The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,13

was what it meant.

It meant I was in like Errol, that’s what it meant.

Five

Turning around and walking down the driveway and away from the Mapes house was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done.

Here was the house, an unassailable fortress, and here I was with a perfect way to assail the daylights out of it. And I’d come prepared, my picks and probes at hand, and my hands easily enough encased in the pair of Pliofilm gloves I’d tucked into a pocket. And who was to say I hadn’t been the beneficiary of unwitting wisdom when I brought along the gloves and the tools? Maybe I’d somehow been given to know that an opportunity would knock. Now that it had done so, how could I fail to answer?

I hadn’t phoned, hadn’t established that they were out for the evening, but the house felt empty to me. I read somewhere that a house can actually sound empty, that occupied premises hum inaudibly with the energy of the people within. I don’t know about that, but I know I can sometimes sense a human presence. I didn’t sense it here, and I had some corroborating evidence from the garage; a peek had shown a fat and happy Lexus SUV parked to one side, with plenty of empty space for a second vehicle alongside it.

God, I was itching to do it, chomping at the bit, salivating like all of Pavlov’s dogs rolled into one. My fingertips tingled, and the blood surged in my veins, and it took a measure of self-discipline I hadn’t known I possessed to get me out of there.

Not that getting away from the Mapes house cut off the siren’s song. There were other houses just like Mapes’s, an inner voice reminded me, and every single one of them was sure to have the same happy flaw that would lay it wide open to an enterprising burglar. Why not knock off one of them now? Or even two of them, if time permitted. Why the hell not?

Because a burglary in the neighborhood would put everybody on edge, I told myself, and increase the risk on Friday night. To that the inner voice, resourceful devil that he was, had a persuasive counterargument: a burglary a few doors away, two days before I hit Mapes, would make Friday’s burglary look like part of a string, and Mapes an incidental victim rather than a designated burglaree. Thus nobody would think to look for someone with a grudge against the man, turn up Marty, and work backwards from there.

Knock off that house on the corner, the voice murmured, and they won’t look twice at Mapes. They’ll see a pattern, and they’ll stake out the neighborhood, waiting patiently for the burglar to strike a third time. And he won’t, and nobody will ever figure it out.

You can’t argue with a voice like that. What you can do is keep walking, and that’s what I did—head lowered, hands in pockets, shoulders drawn protectively inward. The voice babbled on. Thanks for sharing, I told it, and walked all the way to the subway, and climbed the platform and caught a train home.

The first thing I did was return my windbreaker to the closet. While I was there, I opened up my hidden compartment—easy enough, if you know how—and stowed my burglar’s tools and the gloves. I made myself a cup of tea and sat in front of the television set. The West Wing was history, and Law & Order was already in its second half, with prosecutor Jack McCoy pulling a dirty trick in an overzealous try for a conviction. Once upon a time TV cops and DAs were all good guys, and then there was a stretch where some of them were bad guys, and now the medium and the viewers have matured to the point where a character can be both at once.

Something unrelated to the story kept me watching even as it made me lose track of the storyline. There was an extra, one of the dozen folks in the jury box, who looked like a woman I’d had a very brief fling with a couple of years ago. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since, and had in fact lost track of her entirely.

And I couldn’t tell if it was her or not. She’d done a little acting, although she hadn’t gotten very far with it. She’d also done a little writing and a little singing, but what she’d done the