“Right here; I’m in a legal parking spot, and I don’t have to move the van until tomorrow morning, when the alternate side parking rules change. I’ll just leave it until then.”
“Good. No point in surveilling when she’s at work, either. Just check her between quitting time and bedtime; let’s see if the guy really calls back or if he’s just handing her a line.”
“Okay. How long do you want me to keep the recorder going?”
“The rest of the week, if you can check out the other two names I gave you while the recorder listens.”
“Sure thing. Tell me, did you set your alarm when you left the house?”
“Damn it, I forgot.”
“They’ll come back, I promise you.”
“How will I know if they do?”
“You won’t, unless you know exactly what to look for.”
Stone opened the door of the van. “I think I’d better get home.”
The phone was ringing when he opened the front door.
“Hi,” Arrington said. “How about tonight?”
“I’ve got to do something tonight,” he said. “and I’m afraid you can’t help.”
“I can be very helpful,” she said.
“I know, but this one I need to do alone. How about tomorrow?”
“You’re on; see you later.” She hung up.
Stone walked around the house and took a good look at things; nothing seemed to have been disturbed in his absence. He switched on the living room lights and left the house by the front door, careful to set the alarm this time, then walked around to the other side of the block and rang the bell of a neighbor of his acquaintance.
“Hi,” he said to the woman. “I’ve forgotten my front door key; could I go out the back door of your house? I’ve got a kitchen door key hidden.”
“Sure,” the woman said, then let him into and out the rear of her house.
It was dark now, but the lights in the common garden had not yet come on. Stone stood very still for ten minutes, sweeping the entire garden, looking for any sign of movement. There was none. He walked slowly toward the back door of his own house, as if out for an evening stroll, then stopped again at his back gate. Still no movement in the garden.
He went to his kitchen door and let himself in, then disarmed the burglar alarm. Without turning on any lights, he went upstairs to his bedroom, changed into slippers, got the loaded riot gun, and went back downstairs to his study. He sat himself down in a comfortable chair and began to wait. The only light in the room filtered in from the living room, where a single lamp burned.
It had been a long time since he had been on a stakeout, and he tried to remember how he had dealt with the boredom without falling asleep. Reading was out; so was listening to music or watching television. Instead, he tried to remember things, things from a long time ago; that, he knew from experience, would keep him awake and wouldn’t interfere with his hearing. He tried to remember all the names of his high school graduating class, scoring about 80 percent, he reckoned.
The graduation memory done, he started on girls. He tried to remember each of the girls he had slept with from his freshman year at NYU, when he had had his first sexual experience, until he graduated. He began with Susan Bernstein, his first, who had invited him back to her dorm room and brazenly seduced him, cheerfully waiting until he had recovered from his first, premature ejaculation so that they could do it again, this time for a considerably longer period. He had slept with her throughout his freshman year; he tried to remember each experience. She didn’t come back his sophomore year; she had quit school to marry a jeweler in the diamond district.
He worked his way through the college years, lingering over the first experience he had had with two girls, at a summer house in East Hampton. The girls, he remembered, had been just as interested in each other as in him, something that had fascinated him to no end. Then there had been the assistant professor of English whom he had screwed late at night in the faculty lounge and on three other occasions, always in the same room. For some reason, doing it there had turned her on.
He was somewhere in the middle of his senior year, in the back seat of a Cadillac convertible parked on a dark Greenwich Village street, fucking the beautiful daughter of a New Jersey car dealer, when he was suddenly snapped back to the present. He had heard a noise from somewhere downstairs.
Chapter 31
Stone stood up, retrieved the shotgun leaning against his chair, and checked to be sure the safety was still on. If he had to use the shotgun, he reckoned, he would use it as a club, if at all possible. He had no desire to kill anybody, and he knew, from his experience as a police detective, what a pain in the ass it was to deal with the aftermath of a killing, even a legal one.
The noise had seemed to come from the lower front of the house, so he tiptoed down the hall toward the front stairs, keeping to the edge of the floor to avoid creaking. He went slowly down the stairs the same way. There was another noise, a tiny one, and he was sure it came from the direction of his office. He was in the kitchen dining area, and he moved very carefully toward the door that opened into his office. Arriving there, he put an ear to the door, held his breath, and listened. He was certain he could hear something, but it was so faint that he reckoned it must be coming from his secretary’s office or the hallway where the telephone box was located.
Slowly, he turned the knob and opened the door an inch. He could hear the noise better now, and it wasn’t coming from inside his office. He opened the door and stepped into the room. The noise stopped. Stone stood silently immobile for perhaps a minute, then the noise began again, this time a series of noises, like tools being taken from or returned to a toolbox. He moved on toward the closed door to the hallway and put an ear against it. Again, the noise had stopped. Stone reckoned that whoever it was was engaged in work that periodically made some noise, then was quiet. He began turning the knob, a quarter-inch at a time; when he had turned it all the way he opened the door an inch and listened. Silence. Then, slowly, an inch at a time, he swung the door open just enough to allow himself through it. He held the shotgun across his chest, ready to swing the butt if he encountered anybody, and stepped into the hallway. The floor made a tiny creak. He could hear nothing else.
As he inched along the hallway he began to be able to see better, and he realized that the tiny red lights from the alarm system and the telephone box were beginning to light his way; then he saw that the doors to both boxes were open. Bingo, he said to himself, almost at the very moment that something crashed into the back of his neck. It seemed a long time afterward that his head, along with his consciousness, came to an abrupt stop against the hall floor.
The first thing he heard was a ringing in his head. Then the ringing seemed to float out of his body and into another place, while changing pitch upward. Finally it stopped and he heard his own voice: “This is Stone Barrington; please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.” There followed an electronic beep, then a familiar voice.
“Stone, are you there? If you’re there, pick up.” A brief silence. “Please pick up, will you? I’ve got to talk to you right now!” Another silence. “Goddamnit, if you’re in the sack with somebody else, you’re in very big trouble!” There was a loud noise of a connection being broken.
Stone didn’t feel like moving just yet, since the floor seemed to be doing the moving for him. He lay there, his cheek against the cool oak, and tried to still it. Finally, hours later, it seemed, stillness arrived. He opened his eyes and blinked a few times. There was something inches from his nose, something tubular, and when he could move his head back and focus, he realized that it was the barrel of his own shotgun, lying on the floor in front of him.