Collar Robber (23 page)

“Yes.”

“Are you armed?”

“No—and I don't plan to be, if that's what you're worried about.”

“That's one of several things I'm worried about. Any money?”

“No.”

Willy snapped his fingers at Amber. She dipped into her purse and came out with a modest wad of hundred-dollar bills. Instead of just tossing them into my lap she handed them to me. That's Amber. Pure class.

“Okay. We'd better take a cab to the airport. You're in no condition to drive, and I'll be busy finding flight times and booking tickets. Amber can get the spare keys from the condo and meet us at the airport with them.”

Willy beamed.

“You are one hell of a lawyer, C.J.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “For the moment.”

Chapter Fifty-two

Cynthia Jakubek

It was like traveling in the third world, as Willy might put it. Not really, of course. No one was shooting at us.

On the way to the airport I called the Pittsburgh PD to report the theft of Willy's Sable. I mentioned a tip that the car might be in the D.C. area now. I figured that would generate nothing but a report, and that was all I really cared about. I managed to book two tickets on a direct flight that we could just barely make. Amber got to the airport with the keys and gave them to me. After that things went downhill.

Flying time from Pittsburgh to D.C. is supposed to be one hour and one minute, but that's after you get off the ground. We didn't even get on the plane until ninety minutes after the scheduled departure time. Then we sat on the runway for awhile. After we took off, air traffic control held us up so that there'd be a clear runway for us to land on at Reagan National. Once we landed, we had some more ninth-circle-of-Hell stuff trying to get to the gate. Bottom line, we weren't strolling into the terminal until almost three o'clock.

Nesselrode had put away three mini-bottles of Johnny Walker Red during the flight. He wasn't close to drunk, but you could tell he hadn't been drinking lemonade. When we finally approached the Avis counter, I suggested that he hit the men's room so that the agent wouldn't get too strong a whiff. It worked. By twenty of four we were driving to Alexandria.

With a little navigational aid from GPS we found the culdesac where Davidovich lived and drove past his house. Looked to me like nobody was home. Nesselrode said he wasn't getting a peep from the receiver balanced on his thighs. I frowned my way through a Y-turn and got ready to exit the culdesac. I still had the frown on when I looked over at him.

“Now what?”

“Now we drive in expanding circles around this area.”

“For how long?”

“Until I pick up a signal.”

And what if you never pick up a signal?
Unconstructive question. No point in asking it. I was pissed off, but so what? I sure didn't have any better ideas.

Traffic in Alexandria sucks. Makes Pittsburgh look like an urban planner's dream. Around six-thirty-seven on this particular Friday night it started sucking slightly less than it had before. I mention the time because that was when I noticed that the same pair of headlights had been in my rearview mirror for a while. With a chilly little gut tingle I wondered if someone was following us.
That's right, Nancy Drew. Off on an adventure in the roadster, so someone must be following you
. Well if they were they sure weren't doing it in a Sable, so I repressed the thought.

We had put over fifty miles on the car and I'd just about given up hope when I heard a
blip
from Nesselrode's receiver. Not a
beep
, a
blip
. I remember filing that away with a mental
isn't that interesting
note attached to it. The dashboard clock read seven-thirty-two.

“How far away is it?”

“Something like four or five miles.” For the tenth time he reached for a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and then irritably checked himself. “But it's not like we can drive straight to it. We have to weave back and forth in the general direction and correct when we lose the directional signal.”

“So it's not like TV?”

“No. All kinds of stuff can affect the signal. It's basically trial and error. Hope, prayer, and guesswork.”

“Well,” I sighed, “we have plenty of experience with that. Go ahead and smoke if you want to. I can handle it.”

I've never had a more frustrating experience in my life, including
coitus interruptus
.
Blip-blip-blip
and then all of a sudden nothing. Turn back the way we'd come from. Hold our breaths.
Blip-blip-blip
. Repeat. More than two bloody hours of that.

Seriously. It was like following a directional signal in a third-world country.

