive musical quality, a descending arc of tones in a minor key, lovely if heard from the right perspective. If it had had a beat, I might have danced to it.

  “I still can’t see.” It was the Slugger’s voice, just barely not sobbing, and that was the cue I needed. I clawed back up the ivy until I was about halfway to the top and then headed right. When I got to Eagle Beak’s gate, which was about three feet shorter than the wall, I climbed up onto it, stepped over, and then ivy-rappelled down to the sidewalk and took off up the street, away from the Slugger’s collapsed gate. Turning the corner, I yanked my shirt away from me and shook off my passengers, one of which bit me by way of goodbye, and pulled out the phone, which was vibrating again, or possibly still. I put it to my ear, and Ronnie said, “Come uphill to Tigertail and turn south. I’m in your car, two driveways down.”

  3

  The God of Spring

  I think it was the immortal Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, who invented the trope in which a character runs off the edge of a cliff and keeps right on running on thin air until it looks down, at which point it falls like a stone.

  As busy as I’d been trying to stay alive in the Slugger’s house, the moment I heard that car hit the gate, I had the unmistakable sensation that I’d just left the cliff behind and that there was probably a considerable drop beneath me. But I hadn’t had time to look down and see just how far the fall might be.