The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

1

The night it all started, the whole strange spiral, we were having our usual midweek poker game — four fortyish men who work in the financial business getting together for beer and bawdy jokes and straight poker. No wild card games. We hate them.

This was summer, and vacation time, and so it happened that the game was held two weeks in a row at my house. Jan had taken the kids to see her Aunt Wendy and Uncle Verne at their fishing cabin, and so I offered to have the game at my house this week, too. With nobody there to supervise, the beer could be laced with a little bourbon, and the jokes could get even bawdier. With the wife and kids in the house, you’re always at least a little bit intimidated.

Mike and Bob came together, bearing gifts, which in this case meant the kind of sexy magazines our wives did not want in the house in case the kids might stumble across them. At least that’s what they say. I think they sense, and rightly, that the magazines might give their spouses bad ideas about taking the secretary out for a few after-work drinks, or stopping by a singles bar some night.

We got the chips and cards set up at the table, we got the first beers open (Mike chasing a shot of bourbon with his beer), and we started passing the dirty magazines around with tenth-grade glee. The magazines compensated, I suppose, for the balding head, the bloating belly, the stooping shoulders. Deep in the heart of every hundred-year-old man is a horny fourteen-year-old boy.

All this, by the way, took place up in the attic. The four of us got to know one another when we all moved into what city planners called a “transitional neighborhood.” There were some grand old houses that could be renovated with enough money and real care. The city designated a ten-square-block area as one it wanted to restore to shiny new luster. Jan and I chose a crumbling Victorian. You wouldn’t recognize it today. And that includes the attic, which I’ve turned into a very nice den.

“Pisses me off,” Mike O’Brien said. “He’s always late.”

And that was true. Neil Solomon was always late. Never by that much but always late nonetheless.

“At least tonight he has a good excuse,” Bob Genter said.

“He does?” Mike said. “He’s probably swimming in his pool.” Neil recently got a bonus that made him the first owner of a full-size outdoor pool in our neighborhood.

“No, he’s got patrol. But he’s stopping at nine. He’s got somebody trading with him for next week.”

“Oh, hell,” Mike said, obviously sorry that he’d complained. “I didn’t know that.”

Bob Genter’s handsome black head nodded solemnly.

Patrol is something we all take very seriously in this newly restored “transitional neighborhood.” Eight months ago, the burglaries started, and they’ve gotten pretty bad. My house has been burglarized once and vandalized once. Bob and Mike have had curb-sitting cars stolen. Neil’s wife, Sarah, was surprised in her own kitchen by a burglar. And then there was the killing four months ago, man and wife who’d just moved into the neighborhood, savagely stabbed to death in their own bed. The police caught the guy a few days later trying to cash some of the traveler’s checks he’d stolen after killing his prey. He was typical of the kind of man who infested this neighborhood after sundown: a twentyish junkie stoned to the point of psychosis on various street drugs, and not at all averse to murdering people he envied and despised. He also knew a whole hell of a lot about fooling burglar alarms.

After the murders there was a neighborhood meeting, and that’s when we came up with the patrol, something somebody’d read about being popular back east. People think that a nice middle-sized Midwestern city like ours doesn’t have major crime problems. I invite them to walk many of these streets after dark. They’ll quickly be disabused of that notion. Anyway, the patrol worked this way: each night, two neighborhood people got in the family van and patrolled the ten-block area that had been restored. If they saw anything suspicious, they used their cellular phones and called police. We jokingly called it the Baby-Boomer Brigade. The patrol had one strict rule: you were never to take direct action unless somebody’s life was at stake. Always, always use the cellular phone and call the police.

Neil had patrol tonight. He’d be rolling in here in another half hour. The patrol had two shifts: early, eight to ten; late, ten to twelve.

Bob said, “You hear what Evans suggested?”

“About guns?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Makes me a little nervous,” I said.

“Me, too,” Bob said. For somebody who’d grown up in the worst area of the city, Bob Genter was a very polished guy. Whenever he joked that he was the token black, Neil always countered with the fact that he was the token Jew, just as Mike was the token Catholic and I was the token Methodist. We were friends of convenience, I suppose, but we all really did like one another, something that was demonstrated when Neil had a cancer scare a few years back. Bob, Mike, and I were in his hospital room twice a day, all eight days running.

“I think it’s time,” Mike said. “The bad guys have guns, so the good guys should have guns.”

“The good guys are the cops,” I said. “Not us.”

“People start bringing guns on patrol,” Bob said, “somebody innocent is going to get shot.”

“So some night one of us here is on patrol and we see a bad guy and he sees us and before the cops get there, the bad guy shoots us? You don’t think that’s going to happen?”

“It could happen, Mike,” I said, “but I just don’t think that justifies carrying guns.”

The argument gave us something to do while we waited for Neil.

“Sorry I’m late,” Neil Solomon said after he followed me up to the attic and came inside.

“We already drank all the beer,” Mike O’Brien said loudly.

Neil smiled. “That gut you’re carrying lately, I can believe that you drank all the beer.”

Mike always enjoyed being put down by Neil, possibly because most people were a bit intimidated by him — he had that angry Irish edge — and he seemed to enjoy Neil’s skilled and fearless handling of him. He laughed with real pleasure.

Neil sat down, I got him a beer from the tiny fridge I keep up here, cards were dealt, seven-card stud was played.

Bob said, “How’d patrol go tonight?”

Neil shrugged. “No problems.”

“I still say we should carry guns,” Mike said.

“You’re not going to believe this, but I agree with you,” Neil said.

“Seriously?” Mike said.

“Oh, great,” I said to Bob Genter. “Another beer commercial cowboy.”

Bob smiled. “Where I come from, we didn’t have cowboys, we had ‘mothas.’ ” He laughed. “Mean mothas, let me tell you. And practically all of them carried guns.”

“That mean you’re siding with them?” I said.

Bob looked at his cards again, then shrugged. “Haven’t decided yet, I guess.”

I didn’t think the anti-gun people were going to lose this round. But I worried about the round after it, a few months down the line, when the subject of carrying guns came up again. All the TV coverage violence gets in this city, people are more and more developing a siege mentality.

“Play cards,” Mike said, “and leave the debate society crap till later.”

Good idea.

We played cards.

In forty-five minutes, I lost $63.82. Mike and Neil always played as if their lives were at stake. All you had to do was watch their faces. Gunfighters couldn’t have looked more serious or determined.

The first pit stop came just after ten o’clock, and Neil took it. There was a John on the second floor between the bedrooms, and another John on the first floor.

Neil said, “The good Dr. Gottesfeld had to give me a finger-wave this afternoon, gents, so this may take a while.”

“You should trade that prostate of yours in for a new one,” Mike said.

“Believe me, I’d like to.”

While Neil was gone, the three of us started talking about the patrol again, and whether we should go armed.

We made the same old arguments. The passion was gone. We were just marking time waiting for Neil, and we knew it.

Finally, Mike said, “Let me see some of those magazines again.”

“You got some identification?” I said.

“I’ll show you some identification,” Mike said.

“Spare me,” I said. “I’ll just give you the magazines.”

“You mind if I use the John on the first floor?” Bob said.

“Yeah, it would really piss me off,” I said.

“Really?”

That was one thing about Bob. He always fell for deadpan humor.

“No, not really,” I said. “Why would I care if you used the John on the first floor?”

He grinned. “Thought maybe they were segregated facilities or something.”

He left.

Mike said, “We’re lucky, you know that?”

“You mean me and you?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucky how?”

“Those two guys. They’re great guys. I wish I had them at work.” He shook his head. “Treacherous bastards. That’s all I’m around all day long.”

“No offense, but I’ll bet you can be pretty treacherous yourself.”

