The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - By Lawrence Block Page 0,63
sported matching brass hardware, including a pair of clasps, each with its own three-number combination lock.
I carried it into the living room and sat down on the couch with it. Luggage locks in general are more for show than security. Anyone with enough brute strength to pull the ring top off a can of Dr Pepper can knock them loose with a hammer, or pry them off with a screwdriver. A gentler soul can simply run the numbers. There are, after all, only a thousand possibilities, and how long can it take? It’s tedious, starting with 0–0–0 and 0–0–1 and 0–0–2, but once you get going there’s not much to it. If you worked at a positive snail’s pace of five seconds per combination, you’d run twelve in a minute, 120 in ten minutes, and you’d be all the way to 9–9–9 in what, an hour and a half?
Since the mechanisms are pretty simple, they’re also easy to pick, which is what I’d done. Having done so, I’d reset both combinations to 4–2–2, which was the house number of my boyhood home. (That’s where my baseball cards used to be, once upon a time.) I opened them now so that I could put “A Stand-up Triple!” with its companions.
I know, I know. You’re wondering where the attaché case came from. Didn’t Doll and I just spend part of the afternoon searching fruitlessly for it?
Well, much as it pains me to admit it, I haven’t played entirely fair with you. My day actually got underway a little earlier than you (and Doll Cooper) may have been led to believe. See, I left out a few things in the telling….
CHAPTER
Sixteen
I was somewhere, God knows where, picking a lock. Had I been an Iraqi, I might have called it the mother of all locks, because every time I seemed to have opened it I found another more intricate mechanism within. At last the final set of tumblers tumbled, giving me access not to a house or apartment but to the inner recesses of the lock itself. I had done it, I had broken into the lock, and I could wander around in its labyrinthine chambers where no mere human had ever gone before, and—
The burglar alarm went off. Loud, piercing, shrill. Where was the keypad? What was the combination? How could I get out of here?
I rolled over, sat up, blinked, and glared at the alarm clock. There was no keypad to cope with, no combination to be entered. There was a button to push, and I pushed it, and the awful ringing stopped.
But not without having done its job. I was awake, with no hope of finding my way back into the seductive machinery of the dream. You could wait all your life for a dream like that, and then it finally comes along, and there you are, abruptly delivered from it as if by an obstetrician with a golf date in an hour. Maybe if I settled my head on the pillow, maybe if I just thought about locks for a moment—
No.
It was six in the morning, and time for my Sunday to start. I put on a singlet and a pair of nylon running shorts. I pulled my socks on, reached for my Sauconys, then set them aside and got an old pair of New Balance 450s from the closet. I never wore them anymore because they were falling apart, but you couldn’t touch them for comfort.
I put a few things in a fanny pack and hooked it around my waist. I found a terry-cloth sweatband and put it on, picked up a blue-and-white checkered hand towel and tucked that into the waistband of my fanny pack. I let myself out of my apartment, locked up after myself, and put my keys in the fanny pack and zipped it shut.
Outside, the sky was just lightening up, which was more than I could say for myself. I started off walking briskly, and that seemed to me as much as ought to be required of anyone. If a man needs to move any faster than that, let him take a cab.
At Seventy-second Street, I forced myself to turn left, toward Riverside Park and the Hudson River. I walked for another twenty or thirty yards, then made myself ease into a slow trot.
You’re doing it, I told myself. You’re running. You fool, you’re running!
Not for very long, however. I trotted for half a block or so, then switched back to my brisk walking