The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,39
to do next.
First of all, damage control. The feeling of violation aside, what had I lost?
Well, money. Over eight thousand dollars, which is still a tidy sum, even if it’s not what it used to be. (My grandfather Grimes paid eight thousand dollars for the house my mother was born in, while nowadays there are people in Manhattan—rich ones, admittedly—who pay that much every month in rent.) It hurt to lose the money, but that’s the thing about money: it’s always painful to lose it, but it’s never more pain than you can stand.
Because all it takes to replace it is other money. Barbara Anne Creeley couldn’t replace her class ring, but I could replace the eight grand, and when I did the pain I now felt would go away. So I hated to see my Get Out of Dodge fund depleted all the way to zero, but I knew I’d build it up again, one way or another.
Besides the money, all I could see that I’d lost was time, the time it would take me to make my apartment look as it had before my visitors had come. A certain number of hours, plus a certain number of dollars to replace the lock they’d broken and, now that the horse was stolen, add a more serviceable lock that would lessen the likelihood of the same thing happening again. And some more dollars for a cleaning woman, to whisk away the traces of an alien presence. My neighbor Mrs. Hesch had a woman who cleaned for her once a week, and I’d recruited her occasionally in the past, and could do so again. That would have to wait until the books were on the shelves and the drawers back where they belonged, so general tidying came first, but—
Oh, hell. I was forgetting the damage they’d done to my formerly secret compartment. The fellow who built it for me had moved to the West Coast—Washington State, if I remembered correctly—and I had no idea who I could find to do work like that. If I could reach him I could ask him to recommend someone, but I didn’t know what town he’d gone to or if he was still there, and his name was David Miller, so I could forget about trying a computer search. The thing about computer searches is that they make finding a needle in a haystack as easy as falling off a bicycle. Nothing to it. But finding the right David Miller would be more like trying to find a particular needle in a needle stack. I knew better than to try.
Well, I’d find somebody. There was no rush, because for the time being I didn’t have anything to hide.
I picked up another stack of books, and resumed the task of stowing them on the shelves. As important as putting my place in order, I thought, was dealing with the people who’d done this. Because it was pretty clear that they’d come looking for something, and my eight thousand dollars wasn’t it. It had been worth taking, but it wasn’t worth breaking in for, not to those bastards.
Because they had to be the same gang that broke into the Rogovins the night before.
I mean, who else could it be? No professional burglar for profit would single me out, and no snatch-and-grab junkie opportunist, looking to grab something he could turn into smack or crack, would wend his wobbly way into a doorman building, and—
Ohmigod.
I rushed out into the hall, rang for the elevator, then turned around and darted back into my apartment. My tools were in the ruins of my hidey-hole, where my visitors had left them, and I snatched them up and hurried back to the elevator, which had come and gone while I was getting my tools. Rather than wait for it I took the stairs, hurtling down them, terrified of what I was going to find.
The doorman at 34th and Park had suffocated. It was presumably an accident, tape meant for his mouth covering his nose as well, but maybe someone had decided that an extra piece of tape on the nose would avoid leaving a witness as a loose end. And even if it had been an accident, who was to say they wouldn’t make the same mistake again?
I went to the parcel room, tried the door. It was locked. I put an ear to it and listened, and couldn’t hear a thing but my own heartbeat.