Hard Stop (2 page)

“Can you keep him from talking to anybody while you do that?” I asked.

“First tell me what happened.”

I went through the whole story, everything I knew, including the name of Ackerman’s employer, my old boss.

“Jesus,” said the cop. “Why would he do something like that?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to the guy in years. Or had anything to do with his company. It makes absolutely no sense.”

Sullivan went and stood over Ackerman, who shrank involuntarily into his seat.

“I guess we’ll find out when we book this lard-ass ninja.”

“Could we talk about that? In private?”

I got the look I expected from Sullivan. After cuffing Ackerman to a radiator, he followed me outside.

“I’m not going to like this,” he said.

“Don’t I have the option of pressing charges?”

“Sort of. A B&E is pretty serious crap. At night, with a gun, assaulting the homeowner. Bad shit.”

“I’ve got to know what’s going on. Donovan’s a very heavy guy. The worst Ackerman’s statement will do is prompt a firm denial and cause a little embarrassment. If you bring him in now we’ll lose whatever leverage we got.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want you to take him to the hospital and get him patched up. Don’t let him talk to anybody or get near a phone. Then figure out a way to burn up some time. Lose him somewhere. Give me eight hours. Then I’ll call you and tell you what I want to do.”

“What
you
want to do? Doesn’t work that way.”

Sullivan was a straight-ahead type of cop. He not only followed the rules, he liked following the rules. He wasn’t
self-righteous about it, it was just the way he was. For him, proper procedure was sacred doctrine.

But then again, there was such a thick ledger of debt between us that we both knew he’d try to do what I wanted, no matter how much it endangered his career. A career we also knew was partly my doing.

“This is not a typical situation,” I said. “This guy’s only here because I’m here. I’m the target. Nobody else.”

“That’s a fine point.”

“Just give me the time to do some things. Figure out how to deal with this.”

“I may not agree with what you figure out.”

“I understand. It’s your call. I just need a little wiggle room.”

Sullivan had his hands on his hips, skepticism etched on his face.

“Wiggle room for what?” he asked, then abruptly put up his hands. “Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

“You don’t.”

He’d given in. Though I could see the warning in his eyes—
do not fuck this up
.

Sullivan retrieved Ackerman from the kitchen and marched him over to the battered Bronco. Along the way he recited Miranda. He didn’t mention that Ackerman was about to disappear into a hole before all those hallowed rights could be exercised. But Sullivan said the legal bit like he meant it, which he mostly did.

I’d finished my coffee by then so I felt okay about switching to an aluminum tumbler filled with Absolut on the rocks, to bring over to Amanda Anselma’s house next door. I needed her to look after Eddie while I was gone and I wanted to
brief her on the situation. Get it all out right from the get-go. See what it felt like to have complete trust in another human being, something we’d been working on lately. Something neither of us were very good at.

She met me at the door in one of my favorite flimsy white things. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back from her face, which this time of year was tanned a deep mahogany, creating an even sharper contrast with her brilliant green eyes.

“I was just about to jump into the shower,” she said. “Care to join?”

I surprised her by asking for a rain check. Instead I started sharing details of the evening’s events, and as much as I dared of my plan for where it might go from there. While I talked she gripped my arm and searched around my body, staring into my eyes for signs of dire injury.

My first go at candid and complete disclosure went about as well as I thought it would.

“This makes me very unhappy,” she said. “You need to go to the hospital.”

“I’m okay. Nothing bad happened.”

Age was less an issue with an old boxer than the accumulated damage, of which I had more than my share. This meant I’d have to live the rest of my life walking along the edge of a precipice, one step away from the mental abyss. And that assumed no more shots to the head. I’d promised as much to Amanda, an easy promise to make provided the situation was entirely up to me, which I pointed out to her.

“You didn’t have to go in that house,” she said. “You could have just called the police. You have your own cell phone now, just like a regular person.”

I have a general rule when it comes to arguments with people I love. I don’t have them. At the first sign of genuine conflict, I do the brave thing and concede defeat, or if I’m
really feeling courageous, I turn and run the other way.

I decided on a combination of the two.

“You’re right. I’m still a work in progress. Can I borrow your Audi?”

She looked incredulous. I liked that a lot better than pissed off.

“It’s only two weeks old. I’ve hardly driven it.”

“That’s why it needs some highway miles. I know this for a fact. My father was a mechanic.”

