Break and Enter (35 page)

But it was the heating bill that broke his spirit: $389.34. How could that have happened? He had been so careful. All the windows had their
storms—he had done it at halftime of an Eagles game on TV last fall. According to his bank statement—luckily it had arrived only two days before and was therefore fairly current—he was down to about three hundred dollars in his account. And—thanks in part to his mother—Janice hadn’t even written out any checks. Anyway, he was running thousands behind the pace, as best as he could determine, with another mortgage payment due in three weeks. Vinnie could ruin him, easily and forever. A leak to the right reporter, anything. What was money compared to what Vinnie could do? His paycheck would arrive at the end of the month, but it was already spent. Insanity! He had not recorded his checks or the frequent money-machine withdrawals he was making.

If only he could freeze the chaos in his life and untangle each piece one by one. He looked at the figures of income and expenditure, and decided to root out the cause of his $389.34 heating bill. The basement was the first place to look, and past the old bicycles and moldy boxes of papers he found, to his horror, that the door leading to the old coal chute was wide open. He had been heating an unsealed airspace, for the chute also opened to the street via a pair of loose-fitting steel ground doors. He couldn’t remember having gone down there recently. The typical winter month bill should be two hundred dollars. He knew positively that he hadn’t been down in the basement for over a week. He looked at the bill. The meter read date was three days prior, on Friday. Because the door was still open, that meant two things: One, he would have to pay for three days of open-door heating on his
next
bill, and two, that it was at least five or six days ago that the door had been opened. What was happening then?

He put on his coat and walked outside to inspect the ground doors of the cellar, thinking he could tell Vinnie to go screw himself if he and Janice could get together. He could string Vinnie along for a little while longer, then duck out and deal with him as a private citizen.

Peter brushed back the winter-dead forsythia bushes and found the fat padlock that locked the chain fed through the loops of the doors. It appeared untouched. He gave it a yank.

The chain came flying off the doors. Someone had cut the narrow links of chain, then arranged them carefully to look unchanged. Nothing
had been stolen, that he knew of. Had someone been in the house and left quickly when he arrived home? Who? The elder Robinson and his evil, drunken henchmen, “me and the boys”? Someone else?

When he returned inside, his answering machine was blinking.

“Listen, Scattergood, listen very carefully.” It was Stein, Carothers’s lawyer. “My client Mr. Carothers two hours ago was attacked by two other prisoners who are complete strangers to him. He was very lucky, very lucky indeed for the guards broke it up immediately. Nobody was even scratched—it was over in fifteen seconds. These men are well-known drug dealers and they appeared ready to kill him. There is no motive for this, do you understand? I’m appealing to you because of your reputation. This was a setup. There was no altercation, no grudge already there. My client hasn’t been in prison long enough to make enemies, and whatever my client’s shortcomings, he’s not a dealer. There are no old scores being settled. I’m going to put it to you straight. Somebody’s trying to get to my client before he tells his story. I don’t know who or why, but I demand action or I go to the papers.”

Berger had been right, and now Peter could squeeze Carothers, force him to talk. The pressure was on, and soon Peter would have to decide if he was going to play against Hoskins or with him. The same could be said of Vinnie, and Peter headed back to his study to figure out when, if ever, he could pay his former basketball teammate. On the screen,
DISK ERROR
flashed at him. He tried to open the file again. The disk drive spun and clicked and screeched, trying repeatedly. He pulled out his manual, searched through it. He hadn’t cleaned the disk drive in a long time and the disk contained a year’s worth of financial information.
DISK ERROR
flashed rhythmically at him, producing a sense of crisis. He hit one of the keys and saw $ Z $ $ $ $ Z $ ˆ ˆ ˆ * * * * WHA ? ? ? ? ? ? ˆ ˆ ˆ # HAOOH @ @ @ @ ! ! !hhkWHA ? ? ? ? snjtRR ˜ ˜ ˜ }{%%2 qflZ$UUUUUˆ—strings of thousands of senseless characters confronted him.

“Fuck! Fuck this machine!”

He yanked the disk out and flung it across the room.

