The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,25

anyone would want to use it. Where’s the pleasure in having sex with someone who’s not even capable of knowing what’s going on, let alone matching your moves with moves of her own? Isn’t it a little like romancing an inflatable doll?

Then again, they evidently sell quite a few of those dolls, enough to warrant mass-producing them. There would seem to be a substantial number of men who don’t care if their partner’s having a good time, or if she’s even there at all. And I can see where a woman all goofy on Roofies might have it all over a plastic lady. You wouldn’t get winded blowing her up, and you wouldn’t have the worry that she might suddenly deflate at le moment critique.

I guess Barbara Creeley functioned satisfactorily in her role as a flesh-and-blood inflatable doll, because her partner seemed to be having a good time. He moaned and grunted a lot, and said “Baby, baby” and that sort of thing, and made a lot of noise as he reached the finish line. Then the bed stopped creaking and rocking above me, and all was mercifully silent for a moment, and then his weight shifted and he got up from the bed.

“Not bad,” he said. “You’re a pretty good piece of ass for a dead girl.” And he laughed that deep-throated laugh I’d heard earlier, and said, his tone mock-earnest, “Well, darling? Was it good for you?” and started in laughing all over again.

I stayed where I was. Not bad for a dead girl. But it was just a drug, wasn’t it? Just a couple of Roofies, enough to sedate her but not enough to kill her. He couldn’t really mean it literally, could he?

While I lay there and wondered about it, he clomped around the apartment, making more noise than a man generally makes getting dressed. I heard him yanking drawers out, spilling things, and I had a pretty good idea what was going on. But I couldn’t do anything about it. I kept knowing what the son of a bitch was doing, and I kept being unable to do anything about it.

Eventually he walked off, and I didn’t hear him for a while and wondered if he might have left. Then his footsteps returned, and I heard a buzzing sound. I couldn’t place it, until he spoke and cleared things up for me.

“Your name’s Barbara,” he said, with the air of having just discovered this fact. “Hey, Barbie Doll, how about if I give you a shave? Be a nice surprise for you when you wake up. Make things a little smoother and sweeter for the next man in your life, too.”

The shaver went on buzzing.

“Nah, the hell with it,” he said, and there was a noise which it didn’t take too much imagination to identify as the sound of the electric shaver hitting the floor. “So long,” he said. “Sleep tight, you stupid cow.”

He slammed the door on his way out, and he didn’t stop to lock the locks. I heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs, and I heard the door slam down on the first floor. And then, when I didn’t hear anything more, I set about wriggling and squirming, and the heroic devil-may-care burglar got out from under the bed.

He’d left a godawful mess behind. I’d figured out the noise he was making was a by-product of a search for something to steal; having taken what he could sexually, he was looking to turn a cash profit on the night as well.

Her black leather handbag was on the floor where he’d flung it, its contents strewed all over the place. I scooped up a lipstick and a comb and her checkbook and a set of keys and returned them to her purse. Her wallet, a little French purse of green leather with gold tooling, lay in a corner where he’d flung it; I picked it up and saw that her driver’s license was halfway out of its frame, and figured that’s how he’d learned her name. The license identified her as Barbara Anne Creeley, gave a date of birth that made her thirty-two years old, and showed a picture of a pretty woman with dark hair and about as winning a smile as anyone can manage while being photographed by some schmendrick from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I carried the wallet over to the bedside, past the heap of clothing she’d been wearing. She was sprawled on her back, her head angled