But a sleepy, prosperous neighborhood like this did me no favors.
This was a street — a narrow two-lane street at that — where everybody knew their neighbors. By name. Kids included. Hell, they probably knew each other’s car — fuck, license plate. Somebody right now could be calling the Steeple Run Homeowners Association rep or even the Naperville police to sound the alarm that some unknown party was driving a 1970s-era relic through the area.
The house in question was painfully cheerful, like maybe the Partridge Family lived here — two modern canary-yellow stories trimmed blue with a peaked two-car attached garage. In the driveway was a Cadillac DeVille, recent vintage, pale yellow with a white Cabriolet-style vinyl half-roof. Color-coordinated, yet. If his next Caddy was green, would the house get a paint job?
Surveillance difficulties abounded. Houses here were fairly close together, the lawns shallow along the narrow concrete ribbon of Ridgeview Lane. Driveways were for parking, curbs strictly decorative. Park your wheels on one side of the street and you’d be in the opposite homeowner’s face.
At the same time, sidewalks and for that matter front yards were free of toys or skates or bikes or any other signs of life except for the nice new (or at least new-ish) cars in the drives of two-car garages. The only other indications of inhabitants were the garbage cans set out for tomorrow’s pick-up.
Maybe I could get a job as a garbage man — that would allow me to unobtrusively stake out the house on Ridgeview Lane for as much as a once-a-week minute. No, better than a minute! I could probably get five or even ten minutes out of my efforts, if I could master the motor skills needed to empty cans in back of the truck while keeping my eye on this particular house...
Or, with my background in the service of my country, possibly I could land a gig at the post office as a mail carrier and secretly keep watch on the neighborhood six days a week, an hour or so a day. This assumed I could pass the civil service exam, and didn’t shoot any dogs trying to bite me. Hey! What about a paper route?
At this point, by the way, I was on my third slow pass through the two blocks of Ridgeview Lane, and about at the end of what I dared do around here for now.
Yet, childish sarcasm aside, one possibility did wink dangerously at my desperate needs, like jailbait behind the Naperville Mall corndog counter. A house across the way — not directly across the way, but two houses down — had a big FOR SALE sign in the lawn.
I almost didn’t bother. I almost bailed anyway. Already I was getting disheartened about what I’d been doing these past ten or so years, and if you factored in the five or six years with the Broker, and the two tours in Nam (sometimes we don’t use the “the”), I mean, who needed this?
Didn’t I have money in the bank? In a number of banks actually? I’d scored well this past decade, while living modestly; and I’d had a number of unexpected windfalls over the years. Now and then you stumble into money when you take down evil pricks. Really, why not seriously consider retirement?
Maybe to a house on Ridgeview Lane.
Which gave me a couple of reasons to check out that house across the way, two doors down, where I pulled into the empty drive and moved the nine millimeter from under the Playboy and into my waistband, under the zipped bomber jacket.
Then I got out and went over to stand on the edge of the drive, hands on hips, gawking at the house in prospective buyer mode. The slant of the lawn and glint of the sun didn’t allow for an easy look in the windows. Best play it safe. Sort of safe.
I walked up to the faux-rustic two-story and rang the bell. I could hear it sound faintly within. My hunch was no one was home — no car in the drive, no sign of activity. But somebody might answer, and if they did, I would inquire about seeing the house.
Presumably whoever answered, depending on how hungry they were to sell, would give me an impromptu walk-through, or remind me that the realtor’s name and phone number were on the yard sign.
Anyway, none of that mattered, because three tries on the bell went unanswered. By now someone — possibly any number of someones, including the person I was there to stake out (and possibly family members of his) could well be watching. Wouldn’t they be, in this kind of neighborhood?
So I did not try the door. That would be rude. Might seem suspicious. Could even be gauche, if I knew what that meant exactly.
What I did instead was more in keeping with what any innocent person interested in possibly buying the house might do — I got on my toes and peeked in a few windows. And the news was good.
No furniture.
So maybe I was still in business after all. Having no homeowner to deal with meant I had options. For example, I could go to the realtor with fake I.D. (which of course I carried) and begin negotiations to buy, doing my best not to put much, or any, money down. Just do what it took to tie a ribbon around the property.
Or, better, I could come in after dark and slip into the place and play squatter. With luck, the water would be on, which meant drinking water and toilet privileges. Maybe some of the appliances had been left in the house. I already had some stuff in the trunk of the Impala for just such a contingency — a little portable TV, space heater, an inflatable camping mattress, pillow from home, portable radio, plastic ice chest.
I would find a grocery store to buy bags of ice, sandwich makings, and six-packs of Diet Coke. I don’t drink beer on the job. Don’t drink it much ever, actually. Very clean-cut type. Add no facial hair to your mental image.
This camping-out approach I had used in the Broker days when the passive role came my way. And in recent years, I’d occasionally gone this route, too. This was not the first time I’d consigned myself to a mid-range rung of suburban Hell.
Walking around outside the house, I found a cement patio with a covered barbecue grill and not much else. Edging up to snow-touched shrubbery, I checked more windows, but also looked for access, in terms of both the house itself (basement windows — nice) and behind the place, which was heavily wooded.
Good.
I could sneak in that way easy enough, after dark. With luck, I could get inside, check the place out, determining the best window onto the street with a view on the house across the way, two doors down.
Then I’d look the garage over, probably find it empty, and locate the garage door opener, likely just inside the door connecting to the house. Sometime deep into the night, I could move my car into the garage, empty the trunk of my accessories, and play Campfire Girl in a stranger’s domain. I had everything but marshmallows and a stick.
I would also have to make arrangements for quickly disassembling my surveillance perch, and find somewhere close to stow the gear (again, quickly), should a car or two pull up for a realtor showing of the house to prospective buyers. That was a routine I’d been through many times, back in Broker days, and about as fun as a surprise inspection in a barracks.
But nobody said life was going to be easy.
“Can I help you?”
The voice was male, friendly and mildly threatening.
He was in the back yard of the house next door — to my left as I faced the rear of my would-be squatter’s paradise. A big guy, fleshy, in a gray overcoat and matching face. Kind of a junior-high football coach type. Probably the assistant coach, who worked with the line.
I grinned and strode over to him, extended a hand. “Jack Matthews,” I said.
“Carl Burgis,” he said, half-smiling, the other half of his face skeptical. He had light-color thinning hair and a wide oval of a face. Maybe forty. Lots of lines, but then he was partly frowning, so...