"My name is John Felker, and—"
"How did you get in here?" she asked.
"You weren’t home, and I couldn’t find a safe place. The motels ..." He seemed to see that he wasn’t answering the question. "You mean the alarm system?"
"You know I do," she said evenly. "How?"
He gave a small, apologetic shrug. "They always wire the windows and doors and things. You can’t get past them. But on the attic of every house there’s a vent at the peak, just under the roof. If you take off the grille, a man can sometimes fit."
"If he happens to be up there."
"Your neighbor is painting his house. He has an extension ladder."
Jane resolved to have the alarm company come back if she survived this. "Then what?"
"Once you’re in the attic, there’s a trapdoor to come down. I cut off the alarm."
She worked her jaw and lifted the pistol a few degrees to aim at his belly. "The alarm has a battery for backup in case the power is shut off."
His eyes settled on the gun. "The terminal box for your system is in your bedroom closet. I couldn’t find the battery, so I connected the battery circuit to your hair dryer until the battery was drained before I shut off the main circuit breaker for the house. They were smart enough to wire your phone-junction box, so I had to be sure it wasn’t hot before I disconnected the phone wires."
"You shouldn’t have done it," she said.
"I’m sorry," he said, "but I had to. Once the phone was off, I turned the power on again so the alarm would still sound inside the house if somebody broke in. I just couldn’t have the alarm going off at the police station. The battery is charged up again. No harm done."
"If you get shot, I won’t be able to call an ambulance."
"If you shoot me from there, I won’t need one." He looked a little hopeful, his eyes now fixing on hers. "If you don’t, I can hook up the phone wires again as soon as you turn off the alarm."
’’That was a lot of work. What did you do it for?"
"I need to disappear."
"And you’re afraid of the police."
"Yes."
"Then you’re a criminal."
"So are you."
She caught herself liking him a little for that. He was straightforward and quick, not watching her for a reaction and then changing his story. But nobody knew that much about how alarm systems worked unless he had some very good reason... or some very bad reason. "Tell me what happened."
He looked down at his feet, then at her. "Like this?"
"You can sit. If you like, you can lie down."
"Where?"
"Right there," she said, almost smiling at his befuddlement. "On the floor."
He sat down on the floor and she watched him as she moved across the room, until she was eight feet away and could be sure nothing he did would neutralize the advantage of the gun. He sat absolutely still on the bare, shiny floor with his knees pulled up, held by his arms. He was lean and athletic and wore a clean pair of blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of good sneakers. The signs were ambiguous. Since he was clean, he probably wasn’t crazy. But men his age tended to let their bellies go a little bit unless what they did for a living involved fighting or they had some kind of sexual problem or they had spent a lot of time in prison, and there was a lot of overlap among those three. She decided he did look a little bit like a prisoner as he sat there on the floor, not at ease but motionless—maybe a captured soldier.
"Who told you to come here?" she asked.
"Harry Kemple."
Hearing the name was like feeling an injection of tranquilizer stab into her arm. The effect should have been calming, but the first impression was of the sharp, silvery needle sliding directly into the vein. Her impulse was to fight it. "Where did you meet Harry Kemple?"
"I used to be a cop."
She felt the ground under her begin to crumble. That was one of the few good explanations for the way he looked. Maybe it would even explain why he knew so much about breaking into a house and why he had a gun. But Harry Kemple would not have told a cop anything about her. So this one must be lying, and Harry Kemple had probably never made it home free.
Thinking of that term caught her by surprise. It was from the game that she and the Reinerts and the other neighborhood kids had played most summer evenings. When grown-ups noticed, they would ask, "Are you playing hide-and-seek?" but its only name here was chase. That reflected its seriousness and scope. It was played with competitiveness and cunning, and there were no boundaries at all. Combatants could and did climb trees to the roofs of houses or run a quarter mile to the river to crouch among the rotted pilings and mossy rocks from the old ferry landing.
Each person who was caught would become one of the chasers, until at last, one person, the best, would be pursued relentlessly by all of the others, sometimes in a roving pack and sometimes spread out to sweep the neighborhood like tiger hunters. It wasn’t enough to be the last one left. To win, you still had to make it back alone to touch the big tree where everyone had started. Hot and dry-tongued and panting, you would make the final dash from the last bit of cover, across the open space, arm out to slap the tree, and yell, "Home free!"
She felt sad. Harry had lasted long enough to be the last one out, but still out. "Did you take him in? Arrest him?"
"No," said Felker. "He got in touch with me to tell me."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because I helped him once. It was maybe five, six years ago. You know about Harry?"
"Something. Tell me how you helped him."
"I was a sergeant in St. Louis. Harry got picked up in one of those group arrests that sometimes happen. You’ve got three or four guys on a dark street and they’ve all got blood on them, and their clothes are all messed up and each one says he was minding his own business when somebody hit him."
"So you arrest all of them?"
Felker’s eyebrows went up and he gave a sad chuckle. "See, when you get there, you’re alone. You call for another car and get out on the pavement and what you think about is that there is no way in the world one man can control four except to shoot them. Usually, they know that as well as you do. You try to talk, you try to scare them with the lights and the baton and all that to get them to separate. When you do, they’re all yelling at once about who did what. If you get one aside to give you a clue, the others either run or attack him. It’s ugly. So what you do is survive on bluster until more cars get there, then sit them down and sort it out."
"And Harry was the victim?"
"I don’t think Harry was ever exactly a victim. He was just the worst fighter. You know Harry."
"I knew Harry."
"What do you mean?"
"I haven’t seen him in a long time."
Felker looked at her for a moment without speaking, then said, "Anyway, when they brought him in he was acting strange. If there waS a fine he wanted to pay it, if there were charges he could file against anybody he wanted to forgive and forget. This is from a guy with a split lip, a black eye, and a nose that was probably broken. At first I figured, Okay. This guy is wanted. But when I checked ... nothing. So I sat him down and talked to him."
"What did he tell you?"
"He had been running a floating poker game in Chicago for over a year. It seemed like it was a great idea. Harry wasn’t betting anything, and he got to take a rake off every pot. He would recruit the players and bring them in and introduce them to each other. He had a couple of very rich guys who liked the danger of it: sort of an anonymous, low-life way to gamble for big stakes. The higher the pots, the bigger the rake, and Harry was also getting a chair fee and catering it like a party."