He smiled. “Look who’s talking.”

The first time I heard it, I thought it was some kind of animal noise from outside, a dog or a cat in some kind of discomfort maybe. Mike, who was dealing himself a hand of solitaire, didn’t even look up from his cards.

But the second time I heard the sound, Mike and I both looked up. And then we heard the exploding sound of breaking glass.

“What the hell is that?” Mike said.

“Let’s go find out.”

Just about the time we reached the bottom of the attic steps, we saw Neil coming out of the second-floor John. “You hear that?”

“Sure as hell did,” I said.

We reached the staircase leading to the first floor. Everything was dark. Mike reached for the light switch, but I brushed his hand away.

I put a ssshing finger to my lips and then showed him the Louisville Slugger I’d grabbed from Tim’s room. He’s my nine-year-old, and his most devout wish is to be a good baseball player. His mother has convinced him that just because I went to college on a baseball scholarship, I was a good player. I wasn’t. I was a lucky player.

I led the way downstairs, keeping the bat ready at all times.

“You sonofabitch!”

The voice belonged to Bob.

More smashing glass.

I listened to the passage of the sound. Kitchen. Had to be the kitchen.

In the shadowy light from the street, I saw their faces, Mike’s and Neil’s. They looked scared.

I hefted the bat some more and then started moving fast to the kitchen.

Just as we passed through the dining room, I heard something heavy hit the kitchen floor. Something human and heavy.

I got the kitchen light on.

He was at the back door. White. Tall. Blond shoulder-length hair. Filthy tan T-shirt. Greasy jeans. He had grabbed one of Jan’s carving knives from the huge iron rack that sits atop the butcher-block island. The one curious thing about him was the eyes: there was a malevolent iridescence to the blue pupils, an angry but somehow alien intelligence, a silver glow.

Bob was sprawled facedown on the tile floor. His arms were spread wide on either side of him. He didn’t seem to be moving. Chunks and fragments of glass were strewn everywhere across the floor. My uninvited guest had smashed two or three of the colorful pitchers we’d bought the winter before in Mexico.

“Run!” the burglar cried to somebody on the back porch.

He turned, waving the butcher knife back and forth to keep us at bay.

Footsteps out the back door.

The burglar held us off a few more moments, but then I gave him a little bit of tempered Louisville Slugger wood right across the wrist. The knife went clattering.

By this time, Mike and Neil were pretty crazed. They jumped him, hurled him back against the door, and then started putting in punches wherever they’d fit.

“Hey!” I said, and tossed Neil the bat. “Just hold this. If he makes a move, open up his head. Otherwise leave him alone.”

They really were crazed, like pit bulls who’d been pulled back just as a fight was starting to get good.

“Mike, call the cops and tell them to send a car.”

I got Bob up and walking. I took him into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet lid. I found a lump the size of an egg on the back of his head. I soaked a clean washcloth with cold water and pressed it against the lump. Bob took it from there.

“You want an ambulance?” I said.

“An ambulance? Are you kidding? You must think I’m a ballet dancer or something.”

I shook my head. “No. I know better than that. I’ve got a male cousin who’s a ballet dancer, and he’s one tough sonofabitch, believe me. You—” I smiled. “You aren’t that tough, Bob.”

“I don’t need an ambulance. I’m fine.”

He winced and tamped the washcloth tighter against his head. “Just a little headache is all.” He looked young suddenly, the aftershock of fear in his brown eyes. “Scared the hell out of me. Heard something when I was leaving the John. Went out to the kitchen to check it out. He jumped me.”

“What’d he hit you with?”

“No idea.”

“I’ll go get you some whiskey. Just sit tight.”

“I love sitting in bathrooms, man.”

I laughed. “I don’t blame you.”

When I got back to the kitchen, they were gone. All three of them. Then I saw the basement door. It stood open a few inches. I could see dusty light in the space between door and frame. The basement was our wilderness. We hadn’t had the time or money to really fix it up yet. We were counting on this year’s Christmas bonus from the Windsor Financial Group to help us set it right.

I went down the stairs. The basement is one big, mostly unused room except for the washer and dryer in the corner. All the boxes and odds and ends that should have gone to the attic instead went down here. It smells damp most of the time. The idea is to turn it into a family room for when the boys are older. These days it’s mostly inhabited by stray waterbugs.

When I reached the bottom step, I saw them. There are four metal support poles in the basement, near each corner. They had him lashed to a pole in the east quadrant, lashed his wrists behind him with rope found in the tool room. They also had him gagged with what looked like a pillowcase. His eyes were big and wide. He looked scared, and I didn’t blame him. I was scared, too.

“What the hell are you guys doing?”

“Just calm down, Papa Bear,” Mike said. That’s his name for me whenever he wants to convey to people that I’m kind of this old fuddy-duddy. It so happens that Mike is two years older than I am, and it also happens that I’m not a fuddy-duddy. Jan has assured me of that, and she’s completely impartial.

“Knock off the Papa Bear bullshit. Did you call the cops?”

“Not yet,” Neil said. “Just calm down a little, all right?”

“You haven’t called the cops. You’ve got some guy tied up and gagged in my basement. You haven’t even asked how Bob is. And you want me to calm down.”

Mike came up to me then. He still had that air of pit-bull craziness about him, frantic, uncontrollable, alien.

“We’re going to do what the cops can’t do, man,” he said. “We’re going to sweat this sonofabitch. We’re going to make him tell us who he was with tonight, and then we’re going to make him give us every single name of every single bad guy who works this neighborhood. And then we’ll turn all the names over to the cops.”

“It’s just an extension of the patrol,” Neil said. “Just keeping our neighborhood safe is all.”

“You guys are nuts,” I said, and turned back toward the steps. “I’m going up and call the cops.”

That’s when I realized just how crazed Mike was. “You aren’t going anywhere, man. You’re going to stay here and help us break this bastard down. You’re going to do your goddamned neighborhood duty.”

He’d grabbed my sleeve so hard that he’d torn it at the shoulder. We both discovered this at the same time.

I expected him to look sorry. He didn’t. In fact, he was smirking at me. “Don’t be such a wimp, Aaron,” he said.

2

Mike led the charge getting the kitchen cleaned up. I think he was feeling guilty about calling me a wimp with such angry exuberance. Now I understood how lynch mobs got formed. One guy like Mike stirring people up by alternately insulting them and urging them on.

After the kitchen was put back in order, and after I’d taken inventory to find that nothing had been stolen, I went to the refrigerator and got beers for everybody. Bob had drifted back to the kitchen, too.

“All right,” I said. “Now that we’ve all calmed down, I want to walk over to that yellow kitchen wall phone there and call the police. Any objections?”

“I think blue would look better in here than yellow,” Neil said.

“Funny,” I said.

They looked like themselves now, no feral madness on the faces of Mike and Neil, no winces on Bob’s.

I started across the floor to the phone.

Neil grabbed my arm. Not with the same insulting force Mike had used on me. But enough to get the job done.

“I think Mike’s right,” Neil said. “I think we should grill that bastard a little bit.”

I shook my head, politely removed his hand from my forearm, and proceeded to the phone.

“This isn’t just your decision alone,” Mike said.

He’d finally had his way. He’d succeeded in making me angry. I turned around and looked at him. “This is my house, Mike. If you don’t like my decisions, then I’d suggest you leave.”

We both took steps toward each other. Mike would no doubt win any battle we had, but I’d at least be able to inflict a little damage, and right now that’s all I was thinking about.

Neil got between us.

“Hey,” he said. “For God’s sake, you two, c’mon. We’re friends, remember?”

“This is my house,” I said, my words childish in my ears.

“Yeah, but we live in the same neighborhood, Aaron,” Mike said, “which makes this ‘our’ problem.”