Chapter Fifty-three

Jay Davidovich

I woke up at five o'clock after almost exactly two hours of sleep. I'd retrieved my keys, relocked the back door, and reset the alarm. Then I'd thrown sofa cushions on the kitchen floor and allowed myself a power nap with my body resting against the door and the Colt nestled lightly in my right hand. Sleepwise, that would pretty much do it until dawn, roughly twelve hours from now.

I'd given a lot of thought to how I'd proceed if I were Halkani. Maybe he thought I really
was
going to Vegas to lure him there. Instead of walking into the trap, he'd sneak into our empty home and wait here for us to come back Sunday night. Then he'd kill us and make tracks. Or maybe he realized the whole Vegas thing was a feint and that I'd be waiting for him here. In that case, he'd try to find a way to sneak in despite me, kill me, and move on to the next victim on his list. Either way, he'd be coming here unless he really had taken the Vegas fake, in which case my efficient colleagues would take care of him and I had nothing to worry about—but I wasn't betting on that one.

But which night would he pick for the break-in? Small hours on Sunday morning? That would leave him no margin for error if the break-in went wrong for some reason. Small hours Saturday morning—say, seven or eight hours from now—would make more sense. Every minute he spent wandering around Alexandria or cooling his heels in a cheap area motel he risked having some cop spot him as a guy Pittsburgh police and the FBI would like a word with. Much less likely to attract attention once he was inside the house.

How was he planning to get in? He'd gotten the security code. He might not know which code went with the house alarm, but I had to believe he could figure that out with a little study and some educated guesswork. Would he assume that I'd realized what he was up to and changed the code? Probably not. He had a tendency to underestimate me. Actually, he had a tendency to underestimate everyone, but I was the one I cared about at the moment.

All of that argued for the back door. Doing cat-burglar stuff on the roof to come in through a second-story window might not leave him enough time to get downstairs and punch the code in. So, eighty percent back door, twenty-five percent upstairs window, five percent front door.

When Rachel and I travel we always leave a small light on in the entryway off the kitchen, along with another small light over the kitchen sink. Neither of those can be seen from the outside during the day, so they're not a tip-off. We leave three other lights on timers. At six o'clock they came on: one in the living room, one in the den, and one in our bedroom upstairs. They'd all click off at midnight.

One more thing to do before settling down to wait. First thing Friday morning I'd brought a battery powered camp light up from the basement—a rectangular fluorescent tube in a metal frame mounted directly on a big six-volt battery. I put the camp light just inside the linen closet at the top of the stairs, leaving the closet door open. I switched it on. If I were at the bottom of the stairs and suddenly couldn't see the glow from that light, that would mean something had gotten in between me and it: time for target practice.

I started in a squat with my back leaning against the kitchen door. Cozy group: a Magnum flashlight powered by four D-cells, my Colt Combat Commander semi-automatic, and Judas Maccabeus Davidovich. Just the three of us. Old friends who required no conversation. I'd turned off the entryway light, but in the modest glow from the living room light I could see both the bottom of the stairs and the front door from where I was.

After thirty minutes, I moved to a perch with my back against the front door. Thirty minutes there and I worked out a little route around the first floor that I could crawl, walk, and duck-walk through without being visible to anyone looking from outside. I'd make two or three circuits, then return to the kitchen-door post. You can't think about nothing, so I just went down the checklist for this solo operation: A) kitchen door entrance secure?—Check; B) front entrance secure?—Check; C) second floor secure?—Check. Spot an intruder: A) shoot; B) ask questions.

At ten-oh-seven—I checked—I heard an embarrassed little
tinkle
just above me and to my right as I crouched against the kitchen door. A suede covered elbow gingerly smashed the three-by-three inch lower inside pane of the door's window. Glass shards sprinkled onto my shoulder. My eyes went from open to
way
open. My heart started racing. A black glove worked its way tentatively through the empty frame, feeling for the latch on the back of the door.

