The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling - By Lawrence Block Page 0,6
want to eat, and I knew better than to drink anything.
Not now.
I checked, made sure I had everything. I went out into the hall, double-locked my own door, then rode the elevator past the lobby to the basement, letting myself out via the service entrance to avoid passing my doorman.
The air had an edge to it. It wasn’t cold enough for mink, but it was certainly topcoat weather. I had mine over my arm, and I took a moment to put it on.
Was there a patron saint of burglars? If so, I didn’t know his name. I murmured a quick prayer, addressed it to whom it might concern, and set off to resume my life of crime.
CHAPTER
Three
Halfway across the Queensboro Bridge, I happened to glance at the fuel gauge. The needle was all the way over to the left, way past the big E, and I had what suddenly looked like a mile of bridge stretching out in front of me. I could see myself running out of gas smack in the middle of the East River. Horns would blare all around me, and when horns blare, can cops be far behind? They’d be understanding at first, because motorists do get stranded all the time, but their sympathy would fade when they learned I was driving a stolen car. And why, they might wonder, had I stolen a car without checking the gas?
I was wondering much the same thing myself. I stayed in lane and let my foot rest easy on the accelerator, trying to remember what the ecology commercials were always telling me about ways to conserve gasoline. No fast starts, no jamming on the brakes, and don’t spend too much time warming up on cold mornings. Sound advice, all of it, but I couldn’t see how it applied, and I clutched the steering wheel and waited for the engine to cut out and the world to cave in.
Neither of these things happened. I found a Chevron station a block from the bridge and told the attendant to fill the tank. The car was a sprawling old Pontiac with an engine that never heard about fuel crises, and I sat there and watched it drink twenty-two gallons of high-test. I wondered what the tank’s capacity might be. Twenty gallons, I decided, figuring the pumps were crooked. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.
The tab came to fifteen dollars and change. I gave the kid a twenty and he gave me a smile in return and pointed to a sign on a pillar between the two pumps. You had to have exact change or a credit card after 8 P.M. Help us thwart crime, the sign urged. I don’t know that they were thwarting anything, but they were certainly taking the profit out of it.
I have a couple of credit cards. I’ve even opened doors with them, although it’s not the cinch TV shows might lead you to believe. But I didn’t want a record of my presence in Queens, nor did I want anyone copying down the Pontiac’s license number. So I let the little snot keep the change, which got me a mean grin, and I drove east on Queens Boulevard mumbling to myself.
It wasn’t the money. What really troubled me was that I’d been driving around unwittingly with an empty tank. The thing is, I don’t steal cars very often. I don’t even drive them all that frequently, and when I do go and rent one for a weekend in the country, the Olins people give it to me with the tank full. I can be halfway to Vermont before I even have to think about gasoline.
I wasn’t going to Vermont tonight, just to Forest Hills, and I could have gone there easily enough on the E train. That’s how I’d made the trip a few days earlier when I did some basic reconnaissance. But I hadn’t felt like coming home by subway, preferring as I do to avoid public transportation when my arms are full of somebody else’s belongings.
And when I found the Pontiac on Seventy-fourth Street, I’d figured it for a sign from on high. GM cars are the easiest for me to get into and the simplest to start, and this one had Jersey plates, so no one would be surprised if I drove it eccentrically. Finally, the owner was unlikely to report it stolen. He’d parked it next to a fire hydrant, so he’d have to assume the cops had towed it away.