“He’s right, Aaron,” Bob said from the breakfast nook. There’s a window there where I sometimes sit to watch all the animals on sunny days. I saw a mother raccoon and four baby raccoons one day, marching single-file across the grass. My grandparents were the last generation to live on the farm. My father came to town here and ultimately became a vice president of a ball-bearing company. Raccoons are a lot more pleasant to gaze upon than people.

“He’s not right,” I said to Bob. “He’s wrong. We’re not cops, we’re not bounty hunters, we’re not trackers. We’re a bunch of goddamned guys who peddle stocks and bonds. Mike and Neil shouldn’t have tied him up downstairs — that happens to be illegal, at least the way they went about it — and now I’m going to call the cops.”

“Yes, that poor thing,” Mike said. “Aren’t we just picking on him, though? Tell you what, why don’t we make him something to eat?”

“Just make sure we have the right wine to go with it,” Neil said. “Properly chilled, of course.”

“Maybe we could get him a chick,” Bob said.

“With bombers out to here,” Mike said, indicating with his hands where “here” was.

I couldn’t help it. I smiled. They were all being ridiculous. A kind of fever had caught them.

“You really want to go down there and question him?” I said to Neil.

“Yes. We can ask him things the cops can’t.”

“Scare the bastard a little,” Mike said. “So he’ll tell us who was with him tonight, and who else works this neighborhood.” He came over and put his hand out. “God, man, you’re one of my best friends. I don’t want you mad at me.”

Then he hugged me, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with men doing, but to the extent I could, I hugged him back.

“Friends?” he said.

“Friends,” I said. “But I still want to call the cops.”

“And spoil our fun?” Neil said.

“And spoil your fun.”

“I say we take it to a vote,” Bob said.

“This isn’t a democracy,” I said. “It’s my house and I’m the king. I don’t want to have a vote.”

“Can we ask him one question?” Bob said.

I sighed. They weren’t going to let go. “One question?”

“The names of the guys he was with tonight.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. That way we get him and his pals off the street.”

“And then I call the cops?”

“Then,” Mike said, “you call the cops.”

“One question,” Neil said.

While we finished our beers, we argued a little more, but they had a lot more spirit left than I did. I was tired now and missing Jan and the kids and feeling lonely. These three guys had become strangers to me tonight. Very old boys eager to play at boy games once again.

“One question,” I said. “Then I call the cops.”

I led the way down, sneezing as I did so.

There’s always enough dust floating around in the basement to play hell with my sinuses.

The guy was his same sullen self, glaring at us as we descended the stairs and then walked over to him. He smelled of heat and sweat and city grime. The long bare arms sticking out of his filthy T-shirt told tattoo tales of writhing snakes and leaping panthers. The arms were joined in the back with rope. His jaw still flexed, trying to accommodate the intrusion of the gag.

“Maybe we should castrate him,” Mike said, walking up close to the guy. “You like that, scumbag? If we castrated you?”

If the guy felt any fear, it wasn’t evident in his eyes. All you could see there was the usual contempt.

“I’ll bet this is the jerk who broke into the Donaldsons’ house a couple weeks ago,” Neil said.

Now he walked up to the guy. But he was more ambitious than Mike had been. Neil spat in the guy’s face.

“Hey,” I said, “cool it.”

Neil glared at me. “Yeah, I wouldn’t hurt his feelings, would I?”

Then he suddenly turned back on the guy, raised his fist, and started to swing. All I could do was shove him. That sent his punch angling off to the right, missing our burglar by about half a foot.

“You asshole,” Neil said, turning back on me now.

But Mike was there, between us.

“You know what we’re doing? We’re making this jerk happy. He’s gonna have some nice stories to tell all his criminal friends.”

He was right. The burglar was one who got to look all cool and composed. We looked like squabbling brats. As if to confirm this, a hint of amusement played in the burglar’s blue eyes.

“Oh, hell, Aaron, I’m sorry,” Neil said, putting his hand out. This was like a political convention, all the handshaking going on.

“So am I, Neil,” I said. “That’s why I want to call the cops and get this over with.”

And that’s when he chose to make his move, the burglar. As soon as I mentioned the cops, he probably realized that this was going to be his last opportunity.

He waited until we were just finishing up with the handshake, when we were all focused on one another. Then he took off running. We could see that he’d slipped the rope. He went straight for the stairs, angling out around us like a running back seeing daylight. He even stuck his long, tattooed arm out as if he were trying to repel a tackle.

“Hey!” Bob shouted. “He’s getting away.”

He was at the stairs by the time we could gather ourselves enough to go after him. But when we moved, we moved fast, and in virtual unison.

By the time I got my hand on the cuff of his left jeans leg, he was close enough to the basement door to open it.

I yanked hard and ducked out of the way of his kicking foot. By now I was as crazy as Mike and Neil had been earlier. There was adrenaline, and great anger. He wasn’t just a burglar, he was all burglars, intent not merely on stealing things from me but on hurting my family, too. He hadn’t had time to take the gag from his mouth.

This time, I grabbed booted foot and leg and started hauling him back down the stairs. At first he was able to hold on to the door, but when I wrenched his foot rightward, he tried to scream behind the gag. He let go of the doorknob.

The next half minute is still unclear in my mind. I started running down the stairs, dragging him with me. All I wanted to do was get him on the basement floor again, turn him over to the others to watch, and then go call the cops.

But somewhere in those few seconds when I was hauling him back down the steps, I heard edge of stair meeting back of skull. The others heard it, too, because their shouts and curses died in their throats.

When I turned around, I saw the blood running fast and red from his nose. The blue eyes no longer held contempt. They were starting to roll up white in the back of his head.

“God,” I said. “He’s hurt.”

“I think he’s a lot more than hurt,” Mike said.

“Help me carry him upstairs.”

We got him on the kitchen floor. Mike and Neil rushed around soaking paper towels. We tried to revive him. Bob, who kept wincing from his headache, tried the guy’s wrist, ankle, and throat for a pulse. None. His nose and mouth were bloody. Very bloody.

“No way you could die from hitting your head like that,” Neil said.

“Sure you could,” Mike said. “You hit it just the right way.”

“He can’t be dead,” Neil said. “I’m going to try his pulse again.”

Bob, who obviously took Neil’s second opinion personally, frowned and rolled his eyes. “He’s dead, man. He really is.”

“Bullshit.”

“You a doctor or something?” Bob said.

Neil smiled nervously. “No, but I play one on TV.”

So Neil tried the pulse points. His reading was exactly what Bob’s reading had been.

“See,” Bob said.

I guess none of us was destined to ever quite be an adult.

“Man,” Neil said, looking down at the long, cold, unmoving form of the burglar. “He’s really dead.”

“What the hell’re we gonna do?” Mike said.

“We’re going to call the police,” I said, and started for the phone.

“The hell we are,” Mike said. “The hell we are.”

3

Maybe half an hour after we laid him on the kitchen floor, he started to smell. We’d looked for identification and found none. He was just the Burglar.

We sat at the kitchen table, sharing a fifth of Old Grand-Dad and innumerable beers.

We’d taken two votes, and they’d come up ties. Two for calling the police, Bob and I; two for not calling the police, Mike and Neil.

“All we have to tell them,” I said, “is that we tied him up so he wouldn’t get away.”

“And then they say,” Mike said, “so why didn’t you call us before now?”

“We just lie about the time a little,” I said. “Tell them we called them within twenty minutes.”

“Won’t work,” Neil said.

“Why not?” Bob said.

“Medical examiner can fix the time of death,” Neil said.

“Not that close.”

“Close enough so that the cops might question our story,” Neil said. “By the time they get here, he’ll have been dead at least an hour, hour and a half.”

