in focus and enjoy it. “My father belonged to the Moose and my mom made the best blueberry pie you ever tasted. They both still do.”
“And what about young Douglas Lord?”
“Because I was, ah, clever with my hands, my father thought I’d make a good plumber. It just didn’t seem like my idea of a good time.”
“The hourly rate of a union plumber’s quite impressive.”
“Yeah, well I’ve never been into working by the hour.”
“So instead you decided to—how do you term it— freelance?”
“A vocation’s a vocation. I had this uncle, the family always kept kind of quiet about him.”
“A black sheep?” she asked, interested.
“I guess you wouldn’t have called him lily white. Seems he’d done some time. Anyway, to keep it short, he came to live with us for a while and worked for my dad.” He shot Whitney a quick, appealing grin. “He was good with his hands, too.”
“I see. So you came by your talent, dare I say, honestly.”
“Jack was good. He was real good except he had a weakness for the bottle. When he gave in to it he got sloppy. Get sloppy, you get caught. One of the first things he taught me was never to drink on the job.”
“I don’t imagine you’re referring to unstopping pipes.”
“No. Jack was a second-rate plumber, but he was a first-class thief. I was fourteen when he taught me to pick a lock. Never been real sure why he took to me. One thing was I liked to read and he liked to hear stories. He wasn’t much on sitting down with a book, but he’d sit there for hours if you’d tell him the story of The Man in the Iron Mask or Don Quixote.”
She’d been aware from the beginning of a sharp intellect and a varied kind of taste. “So young Douglas liked to read.”
“Yeah.” He moved his shoulders and negotiated a curve. “First thing I stole was a book. We weren’t poor, really, but we couldn’t afford to stock the kind of library I wanted.” Needed, he corrected. He needed the books, the escape from the everyday the same way he’d needed food. No one had understood.
“Anyway, Jack liked hearing stories. I remember what I read.”
“Authors hope readers do.”
“No, I mean I remember almost line for line. It’s just the way it is. Got me through school.”
She thought about the ease with which he’d spouted off facts and figures from the guidebook. “You mean you have a photographic memory?”
“I don’t see it in pictures, I just don’t forget, that’s all.” He grinned, thinking. “It got me a scholarship to Princeton.”
Whitney sat up straight. “You went to Princeton?”
His grin widened at her reaction. Until then, he’d never considered the truth more interesting than fiction. “No. I decided rather than college I wanted on-the-job training.”
“You’re telling me you turned down a Princeton scholarship?”
“Yeah. Pre-law seemed pretty cut and dried.”
“Pre-law,” she murmured and had to laugh. “So, you might’ve been a lawyer. Ivy League at that.”
“I’d’ve hated it just as much as I’d’ve hated unstopping johns. There was Uncle Jack. He always said he didn’t have any kids and wanted to pass on his trade.”
“Ah, a traditionalist.”
“Yeah, well, in his way, he was. I caught on quick. I had a hell of a lot more fun tripping a lock than I did conjugating verbs, but Jack had this thing about education. He wouldn’t take me on a real job until I had my high-school diploma. And a little math and science come in handy when you’re dealing with security systems.”
With his talent, she imagined Doug could’ve been one of the top engineers in the business. She let it pass. “Very sensible.”
“We went on the road. Did pretty well for ourselves for about five years. Small, clean jobs. Hotels mostly. One memorable night we picked up ten thousand at the Waldorf.” He smiled, reminiscently. “We went to Vegas and dropped most of it, but it was a hell of a time.”
“Easy come, easy go?”
“If you can’t have fun with it, there’s no use taking it.”
She had to smile at that. Her father was fond of saying if you couldn’t have fun with it, there was no use making it. She supposed he’d appreciate Doug’s slight variation on the theme.
“Jack had this idea about hitting this jewelry store. Would’ve set us up for years. We only had a few details to work out.”
“What happened?”
“Jack fell off the wagon. He tried to pull the job on his own, what you might call an