No hurry. All the time in the world. I inched out from behind the door, toward a spot against the kitchen wall, about a foot from where the door would open. Pistol, check. Flashlight, check. The latch snapped. Leaving the flashlight on the floor, I stood up, pistol in my right hand pointed toward the ceiling, left hand free. The door swung open by centimeters.
Beep-beep-beep
. Clock ticking, asshole. Better do something.

A circle of light splashed the area just beyond my feet.
Beep-beep-beep
. Then the flashlight beam glared into the middle of the kitchen—as if anyone were going to be standing
there
.
Beep-beep-beep
. Suddenly the door swept all the way open.
Beep-beep-beep
. A male figure shorter, stockier, and darker-skinned than I remembered Halkani being rushed into the entryway. In the pale glow of his own flashlight I could see him swerve away from the darkness where I lurked and lunge toward the security control console on the wall.
Beep-beep-beep
. Twenty seconds left. Absolutely motionless, peering at him from darkness that ended just beyond my feet, I watched him tensely punch numbers into the console.

Beeeeeeeep! Beeeeeeep!

“Shit!”

I knew the screen was telling him that he'd messed up the code and had one more chance. He paused. Took a deep breath. Punched in numbers again. The
beeps
stopped. No alarm sounded. He blew out a long breath as his shoulders sagged with release of tension.

I didn't know if he was armed, but I knew he didn't have a weapon in either hand. I took one step toward him, grabbed the back of his collar with my left hand, and threw him tumbling, stumbling, falling, and then skidding across almost the entire length of the kitchen floor. His head and body slammed into the cabinet doors underneath the lower leg of our L-shaped counter. I retrieved my flashlight in time to shine four D-cells' worth of light in his face while I showed him the Colt's muzzle. Turning his head away, he brought both hands up to shield his face.

“Hey, man, whachu do that for? Shit.”

“Because you broke into my home.”

I deliberately kept my voice calm, halfway between whisper and normal conversation. Alarm crept up his face. I made him for eighteen or nineteen.

“Shit, man, I didn' know you was here!” His indignation at the thoughtlessness I had exhibited by living in my own home seemed perfectly sincere. “You 'spose to be off on vacation in honkie-heaven somewhere. I mean, lights go on at
exactly
the same time on two floors an' you tryin' to tell me someone's home? Bulllllshit. No, that mean folks is gone an' they doin' sneaky white shit to make everyone
think
they home. Dumb crackers. Shit. I mean, you got no business
bein'
here. That light shit, thass jus' false
pre
tenses, thass what that is.”

“I don't think you're in a position to be making moral judgments.”

“Yeah, well fuck you, honkie. An' get that light outta my face.”

“Let's start with your name.” I kept the light shining full beam on his face.

“Fuck you. No name shit. Jus' call the heat and we start the dance. Make bail, get back wid my baby, see about probation by an' by.”

Lifting my right heel a good four inches from the floor I snap-kicked his left kneecap. He grabbed the knee with two panicky hands as pain exploded across his face. He writhed on the floor in a fair imitation of a fetal position if the fetus were balanced on its tailbone.

“OWWWWW! JESUS H. FUCKING CHRIST, THAT HURT! MOTHUH-
FUCKUH
! FUCK YOU, YOU GODDAMN HONKIE!”

“Name, son. I need your name.”

He thought about it for a second. A determined step forward convinced him.

“All right! Jimmy, okay? My name be Jimmy Whitelightnin'. An' if you broke my knee you in big goddamn trouble. I know my rights, goddammit.”

“Okay, Jimmy, we need to talk.”

“Fuck you. I ain't talkin' wid no one. You jus' call five-oh so's they can get my ass outta this crazy-ass place an' down to the jail.”

I set the flashlight on the counter. I could still see him easily in the glow from the light over the kitchen sink. Retreating a bit, I found our utility drawer. I rummaged around in there until I could grab a fish filet knife with a serrated blade and bone handle that you might take on a camping trip so that you could gut fish over a campfire, or something wholesome like that. I tossed it onto the floor, where it landed about halfway between Jimmy and me.

“Do you know what that is, Jimmy?”

“Yeah, that be a knife. An' I ain't touchin' it.”