“And then we get our names in the paper for not reporting the burglary or the death right away,” Mike said. “Brokerages just love publicity like that.”

“I’m calling the cops right now,” I said, and started up for the table.

“Think about Tomlinson a minute,” Neil said.

Tomlinson was my boss at the brokerage. “What about him?”

“Remember how he canned Dennis Bryce when Bryce’s ex-wife took out a restraining order on him?”

“This is different,” I said.

“The hell it is,” Mike said. “Neil’s right, none of our bosses will like publicity like this. We’ll all sound a little — crazy — you know, keeping him locked up in the basement. And then killing him when he tried to get away.”

They all looked at me.

“You bastards,” I said. “I was the one who wanted to call the police in the first place. And I sure as hell didn’t try to kill him on purpose.”

“Looking back on it,” Neil said, “I guess you were right, Aaron. We should’ve called the cops right away.”

“Now’s a great time to realize that,” I said.

“Maybe they’ve got a point,” Bob said softly, glancing at me, then glancing nervously away.

“Oh, great. You, too?” I said.

“They just might kick my black ass out of there if I had any publicity that involved somebody getting killed,” Bob said.

“He was a frigging burglar,” I said.

“But he’s dead,” Neil said.

“And we killed him,” Mike said.

“I appreciate you saying ‘we,’ ” I said.

“I know a good place,” Bob said.

I looked at him carefully, afraid of what he was going to say next.

“Forget it,” I said.

“A good place for what?” Neil said.

“Dumping the body,” Bob said.

“No way,” I said.

This time, when I got up, nobody tried to stop me. I walked over to the yellow wall telephone.

I wondered if the cozy kitchen would ever feel the same to me now that a dead body had been laid upon its floor.

I had to step over him to reach the phone. The smell was even more sour now.

“You know how many bodies get dumped in the river that never wash up?” Bob said.

“No,” I said, “and you don’t either.”

“Lots,” he said.

“There’s a scientific appraisal for you. ‘Lots.’ ”

“Lots and lots, probably,” Neil said, taking up Bob’s argument.

Mike grinned. “Lots and lots and lots.”

“Thank you, Professor,” I said.

I lifted the receiver and dialed 0.

“Operator.”

“The Police Department, please.”

“Is this an emergency?” asked the young woman. Usually, I would have spent more time wondering if the sweetness of her voice was matched by the sweetness of her face and body. I’m still a face man. I suppose it’s my romantic side. “Is this an emergency?” she repeated.

“No; no, it isn’t.”

“I’ll connect you,” she said.

“You think your kids’ll be able to handle it?” Neil said.

“No mind games,” I said.

“No mind games at all,” he said. “I’m asking you a very realistic question. The police have some doubts about our story and then the press gets ahold of it, and bam. We’re the lead story on all three channels. ‘Did four middle-class men murder the burglar they captured?’ The press even goes after the kids these days. ‘Do you think your daddy murdered that burglar, son?’ ”

“Good evening. Police Department.”

I started to speak, but I couldn’t somehow. My voice wouldn’t work. That’s the only way I can explain it.

“The six o’clock news five nights running,” Neil said softly behind me. “And the DA can’t endorse any kind of vigilante activity, so he nails us on involuntary manslaughter.”

“Hello? This is the Police Department,” said the black female voice on the phone.

Neil was there then, reaching me as if by magic.

He took the receiver gently from my hand and hung it back up on the phone again.

“Let’s go have another drink and see what Bob’s got in mind, all right?”

He led me, as if I were a hospital patient, slowly and carefully back to the table, where Bob, over more whiskey, slowly and gently laid out his plan.

The next morning, three of us phoned in sick. Bob went to work because he had an important meeting.

Around noon — a sunny day when a softball game and a cold six-pack of beer sounded good — Neil and Mike came over. They looked as bad as I felt, and no doubt looked, myself.

We sat out on the patio eating the Hardee’s lunch they’d bought. I’d need to play softball to work off some of the calories I was eating.

Birdsong and soft breezes and the smell of fresh-cut grass should have made our patio time enjoyable. But I had to wonder if we’d ever enjoy anything again. I just kept seeing the body momentarily arced above the roaring waters of the dam, and dropping into white, churning turbulence.

“You think we did the right thing?” Neil said.

“Now’s a hell of a time to ask that,” I said.

“Of course we did the right thing,” Mike said. “What choice did we have? It was either that or get our asses arrested.”

“So you don’t have any regrets?” Neil said.

Mike sighed. “I didn’t say that. I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened in the first place.”

“Maybe Aaron was right all along,” Neil said.

“About what?”

“About going to the cops.”

“Goddamn,” Mike said, sitting up from his slouch. We all wore button-down shirts without ties and with the sleeves rolled up. Somehow there was something profane about wearing shorts and T-shirts on a workday. We even wore pretty good slacks. We were those kind of people. “Goddamn.”

“Here he goes,” Neil said.

“I can’t believe you two,” Mike said. “We should be happy that everything went so well last night — and what’re we doing? Sitting around here pissing and moaning.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s over,” I said.

“Why the hell not?” Mike said.

“Because there’s still one left.”

“One what?”

“One burglar.”

“So?”

“So you don’t think he’s going to get curious about what the hell happened to his partner?”

“What’s he gonna do?” Mike said. “Go to the cops?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? You’re crazy. He goes to the cops, he’d be setting himself up for a robbery conviction.”

“Not if he tells them we murdered his pal.”

Neil said, “Aaron’s got a point. What if this guy goes to the cops?”

“He’s not going to the cops,” Mike said. “No way he’s going to the cops at all.”

4

I was dozing on the couch, a Cubs game on the TV set, when the phone rang around nine that evening. I hadn’t heard from Jan yet, so I expected it would be her. Whenever we’re apart, we call each other at least once a day.

The phone machine picks up on the fourth ring, so I had to scramble to beat it.

“Hello?”

Nothing. But somebody was on the line. Listening.

“Hello?”

I never play games with silent callers. I just hang up. I did so now.

Two innings later, having talked to Jan, having made myself a tuna fish sandwich on rye, found a package of potato chips I thought we’d finished off at the poker game, and gotten myself a new can of beer, I sat down to watch the last inning. The Cubs had a chance of winning. I said a silent prayer to the god of baseball.

The phone rang.

I mouthed several curses around my mouthful of tuna sandwich and went to the phone.

“Hello?” I said, trying to swallow the last of the bite.

My silent friend again.

I slammed the phone.

The Cubs got two more singles. I started on the chips, and I had polished off the beer and was thinking of getting another one when the phone rang again.

I had a suspicion of who was calling and then saying nothing — but I didn’t really want to think about it.

Then I decided there was an easy way to handle this situation. I’d just let the phone machine take it. If my anonymous friend wanted to talk to a phone machine, good for him.

Four rings. The phone machine took over, Jan’s pleasant voice saying that we weren’t home but would be happy to call you back if you’d just leave your number.

I waited to hear dead air and then a click.

Instead, a familiar female voice said, “Aaron, it’s Louise. Bob—” Louise was Bob’s wife. She was crying. I ran from the couch to the phone machine in the hall.

“Hello, Louise. It’s Aaron.”

“Oh, Aaron. It’s terrible.”

“What happened, Louise?”

“Bob—” More tears. “He electrocuted himself tonight out in the garage.” She said that a plug had accidentally fallen into a bowl of water, according to the fire captain on the scene, and Bob hadn’t noticed this and put the plug into the outlet and—

Bob had a woodcraft workshop in his garage, a large and sophisticated one. He knew what he was doing.

“He’s dead, Aaron. He’s dead.”

