I said, “I, uh….”
“You’re going down these steps. You get to choose how.”
He gestured over the railing of the porch, pointing a finger that was like a section of lead pipe.
I chose.
I walked down the stairs, waving a little good-bye to the hulking figure in the doorway, and suddenly realized who he was. Or who he damn well might be.
That same hulking figure in the green van.
The one I had encountered at Mrs. Jonsen’s that night, when I was trying to get license-plate numbers and instead ran into a glandular case loading up the van, who then ran into me and initiated all that Mallory-kicking.
Yes, he was the one. I was sure of it.
So I pretended to go away. I cut through the adjoining yard and headed down the street, which was a narrow lane lined with shade trees. I walked several blocks before ducking behind one of those trees to rest, think, hide. I’d gone in the opposite direction from where I’d left my van, simply because if Hulk and his honey were watching my exit, I didn’t want to tip them as to where my car was. They hadn’t seen me arrive (I hoped) and would assume I’d left my buggy down here somewhere, assume I’d gone to retrieve it and go.
It was a quiet street. No traffic. The warm afternoon sun was filtered and cooled through the shimmering leaves. The homes along the street were modest, standard South-End one-story clapboards, but well kept-up. A pleasant little neighborhood. High wild grass was growing up around the base of the tree where I was sitting, and I plucked a stalk and chewed the sweet root. I didn’t mind sitting in the soothing shade of the tree, regrouping, waiting to see if Hulk or anybody followed me, waiting for five minutes to go by if he didn’t.
When the five minutes had gone, I got up. Headed back to Tony’s Used Auto Parts, circling around several blocks to waste some more time, and also in order to come up behind the building on the garage side. One nice thing about black-painted windows; just as I couldn’t see in, they couldn’t see out, and my approach was, I felt sure, undetected.
Next door to the garage was a run-down two-story gothic that was so close to its neighbor there was little more than a crawl space between them; it was a tight squeeze, but I had breathing room, and thanks to some bushes gone out-of-hand up by the gothic’s porch, my presence wasn’t likely to be noticed by passersby-out front, anyway. From the back I was pretty well exposed, though the passageway was dark enough to shelter me some.
I began examining the windows along the side of the garage. There were three of them, evenly spaced, and on the middle one I found a spot in the lower corner where some of its black paint had worn away a bit, or had maybe been scratched off. Heart pumping, I peeked in and saw nothing but the green of a vehicle of some kind.
Green?
I kept peeking, trying to tell whether or not that green vehicle was the same green vehicle I thought it was-namely, the green van that had been used to haul loot away from Mrs. Jonsen’s.
I couldn’t be sure.
There just wasn’t enough of a peephole in the blackened window; not enough paint had been scraped or worn away. No way to tell for certain.
Except to get inside the garage and see for myself.
The street out in front of Tony’s was well traveled, since it passed the grain-processing plant with its many employees, and also because it was one of the main entries to this South End residential section. But it was mid-afternoon, an off time, and the darkness of the space between garage and gothic, as well as those bushes blocking the way, made it hard (not impossible, but hard) for anyone going by in a car to see what I was going to do.
And what I was going to do was break the window.
Now wait a minute. I didn’t go off half-cocked. I went off fully cocked. I first plastered my ear against the glass to check for any activity that might be going on in the garage. Not a sound. Then I very carefully slipped out of my short-sleeve sweatshirt and folded it, laid it gently against a pane of black-painted glass, and rammed my elbow into it.
The glass cracked.
It didn’t shatter and go clattering to the floor, waking the dead and scaring hell out of the living; it just cracked, so that when I took the folded sweatshirt away, the framing wood still held the glass, slivered now in the formation of an interesting but simple jigsaw puzzle, and all that remained was to carefully, piece by piece, take apart that jigsaw puzzle, and then where a pane of glass had been would be a hole. I shook the loose glass from the sweatshirt, got back into it, and started picking the shards of glass from the window frame.
When I was done, I had a hole through which I could see the green vehicle completely. It was indeed a green van, but if it was the same green van, some changes had been made. For one thing, there were license plates, or one anyway; I had a back-angle view of the truck and could see a license plate where the van at Jonsen’s had had none. Not that it was any great trick to take off or put on a plate, but it was a difference. A bigger difference was the red lettering on the side-GARDENING SERVICE-big, bold letters that hadn’t been on the van I’d seen. Either the letters had been added since, or that night they’d been covered up somehow. Or this wasn’t the same van.
But it had to be. And that Neanderthal upstairs just had to be the same Neanderthal who had jumped me at Jonsen’s. Running into both Hulk and the van cinched it.
Especially added to the contents of the garage. Instead of the filthy, greasy pit you might expect, full of old auto parts salvaged from junkyards, this was a clean, tidy, cement-floored room, with crates and boxes stacked around. The garage was a damn warehouse! And not for used auto parts, either. This was where the ripped-off loot was stashed.
I wanted to let out a whoop of victory, but now wasn’t the time. I could almost feel the adrenalin flowing into my veins. What you should do now, I told myself, is call Brennan and tell him to get out here and whip a John Doe warrant on these people and confiscate the goods and have that garbage living upstairs tossed into a more-or-less permanent can.
What I did instead was reach my hand through where the pane of glass used to be and unlock the window. I pushed it up and crawled inside. They call it breaking-and-entering, gang, and I just couldn’t help myself.
Because I had to know.
I had to know it was the same van. I had to know those crates and boxes contained what I thought they contained.
Once inside, I walked softly and wished I had a big stick. There wasn’t much light in here. Some little came through the open pane, and a single but fairly bright bulb was burning, hanging over a workbench affair built into the back wall, next to the open door of a toilet in the far corner. I felt fortunate at first that the bulb was lit, though on second thought its being on could easily mean someone would be coming back soon.
I started looking. The van, first. No way to be absolutely sure about it, but other than the license plates and the red lettering, it was a ringer, and I was convinced. I started poking into boxes, crates. Found everything from kitchen appliances to an antique vase. In one corner I found Mrs. Jonsen’s grandfather clock, under a tarp. In another I found, crated up, her color TV.
In yet another I found, neatly boxed, the blue Christmas plates.
And for a quiet moment there, I was very angry.
Most of the stuff in the room was Mrs. Jonsen’s. Not all, but most, and the way I figured it was these people moved out whatever they stole as quickly as possible. Mrs. Jonsen had been Thursday night and the stuff wasn’t moved yet, but this was just Saturday, and with the van here, maybe tonight was the night. I didn’t know what they did with their goods, but my guess was that they sold as much as possible to fences in the Quad Cities. Chicago wasn’t that far away, either, and the not-easily-traced items (like a color TV with serial number “worn” away) could be fenced or sold locally. Antiques and such would have to be fenced outside of the area.