“That's what police call a ‘throw-down'. In the old days, like up until oh, last week or so, cops on tough beats would always carry one or two with them. You run across someone in some dark alley at two in the morning, one thing leads to another, he ends up dead—but the inconsiderate little shit turns out to be unarmed. So you drop the ‘throw down' near the body and you've got self-defense all tied up in a neat package.”

He did his level best to hide the fear on his face, but no dice. He scooted a couple of feet farther away from me. I shook my head. He stopped.

“Now you jus' go an call the police right now, dammit! Jus' do it! I know my rights! I gots a right to be arrested! I wants a motherfucker wid a badge standing there readin' me my rights in five minutes! Get to it, goddammit!”

“You see, Jimmy, this isn't the District. This is northern Virginia. I think I'm beginning to feel in peril of death or grave bodily injury at the hands of an intruder here in my own home. My castle. From which I don't have to retreat, even at the cost of taking human life. So in sixty seconds either we'll be having a constructive exchange of views, or you'll have your prints on that knife and three or four bullets in your gut—not in that order.”

Seconds ticked by. Fear held his face in a nauseating rictus. Finally tears started streaming from his right eye. Maybe his left too, but I didn't notice it.

“I wasn' gone hurt no one.” His voice started as a whine and degenerated toward something close to a sob. “I jus' needed a little weekend weed money fo' me an' my woman. Man, I get more'n three months for this an' I'll still be inside when that baby comes. It's our first one, man! She'll be so hurt, I'm not there.”

Very good, Jeff; time for Mutt
. I came to a squat, resting my right hand with the pistol casually on my right knee.

“I know how it is, Jimmy. I can be a reasonable man. You know what I mean? Thing is, we have to talk. Hear what I'm saying, Jimmy?”

He nodded. He'd gotten control of the tears and now had has face set in an eight-year-old kid's version of hopeless defiance.

“Whachu wanna talk 'bout?”

“Well, here it is, Jimmy. I'm not buying the story about how you happened to notice lights being turned on by a timer, and then figured out all by yourself that no one was home. That's pretty high-level cogitation, and I just don't think you're up to it. So I want to know how you really came up with the idea of hitting this place. Who actually put the idea into your head and explained it all to you? I know you want to tell me I'm full of shit. I can understand that. Totally. But think real hard before you lie to me, Jimmy. This is kind of like final jeopardy. Know what I'm saying? Final jeopardy, except you're betting your life on the right answer.”

Watching his face as he clicked through his options and tried to come up with the guts to pick the only one that made sense was like watching a snuff flick must be. Every step in the process seemed to draw blood from his insides.

“Okay.” Huge sigh from him. “Like I say, I'm just lookin' for a little decent weed for my baby and me. Walkin' aroun' wid that shorty inside her, thass a lotta stress, y'know?”

“I understand, Jimmy. A man has to provide for the girl he loves.”

“Thass right. Anyway, this Hymie/A-rab somethin' track me down, yesterday, say he has his eye on this place. Now this is in the District, okay, in Southeast, so you don't see lotta crackers there, but they be somethin' badass 'bout this mothuh-fuckuh, and don't no one be messin' wid his ass, you know what I'm sayin'?”

“Yes, Jimmy, I sure do. Describe him.”

Jimmy provided a fair description of Halkani. I nodded at him to go on.

“So he say he got his eye on dis place, like I says, an' he gots the code for the alarm thing an' shit, and if he sees these lights go on at the same moment that mean ain't nobody home an' the coast be clear, ya hear me?”

“Yep.”

“So he tell me to go in, turn the alarm off wid the code, grab this computer that's right on the table and whatever else I wants, meet him up at that shit-ass mall up the hill, an' he drop two bills on me. Plus whatever I gets for what I grabs, ya know?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“'Cept he didn' say nothin' 'bout no racist mothuh-fuckuh wid no jive-ass cannon be sittin' here waitin' for me.”

“Well, Jimmy, I can understand where that's information you would rather have had, and I don't blame you for being upset about this guy's incomplete disclosure of the situation. You can get up now.”