“Oh, God, Louise. I’m sorry.”

“He was so careful with electricity, too. It’s just so hard to believe—”

Yes, I thought. Yes, it was hard to believe. I thought of last night. Of the burglars — one who’d died, one who’d gotten away.

“Why don’t I come over?”

“Oh, thank you, Aaron, but I need to be alone with the children. But if you could call Neil and Mike—”

“Of course.”

“Thanks for being such good friends, you and Jan.”

“Don’t be silly, Louise. The pleasure’s ours.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. When I’m — you know.”

“Good night, Louise.”

Mike and Neil were at my place within twenty minutes. We sat in the kitchen again, where we were last night.

I said, “Either of you get any weird phone calls tonight?”

“You mean just silence?” Neil said.

“Right.”

“I did,” Mike said. “Tracy was afraid it was that pervert who called all last winter.”

“I did, too,” Neil said. “Three of them.”

“Then a little while ago, Bob dies out in his garage,” I said. “Some coincidence.”

“Hey, Aaron,” Mike said. “Is that why you got us over here? Because you don’t think it was an accident?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t an accident,” I said. “Bob knew what he was doing with his tools. He didn’t notice a plug that had fallen into a bowl of water?”

“He’s coming after us,” Neil said.

“Oh, God,” Mike said. “Not you, too.”

“He calls us, gets us on edge,” I said. “And then he kills Bob. Making it look like an accident.”

“These are pretty bright people,” Mike said sarcastically.

“You notice the burglar’s eyes?” Neil said.

“I did,” I said. “He looked very bright.”

“And spooky,” Neil said. “Never saw eyes like that before.”

“I can shoot your theory right in the butt,” Mike said.

“How?” I said.

He leaned forward, sipped his beer. I’d thought about putting out some munchies, but somehow that seemed wrong given poor Bob’s death and the phone calls. The beers we had to have. The munchies were too festive.

“Here’s how. There are two burglars, right? One gets caught, the other runs. And given the nature of burglars, keeps on running. He wouldn’t even know who was in the house last night, except for Aaron, and that’s only because he’s the owner and his name would be in the phone book. But he wouldn’t know anything about Bob or Neil or me. No way he’d have been able to track down Bob.”

I shook my head. “You’re overlooking the obvious.”

“Like what?”

“Like he runs off last night, gets his car, and then parks in the alley to see what’s going to happen.”

“Right,” Neil said. “Then he sees us bringing his friend out wrapped in a blanket. He follows us to the dam and watches us throw his friend in.”

“And,” I said, “everybody had his car here last night. Very easy for him to write down all the license numbers.”

“So he kills Bob,” Neil said. “And starts making the phone calls to shake us up.”

“Why Bob?”

“Maybe he hates black people,” I said.

Mike looked first at me and then at Neil. “You know what this is?”

“Here he goes,” Neil said.

“No; no, I’m serious here. This is Catholic guilt.”

“How can it be Catholic guilt when I’m Jewish?” Neil said.

“In a culture like ours, everybody is a little bit Jewish and a little bit Catholic, anyway,” Mike said. “So you guys are in the throes of Catholic guilt. You feel bad about what we had to do last night — and we did have to do it, we really didn’t have any choice — and the guilt starts to prey on your mind. So poor Bob electrocutes himself accidentally, and you immediately think it’s the second burglar.”

“He followed him,” Neil said.

“What?” Mike said.

“That’s what he did, I bet. The burglar. Followed Bob around all day trying to figure out what was the best way to kill him. You know, the best way that would look like an accident. So then he finds out about the workshop and decides it’s perfect.”

“That presumes,” Mike said, “that one of us is going to be next.”

“Hell, yes,” Neil said. “That’s why he’s calling us. Shake us up. Sweat us out. Let us know that he’s out there somewhere, just waiting. And that we’re next.”

“I’m going to follow you to work tomorrow, Neil,” I said. “And Mike’s going to be with me.”

“You guys are having breakdowns. You really are,” Mike said.

“We’ll follow Neil tomorrow,” I said. “And then on Saturday, you and Neil can follow me. If he’s following us around, then we’ll see it. And then we can start following him. We’ll at least find out who he is.”

“And then what?” Mike said. “Suppose we do find out where he lives? Then what the hell do we do?”

Neil said, “I guess we worry about that when we get there, don’t we?”

In the morning, I picked Mike up early. We stopped off for doughnuts and coffee. He’s like my brother, not a morning person. Crabby. Our conversation was at a minimum, though he did say, “I could’ve used the extra hour’s sleep this morning. Instead of this crap, I mean.”

As agreed, we parked half a block from Neil’s house. Also as agreed, Neil emerged exactly at 7:35. Kids were already in the wide suburban streets on skateboards and rollerblades. No other car could be seen, except for a lone silver BMW in a driveway far down the block.

We followed him all the way to work. Nobody else followed him. Nobody.

When I dropped Mike off at his office, he said, “You owe me an hour’s sleep.”

“Two hours,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Tomorrow, you and Neil follow me around.”

“No way,” he said.

There are times when only blunt anger will work with Mike. “It was your idea not to call the police, remember? I’m not up for any of your sulking, Mike. I’m really not.”

He sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

I drove for two and a half hours Saturday morning. I hit a hardware store, a lumber yard, and a Kmart. At noon, I pulled into a McDonald’s. The three of us had some lunch.

“You didn’t see anybody even suspicious?”

“Not even suspicious, Aaron,” Neil said. “I’m sorry.”

“This is all bullshit. He’s not going to follow us around.”

“I want to give it one more chance,” I said.

Mike made a face. “I’m not going to get up early, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”

I got angry again. “Bob’s dead, or have you forgotten?”

“Yeah, Aaron,” Mike said. “Bob is dead. He got electrocuted. Accidentally.”

I said, “You really think it was an accident?”

“Of course I do,” Mike said. “When do you want to try it again?”

“Tonight. I’ll do a little bowling.”

“There’s a fight on I want to watch,” Mike said.

“Tape it,” I said.

“ ‘Tape it,’ ” he mocked. “Since when did you start giving us orders?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mike, grow up,” Neil said. “There’s no way that Bob’s electrocution was an accident or a coincidence. He’s probably not going to stop with Bob either.”

The bowling alley was mostly teenagers on Saturday night. There was a time when bowling was mostly a working-class sport. Now it’s come to the suburbs and the white-collar people. Now the bowling lane is a good place for teenage boys to meet teenage girls.

I bowled two games, drank three beers, and walked back outside an hour later.

Summer night. Smell of dying heat, car exhaust, cigarette smoke, perfume. Sound of jukebox, distant loud mufflers, even more distant rushing train, lonely baying dogs.

Mike and Neil were gone.

I went home and opened myself a beer.

The phone rang. Once again, I was expecting Jan.

“Found the bastard,” Neil said. “He followed you from your house to the bowling alley. Then he got tired of waiting and took off again. This time we followed him.”

“Where?”

He gave me an address. It wasn’t a good one.

“We’re waiting for you to get here. Then we’re going up to pay him a little visit.”

“I need twenty minutes.”

“Hurry.”

Not even the silver touch of moonlight lent the blocks of crumbling stucco apartment houses any majesty or beauty. The rats didn’t even bother to hide. They squatted red-eyed on the unmown lawns, amid beer cans, broken bottles, wrappers from Taco John’s, and used condoms that looked like deflated mushrooms.

Mike stood behind a tree.

“I followed him around back,” Mike said. “He went up the fire escape on the back. Then he jumped on this veranda. He’s in the back apartment on the right side. Neil’s in the backyard, watching for him.”

Mike looked down at my ball bat. “That’s a nice complement,” he said. Then he showed me his handgun. “To this.”