That night, sprawled feverishly on the tangled sheets, he dreamed he had rewritten the entire Pennsylvania civic and penal codes, thousands of pages encompassing all the state’s laws, bound in leather. He could open any of the fat volumes anywhere, and inside before his eyes was the
law, written to perfection. In his dream he breezed through these books, reading sections that in waking life he didn’t remember. Each word was his, heartbreakingly beautiful. When he woke, there was the lingering sensation that something great and miraculous had happened, that for a brief instant his brain had been engorged to its fullest power, making the regular operations of the conscious hours seem pale flickerings of the smallest wattage.

PHILADELPHIA WAS ABOUT TO GET HIT,
about to be dumped on as a snow front two hundred miles wide blew across the Great Lakes, Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and east. Specks of storm swirled around the stained bronze cheeks of the impassive five-foot face of William Penn atop City Hall, the whole tower lost within a low gray ceiling of unnatural darkness. Time to gather in and protect oneself from natural elements, and, doing just that, Peter had on his thick-soled hiking boots, long, one hundred percent wool black Brooks Brothers coat, black leather gloves, two scarves stuffed around his neck, and an L. L. Bean’s Irish Tweed “Thatch” Hat, with tapered “Bucket” crown with two-layer brim, size 7 5/8. It was time, he had decided, to take care of himself.

He stepped into the hunting goods store. A small electronic bell chimed as he crossed the threshold. Displayed in locked glass cabinets was an arsenal of deer knives, pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Gazing into this case stood a large man dressed in camouflage survivalist gear and command boots. On his arm was a patch that read
OUTLAW GUNS AND ONLY OUTLAWS WILL CARRY THEM
. Peter moved to another case. A short balding man in wire-rim glasses looked up from a gun he was rubbing with a cloth.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m from the Philadelphia D.A.’s office.”

“Everything’s in order here,” the salesman replied. “Every gun’s registered, and we don’t sell to questionable customers. We’ll turn down the scale, in fact. Sometimes have to do it.”

“Good,” Peter smiled. “I’m here on personal business. Somebody broke into my house. They cut a heavy-duty chain that went to my cellar. My wife’s pretty upset. I’ve also gotten threatening calls from relatives of felons I’ve convicted.”

The salesman nodded sympathetically, pursed his lips with avid concentration.

“I see your problem. You’d be surprised how often this less-than-optimal thing happens. You don’t know
who
is out there, walking around. I had an insurance investigator in here yesterday. Nice guy, mild tempered. Checks burned buildings for arson. Gets all kinds of calls. Many less-than-optimal calls.” The man rubbed the muzzle of the gun energetically. “People like you and me and this other guy, we get backed to the wall. We can’t have a world like this—now, sir, that’s a fact. Look at what happened to that mailman that was on the news, that got shot. Those young nobodies just came into the train and shot him. Didn’t know him. Thought it was fun. You try and mind your own business and … No, sir, sometimes you just gotta—”

“I
have
fired a pistol, once or twice, but not much more,” Peter interrupted, having heard this speech many times in the past from cops, legislators, and well-intentioned madmen who thought they could tell the good guys from the bad and that gun control was a mistake.

“Know what you want?”

“I don’t care what kind of gun it is, as long as it won’t misfire or jam. I want something I can put in a drawer in the bedroom and forget about until the moment some asshole is messing around downstairs or trying to get in.”

“Yes, I see it that way myself.” The salesman nodded vigorously. “I’ve got kids and a wife, too. It makes you see things differently, when you’re threatened. You get worried.”

The man unlocked the glass case and drew out several pistols, placing them reverently on a thick felt pad.

“Basically, what I think you want—if I may suggest it—is a firearm that is light enough to handle easily—say, for you and your wife.” The
man looked up, it being understood between them in an unspoken male language that in Peter’s absence the wife would have
only seconds
to blow away the big bad motherfucker set on raping her in the bedroom, set on stealing that which belonged to Peter, and Peter alone. He thought momentarily of John Apple, who, though not an intruder in the usual sense, certainly had taken something from him.