“Why the hell did you bring that?”

“Are you kidding? You’re the one who said he killed Bob.”

That I couldn’t argue with.

“All right,” I said, “but what happens when we catch him?”

“We tell him to lay off us,” Mike said.

“We need to go to the cops.”

“Oh, sure. Sure we do.” He shook his head. He looked as if he were dealing with a child. A very slow one. “Aaron, going to the cops now won’t bring Bob back. And it’s only going to get us in trouble.”

That’s when we heard the shout. Neil; it sounded like Neil.

Maybe five feet of rust-colored grass separated the yard from the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house.

We ran down the alley, having to hop over an ancient drooping picket fence to reach the backyard, where Neil lay sprawled, facedown, next to a twenty-year-old Chevrolet that was tireless and up on blocks. Through the windshield, you could see the huge gouges in the seats where the rats had eaten their fill.

The backyard smelled of dog shit and car oil.

Neil was moaning. At least we knew he was alive.

“The sonofabitch,” he said when we got him to his feet. “I moved over to the other side, back of the car there, so he wouldn’t see me if he tried to come down that fire escape. I didn’t figure there was another fire escape on the side of the building. He must’ve come around there and snuck up on me. He tried to kill me, but I had this—”

In the moonlight, his wrist and the switchblade he held in his fingers were wet and dark with blood. “I got him a couple of times in the arm. Otherwise, I’d be dead.”

“We’re going up there,” Mike said.

“How about checking Neil first?” I said.

“I’m fine,” Neil said. “A little headache from where he caught me on the back of the neck.” He waved his bloody blade. “Good thing I had this.”

The landlord was on the first floor. He wore Bermuda shorts and no shirt. He looked eleven or twelve months pregnant, with little male titties and enough coarse black hair to knit a sweater with. He had a plastic-tipped cigarillo in the left corner of his mouth.

“Yeah?”

“Two-F,” I said.

“What about it?”

“Who lives there?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“If you were the law, you’d show me a badge.”

“I’ll show you a badge,” Mike said, making a fist.

“Hey,” I said, playing good cop to bad cop. “You just let me speak to this gentleman.”

The guy seemed to like my reference to him as a gentleman. It was probably the only name he’d never been called.

“Sir, we saw somebody go up there.”

“Oh,” he said. “The vampires.”

“Vampires?”

He sucked down some cigarillo smoke. “That’s what we call ’em, the missus and me. They’re street people, winos and homeless and all like that. They know that sometimes some of these apartments ain’t rented for a while, so they sneak up there and spend the night.”

“You don’t stop them?”

“You think I’m gonna get my head split open for something like that?”

“I guess that makes sense.” Then: “So nobody’s renting it now?”

“Nope, it ain’t been rented for three months. This fat broad lived there then. Man, did she smell. You know how fat people can smell sometimes? She sure smelled.” He wasn’t svelte.

Back on the front lawn, trying to wend my way between the mounds of dog shit, I said, “ ‘Vampires.’ Good name for them.”

“Yeah, it is,” Neil said. “I just keep thinking of the one who died. His weird eyes.”

“Here we go again,” Mike said. “You two guys love to scare the shit out of each other, don’t you? They’re a couple of nickel-dime crooks, and that’s all they are.”

“All right if Mike and I stop and get some beer and then swing by your place?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just as long as Mike buys Bud and none of that generic crap.”

“Oh, I forgot.” Neil laughed. “He does do that when it’s his turn to buy, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said, “he certainly does.”

I was never sure what time the call came. Darkness. The ringing phone seemed part of a dream from which I couldn’t escape. Somehow I managed to lift the receiver before the phone machine kicked in.

Silence. That special kind of silence.

Him. I had no doubt about it. The vampire, as the landlord had called him. The one who’d killed Bob. I didn’t say so much as hello. Just listened, angry, afraid, confused.

After a few minutes, he hung up.

Darkness again; deep darkness, the quarter moon in the sky a cold golden scimitar that could cleave a head from a neck.

5

About noon on Sunday, Jan called to tell me that she was staying a few days extra. The kids had discovered archery, and there was a course at the Y they were taking and wouldn’t she please please please ask good old Dad if they could stay. I said sure.

I called Neil and Mike to remind them that at nine tonight we were going to pay a visit to that crumbling stucco apartment house again.

I spent an hour on the lawn. My neighbors shame me into it. Lawns aren’t anything I get excited about. But they sort of shame you into it. About halfway through, Byrnes, the chunky advertising man who lives next door, came over and clapped me on the back. He was apparently pleased that I was a real human being and taking a real human being interest in my lawn. As usual, he wore an expensive T-shirt with one of his clients’ products on it and a pair of Bermuda shorts. As usual, he tried hard to be the kind of winsome neighbor you always had in sitcoms of the fifties. But I knew somebody who knew him. Byrnes had fired his number two man so he wouldn’t have to keep paying the man’s insurance. The man was unfortunately dying of cancer. Byrnes was typical of all the ad people I’d met. Pretty treacherous people who spent most of their time cheating clients out of their money and putting on awards banquets so they could convince themselves that advertising was actually an endeavor that was of consequence.

Around four, Hombre was on one of the cable channels, so I had a few beers and watched Paul Newman doing the best acting of his career. At least that was my opinion.

I was just getting ready for the shower when the phone rang.

He didn’t say hello. He didn’t identify himself. “Tracy call you?”

It was Neil. Tracy was Mike’s wife. “Why should she call me?”

“He’s dead. Mike.”

“What?”

“You remember how he was always bitching about that elevator at work?”

Mike worked in a very old building. He made jokes about the antiquated elevators. But you could always tell the joke simply hid his fears. He’d gotten stuck innumerable times, and it was always stopping several feet short of the upcoming floor.

“He opened the door and the car wasn’t there. He fell eight floors.”

“Oh, God.”

“I don’t have to tell you who did it, do I?”

“Maybe it’s time—”

“I’m way ahead of you, Aaron. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. Then we go to the police. You agree?”

“I agree.”

Late Sunday afternoon, the second precinct parking lot is pretty empty. We’d missed the shift change. Nobody came or went.

“We ask for a detective,” Neil said. He was dark-sportcoat, white-shirt, necktie earnest. I’d settled for an expensive blue sportshirt Jan had bought me for my last birthday.

“You know one thing we haven’t considered?”

“You’re not going to change my mind.”

“I’m not trying to change your mind, Neil, I’m just saying that there’s one thing we haven’t considered.”

He sat behind his steering wheel, his head resting on the back of his seat.

“A lawyer.”

“What for?”

“Because we may go in there and say something that gets us in very deep shit.”

“No lawyers,” he said. “We’d just look like we were trying to hide something from the cops.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m sure.”

“You ready?” I said.

“Ready.”

The interior of the police station was quiet. A muscular bald man in a dark uniform sat behind a desk with a sign that read “Information.”

He said, “Help you?”

“We’d like to see a detective,” I said.

“Are you reporting a crime?”

“Uh, yes,” I said.

“What sort of crime?” he said.

I started to speak but once again lost my voice. I thought about all the reporters, about how Jan and the kids would be affected by it all. How my job would be affected. Taking a guy down to the basement and tying him up and then accidentally killing him—

Neil said: “Vandalism.”

“Vandalism?” the cop said. “You don’t need a detective, then. I can just give you a form.” Then he gave us a leery look, as if he sensed we’d just changed our minds about something.

“In that case, could I just take it home with me and fill it out there?” Neil said.

“Yeah, I guess.” The cop still watched us carefully now.

“Great.”

“You sure that’s what you wanted to report? Vandalism?”

“Yeah; yeah, that’s exactly what we wanted to report,” Neil said. “Exactly.”

“Vandalism?” I said when we were back in the car.

“I don’t want to talk right now.”

“Well, maybe I want to talk.”

“I just couldn’t do it.”

“No kidding.”

He looked over at me. “You could’ve told him the truth. Nobody was stopping you.”

I looked out the window. “Yeah, I guess I could’ve.”

“We’re going over there tonight. To the vampire’s place.”

“And do what?”

“Ask him how much he wants.”

“How much he wants for what?” I said.

“How much he wants to forget everything. He goes on with his life, we go on with ours.”

I had to admit, I’d had a similar thought myself. Neil and I didn’t know how to do any of this. But the vampire did. He was good at stalking, good at harassing, good at violence.

“We don’t have a lot of money to throw around.”

“Maybe he won’t want a lot of money. I mean, these guys aren’t exactly sophisticated.”

“They’re sophisticated enough to make two murders look like accidents.”

“I guess that’s a point.”

“I’m just not sure we should pay him anything, Neil.”

“You got any better ideas?”

I didn’t, actually. I didn’t have any better ideas at all.

6

I spent an hour on the phone with Jan that afternoon. The last few days I’d been pretty anxious, and she’d sensed it, and now she was making sure that everything was all right with me. In addition to being wife and lover, Jan’s also my best friend. I can’t kid her. She always knows when something’s wrong. I’d put off telling her about Bob and Mike dying. I’d been afraid that I might accidentally say more than I should and make her suspicious. But now I had to tell her about their deaths. It was the only way I could explain my tense mood.

“That’s awful,” she said. “Their poor families.”

“They’re handling it better than you might think.”

“Maybe I should bring the kids home early.”

“No reason to, hon. I mean, realistically there isn’t anything any of us can do.”

“Two accidents in that short a time. It’s pretty strange.”

“Yeah, I guess it is. But that’s how it happens sometimes.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Just need to adjust is all,” I sighed. “I guess we won’t be having our poker games anymore.”

Then I did something I hadn’t intended. I started crying, and the tears caught in my throat.

“Oh, honey,”Jan said. “I wish I was there so I could give you a big hug.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Two of your best friends.”

“Yeah.” The tears were starting to dry up now.

“Oh, did I tell you about Tommy?” Tommy was our six-year-old.

“No, what?”

“Remember how he used to be so afraid of horses?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, we took him out to this horse ranch where you can rent horses?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And they found him a little Shetland pony and let him ride it, and he loved it. He wasn’t afraid at all.” She laughed. “In fact, we could barely drag him home.” She paused. “You’re probably not in the mood for this, are you? I’m sorry, hon. Maybe you should do something to take your mind off things. Is there a good movie on?”

“I guess I could check.”

“Something light, that’s what you need.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll go get the newspaper and see what’s on.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too, sweetheart,” I said.

I spent the rest of the afternoon going through my various savings accounts and investments. I had no idea what the creep would want to leave us alone. We could always threaten him with going to the police, though he might rightly point out that if we really wanted to do that, we would already have done it.

I settled in the five-thousand-dollar range. That was the maximum cash I had to play with. And even then I’d have to borrow a little from one of the mutual funds we had earmarked for the kids and college.

Five thousand dollars. To me, it sounded like an enormous amount of money, probably because I knew how hard I’d had to work to get it.

But would it be enough for our friend the vampire?

Neil was there just at dark. He parked in the drive and came in. Meaning he wanted to talk.

We went in the kitchen. I made us a couple of highballs, and we sat there and discussed finances.

“I came up with six thousand,” he said.

“I’ve got five.”

“That’s eleven grand,” he said. “It’s got to be more cash than this creep has ever seen.”

“What if he takes it and comes back for more?”

“We make it absolutely clear,” Neil said, “that there is no more. That this is it. Period.”

“And if not?”

Neil nodded. “I’ve thought this through. You know the kind of lowlife we’re dealing with? A, he’s a burglar, which means, these days, that he’s a junkie. B, if he’s a junkie, then that means he’s very susceptible to AIDS. So between being a burglar and shooting up, this guy is probably going to have a very short lifespan.”

“I guess I’d agree.”

“Even if he wants to make our life miserable, he probably won’t live long enough to do it. So I think we’ll be making just the one payment. We’ll buy enough time to let nature take its course — his nature.”

“What if he wants more than the eleven grand?”

“He won’t. His eyes’ll pop out when he sees this.”

I looked at the kitchen clock. It was going on nine now.

“I guess we could drive over there.”

“It may be a long night,” Neil said.

“I know.”

“But I guess we don’t have a hell of a lot of choice, do we?”

As we’d done the last time we’d been here, we split up the duties. I took the backyard, Neil the apartment door. We’d waited until midnight. The rap music had died by now. Babies cried and mothers screamed; couples fought. TV screens flickered in dark windows.

I went up the fire escape slowly and carefully. We’d talked about bringing guns, then decided against it. We weren’t exactly marksmen, and if a cop stopped us for some reason, we could be arrested for carrying unlicensed firearms. All I carried was a flashlight in my back pocket.

As I grabbed the rungs of the ladder, powdery rust dusted my hands. I was chilly with sweat. My bowels felt sick. I was scared. I just wanted it to be over with. I wanted him to say yes, he’d take the money, and then that would be the end of it.

The stucco veranda was filled with discarded toys — a tricycle, innumerable games, a space helmet, a wiffle bat and ball. The floor was crunchy with dried animal feces. At least, I hoped the feces belonged to animals and not human children.

The door between veranda and apartment was open. Fingers of moonlight revealed an overstuffed couch and chair and a floor covered with the debris of fast food, McDonald’s sacks, Pizza Hut wrappers and cardboards, Arby’s wrappers, and what seemed to be five or six dozen empty beer cans. Far toward the hall that led to the front door, I saw four red eyes watching me, a pair of curious rats.

I stood still and listened. Nothing. No sign of life. I went inside. Tiptoeing.

I went to the front door and let Neil in. There in the murky light of the hallway, he made a face. The smell was pretty bad.

Over the next ten minutes, we searched the apartment. And found nobody.

“We could wait here for him,” I said.

“Noway.”

“The smell?”

“The smell, the rats. God. Don’t you just feel unclean?”

“Yeah, guess I do.”

“There’s an empty garage about halfway down the alley. We’d have a good view of the back of this building.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

“Sounds better than this place, anyway.”

This time, we both went out the front door and down the stairway. Now the smells were getting to me as they’d earlier gotten to Neil. Unclean. He was right.

We got in Neil’s Buick, drove down the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house, backed up to the dark garage, and whipped inside.

“There’s a sack in back,” Neil said. “It’s on your side.”

“A sack?”

“Brewskis. Quart for you, quart for me.”

“That’s how my old man used to drink them,” I said. I was the only blue-collar member of the poker club. “Get off work at the plant and stop by and pick up two quart bottles of Hamms. Never missed.”

“Sometimes I wish I would’ve been born into the working class,” Neil said.

I was the blue-collar guy, and Neil was the dreamer, always inventing alternative realities for himself.

“No, you don’t,” I said, leaning over the seat and picking up the sack damp from the quart bottles. “You had a damned nice life in Boston.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t learn anything. You know I was eighteen before I learned about cunnilingus?”

“Talk about cultural deprivation,” I said.

“Well, every girl I went out with probably looks back on me as a pretty lame lover. They went down on me, but I never went down on them. How old were you when you learned about cunnilingus?”

“Maybe thirteen.”

“See?”

“I learned about it, but I didn’t do anything about it.”

“I was twenty years old before I lost my cherry,” Neil said.

“I was seventeen.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit what? I was seventeen.”

“In sociology, they always taught us that blue-collar kids lost their virginity a lot earlier than white-collar kids.”