“Something,” the man was saying, “something with little maintenance. And adequate at short range. Very important it be comfortable. Something comfortable in the hand. Okay, there’re basically two theories at work here. The snubbie short-range revolver”—he pulled an ugly black short-barreled gun from the case—“keeps it simple. Anybody can understand how it works—you don’t need to practice with it to use it. You pull it out, point it, and pull the trigger again and again until the problem is gone.” He pulled out a square-barreled semi-automatic pistol. “But then again, maybe you want some security features, like a safety, which you flip this way, or a magazine disconnector. This is a .380 pistol, eight shot. Plenty of stopping power. Takes about four seconds to load a clip. About twenty-eight ounces—less than two pounds. Runs about two hundred. You remove this … and it won’t fire. Also you got a slide-mounted safety that locks the firing pin like this. The firing pin can’t strike the cartridge primer.”

The man’s hands blurred over the gun, flipping small levers, tapping at the trigger, assembling parts, clicking them out again. He had seen cops do this in the courtroom when explaining how guns were discharged. “You pull the trigger and nothing happens. You could keep this one in a drawer with the chamber unloaded and the magazine dropped. And put the hammer on half-cock. And flip on this manual safety lever, like this. You gotta practice all this, though. This takes a while to get it straight. Otherwise the guy is gonna be in the bedroom and your wife is going to be messing around with this stuff and not be able to use the gun.”

The man looked up, expectantly.

“Let’s say I need something,” Peter asked, “like you mentioned earlier—that I just want to grab and fire.” He pictured somebody—Vinnie, Robinson’s brother—breaking into his house at night; he would hear them and stand in the dark and be ready, and no matter what happened next, he could say he’d been defending himself.

The man had produced another gun.
“This
is the ultimate .357 snubbie. Fires the 125-grain Remington semi-jacketed hollow-point. That’s a top load. Real man-stopper. There’s a vicious recoil and muzzle jump with this weapon—you’re gonna feel like you have a cannon in your hand. The kick comes more into the hand, see, less upward muzzle flip.”

“Why is that important?” Peter humored him. He had called Stein and was due to see him with Carothers that afternoon while Hoskins stuffed himself at lunch. The homicide chief, Peter had seen, ate with a vengeance, as if someone were about to yank away his plate.

“No matter how much your hand stings, the barrel comes back down faster, back on target. See? This magnum is spec’d for thirty-three thousand copper units of pressure, which means you can use this man-stopper SJHP ammo with confidence. Has a very nice single-action pull, can’t be thumb-cocked. You can put a guy in a body bag from a hundred yards with this mother,” the man breathed, the edge of excitement unmistakable in his voice, “so you can imagine what it does from ten feet.”

“How much is this?” Peter asked.

“That’ll run you about three hundred and fifty. You’ll need a couple of boxes of ammo, too. We can do the bill of sale and the permit and federal form simultaneously. Since you’re in law enforcement, I don’t anticipate any problem.”

The man sucked at his lips in concentration.

“Say! You’re the guy that’s been finding the killer of the Mayor’s kid? And the girlfriend or something? Sure! I seen you all over the news!” The helpful salesman tone and diction was gone, replaced by a dark enthusiasm. “I’m telling my wife, just the other night, I’m telling her, ‘This guy, he really knows how to handle them!’ I was watching you. Well, it’s a pleasure, a real pleasure. Name’s Sam.” The man stuck out his hand, as if the pleasure should be Peter’s. “Now, you ask me, just between the two of us, I don’t think the Mayor is worth the shit he craps every day but that don’t matter. I didn’t vote for him. What matters is you got another one of them killers off the street. Aaah, this used to be a great city! I’m glad to see the story on TV, even if the Mayor ain’t worth shit. We haven’t had a decent mayor since Rizzo! How many mayors ago was
that?
Three, four? So, I’m tellin’ the wife, I like this guy,
informing
them TV faggot newsman with the blowdry-blowjob haircut you ain’t telling
him any more ‘at this present time.’ Half the city’s expecting to hang that guy. Yaaaah!”

The worst kind of gun nut. Who might brag to all his friends about to whom he’d sold a gun. Peter left without a weapon, offering no explanation. The snow was falling now, the storm coming.

THE KILLER ALSO KNEW ABOUT GUNS.
Dressed in a new suit and shackled in back, Wayman Carothers silently bit the tip of his tongue as he and his attorney Stein emerged from the elevator, followed by two cops attached to escort the defendant. Carothers was taller and thinner than Peter had expected, looking almost as if he hadn’t eaten enough recently, or ever. He moved stiffly from his wounds, which were healing well. Peter led the men to the conference room. He put his hand on the cop’s shoulder.