“That’s the trouble with sociology. It tries to particularize from generalities.”

“Huh?” He grinned. “Yeah, I always thought sociology was full of shit, too, actually. But you were really seventeen?”

“I was really seventeen.”

I wish I could tell you that I knew what it was right away, the missile that hit the windshield and shattered and starred it, and then kept right on tearing through the car until the back window was also shattered and starred.

But all I knew was that Neil was screaming and I was screaming and my quart bottle of Miller’s was spilling all over my crotch as I tried to hunch down behind the dashboard. It was a tight fit because Neil was trying to hunch down behind the steering wheel.

The second time, I knew what was going on: somebody was shooting at us. Given the trajectory of the bullet, he had to be right in front of us, probably behind the two Dumpsters that sat on the other side of the alley.

“Can you keep down and drive this sonofabitch at the same time?”

“I can try,” Neil said.

“If we sit here much longer, he’s going to figure out we don’t have guns. Then he’s gonna come for us for sure.”

Neil leaned over and turned on the ignition. “I’m going to turn left when we get out of here.”

“Fine. Just get moving.”

“Hold on.”

What he did was kind of slump over the bottom half of the wheel, just enough so he could sneak a peek at where the car was headed.

There were no more shots.

All I could hear was the smooth-running Buick motor.

He eased out of the garage, ducking down all the time.

When he got a chance, he bore left.

He kept the lights off.

Through the bullet hole in the windshield, I could see an inch or so of starry sky.

It was a long alley, and we must have gone a quarter block before he said, “I’m going to sit up. I think we lost him.”

“So do I.”

“Look at the frigging windshield.”

Not only was the windshield a mess, the car reeked of spilled beer.

“You think I should turn on the headlights?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’re safe now.”

We were still crawling at maybe ten miles per hour when he pulled the headlights on.

That’s when we saw him, silver of eye, dark of hair, crouching in the middle of the alley waiting for us. He was a good fifty yards ahead of us, but we were still within range.

There was no place we could turn around.

He fired.

This bullet shattered whatever had been left untouched of the windshield. Neil slammed on the brakes.

Then he fired a second time.

By now, both Neil and I were screaming and cursing again.

A third bullet.

“Run him over!” I yelled, ducking behind the dashboard.

“What?” Neil yelled back.

“Floor it!”

He floored it. He wasn’t even sitting up straight. We might have gone careening into one of the garages or Dumpsters. But somehow the Buick stayed in the alley. And very soon it was traveling eighty-five miles per hour. I watched the speedometer peg it.

More shots, a lot of them now, side windows shattering, bullets ripping into fender and hood and top.

I didn’t see us hit him, but I felt us hit him, the car traveling that fast, the creep so intent on killing us he hadn’t bothered to get out of the way in time.

The front of the car picked him up and hurled him into a garage near the head of the alley.

We both sat up, watched as his entire body was broken against the edge of the garage, and he then fell smashed and unmoving to the grass.

“Kill the lights,” I said.

“What?”

“Kill the lights, and let’s go look at him.”

Neil punched off the headlights.

We left the car and ran over to him.

A white rib stuck bloody and brazen from his side. Blood poured from his ears, nose, mouth. One leg had been crushed and also showed white bone. His arms had been broken, too.

I played my flashlight beam over him.

He was dead, all right.

“Looks like we can save our money,” I said. “It’s all over now.”

“I want to get the hell out of here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So do I.”

We got the hell out of there.

7

A month later, just as you could smell autumn on the summer winds, Jan and I celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary. We drove up to Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, and stayed at a very nice hotel and rented a Chris-Craft for a couple of days. This was the first time I’d been able to relax since the thing with the burglar had started.

One night when Jan was asleep, I went up on the deck of the boat and just watched the stars. I used to read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was a boy. I always remembered how John Carter felt — that the stars had a very special destiny for him and would someday summon him to that destiny. My destiny, I decided that night there on the deck, was to be a good family man, a good stockbroker, and a good neighbor. The bad things were all behind me now. I imagined Neil was feeling pretty much the same way. Hot bitter July seemed a long way behind us now. Fall was coming, bringing with it football and Thanksgiving and Christmas. July would recede even more with snow on the ground.

The funny thing was, I didn’t see Neil much anymore. It was as if the sight of each other brought back a lot of bad memories. It was a mutual feeling, too. I didn’t want to see him any more than he wanted to see me. Our wives thought this was pretty strange. They’d meet at the supermarket or shopping center and wonder why “the boys” didn’t get together anymore. Neil’s wife, Sarah, kept inviting us over to “sit around the pool and watch Neil pretend he knows how to swim.” September was summer hot. The pool was still the centerpiece of their life.

Not that I made any new friends. The notion of a midweek poker game had lost all its appeal. There was work and my family and little else.

Then, one sunny Indian summer afternoon, Neil called and said, “Maybe we should get together again.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s over, Aaron. It really is.”

“I know.”

“Will you at least think about it?”

I felt embarrassed. “Oh, hell, Neil. Is that swimming pool of yours open Saturday afternoon?”

“As a matter of fact, it is. And as a matter of fact, Sarah and the girls are going to be gone to a fashion show at the club.”

“Perfect. We’ll have a couple of beers.”

“You know how to swim?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “And from what Sarah says, you don’t either.”

I got there about three, pulled into the drive, walked to the back where the gate in the wooden fence led to the swimming pool. It was eighty degrees, and even from here I could smell the chlorine.

I opened the gate and went inside and saw him right away. The funny thing was, I didn’t have much of a reaction at all. I just watched him. He was floating. Facedown. He looked pale in his red trunks. This, like the others, would be judged an accidental death. Of that I had no doubt at all.

I used the cellular phone in my car to call 911.

I didn’t want Sarah and the girls coming back to see an ambulance and police cars in the drive and them not knowing what was going on.

I called the club and had her paged.

I told her what I’d found. I let her cry. I didn’t know what to say. I never do.

In the distance, I could hear the ambulance working its way toward the Neil Solomon residence.

I was just about to get out of the car when my cellular phone rang. I picked up. “Hello?”

“There were three of us that night at your house, Mr. Bellini. You killed two of us. I recovered from when your friend stabbed me, remember? Now I’m ready for action. I really am, Mr. Bellini.”

Then the emergency people were there, and neighbors, too, and then wan, trembling Sarah. I just let her cry some more. Gave her whiskey and let her cry.

8

He knows how to do it, whoever he is.

He lets a long time go between late-night calls. He lets me start to think that maybe he changed his mind and left town. And then he calls.

Oh, yes, he knows just how to play this little game.

He never says anything. He doesn’t need to. He just listens. And then hangs up.

I’ve considered going to the police, of course, but it’s way too late for that. Way too late.

Or I could ask Jan and the kids to move away to a different city with me. But he knows who I am, and he’d find me again.

So all I can do is wait and hope that I get lucky, the way Neil and I got lucky the night we killed the second of them.

Tonight I can’t sleep.

It’s after midnight.

Jan and I wrapped presents until well after eleven. She asked me again if anything was wrong. We don’t make love as much as we used to, she said; and then there are the nightmares. “Please tell me if something’s wrong, Aaron. Please.”

I stand at the window watching the snow come down. Soft and beautiful snow. In the morning, a Saturday, the kids will make a snowman and then go sledding and then have themselves a good old-fashioned snowball fight, which invariably means that one of them will come rushing in at some point and accuse the other of some terrible misdeed.

I see all this from the attic window.

Then I turn back and look around the poker table. Four empty chairs. Three of them belong to dead men.

I look at the empty chairs and think back to summer.

I look at the empty chairs and wait for the phone to ring.

I wait for the phone to ring.