“Your father bought that ridiculous Pontiac. What did he know about zippy little station wagons?”

“You’ve got the pickup. You look great in it.”

“You still haven’t told me what you’re going to do,” she said.

“Get dressed, throw some crap in the car and be on the road in ten minutes. Eddie ate at Hodges’s. Let him stay with you tonight. I want to know he’s safe. And Will Ervin will be hanging around keeping an eye on things.”

I snatched the keys off a ring by the side of the door and wrapped my arm around her waist. She put both hands on my chest and pushed back, looking at me with a mix of annoyance and resignation.

“Some day you might learn to trust me,” she said. “You might learn I can handle the truth.”

My beat-up brain still knew enough not to tackle gigantic relationship issues when you were trying to make a fast getaway. So all I did was give her a sloppy, theatrical kiss on the lips and got the hell out of there.

As promised, I was out on Sunrise Highway heading west ten minutes later, feeling the silken surge of the torqued-out little car as I ran through all six gears. I’d have enjoyed it
more if I hadn’t felt a little bad about the conversation with Amanda. Which would have been distraction enough without the hurricane of confusion and conjecture brought on by the unexpected resurrection of my dead past.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked for the third time that night, with no improvement in the result. So I concentrated on the only thing I knew for certain.

George Donovan had some explaining to do.

I
USED TO DRIVE
through Greenwich on the way from my house in Stamford to the office in White Plains. Every time I passed the Greenwich commuter lot off the Merritt Parkway I’d think of George Donovan’s house, just up the hill and secured within what they call a gated community. There wasn’t an actual gate, just a little hut that was usually empty, though sometimes there was a guy inside you got past by giving your name and the names of the people you were going to visit. The commuter lot always made me think of George’s house because there was a path up the hill from the lot that bypassed the hut at the gate, proving its utility had more to do with status than security.

I’d been to George’s house at least a half dozen times when I worked for the company. These were occasions of soaring elation for my ex-wife, Abby. She saw them as unambiguous signs of my rising fortunes within the firm. She’d walk into the foyer of the majestic limestone mansion, take a deep
breath and gaze about as if to say, “In a few years this shall all be mine.”

What she got instead was spectacular loss, though at least she lost me in the process.

It was about midnight when I pulled into the lot. Even this late, there were plenty of silver and grey imports parked there to camouflage Amanda’s Audi. Awaiting their owners’ return from Jersey City or Kuala Lumpur.

First I put on my clever disguise—a blue blazer over an Ivy League tie and blue oxford cloth shirt, and pressed khakis. Then I stuffed a leather knapsack full of tools and electrical equipment and headed up the path.

I had a lot of worries at this point, even with the adrenaline rush of three hours ago still itching at my nerves. My biggest worry was Mrs. Donovan. It was the middle of the week, barely past Labor Day, so she was probably still at their house in Montauk, wrapping up the season. I truly hoped so, since she’d have the dogs with her, eliminating one more irksome variable.

As I followed the gentle curves of the main road, I tried to look like a titan of industry out for an evening stroll, willing the backpack full of burglar’s tools into invisibility.

George had about a quarter mile of driveway. Spotlights buried in the ground illuminated the tangled branches of sycamore trees overhead. I took a parallel course over the lawn, staying well inside the dark edges.

When I reached the house I went around back and located a basement window. I took off the backpack and sat cross-legged, listening. All I heard were bugs in the woods and the monotonous swoosh of traffic washing up from the Merritt Parkway.

I pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. Then I took the glass cutter, and, using the window frame as a straightedge, started
drawing the tool across the glass. Certain repetitive motions bore me to death, but I put up with myself long enough to carve deep scores into the glass. Then, after wiping everything clean with a paper towel, I stuck two wads of plumber’s dope to the center of the window. I twisted galvanized screws into the dope to give me something to grip, then, using my fist like a hammer, gently tapped until I felt it bust inward. I turned the glass in the hole and drew it out, placing it carefully on the ground.

Then I sat and listened to the bugs and traffic for a few more minutes. No screeching alarms, no sirens.

I used a miniature Maglite to examine the window. As expected, there was an alarm sensor mounted to the frame, a magnetic type that went off by breaking a circuit when the sash was opened. Something I didn’t need to do with the glass out of the way.

I slithered through the hole and dropped to the floor, dragging my pack behind me with a string tied to the straps. Using the Maglite, I searched around for the electrical panel, which I found near the furnace. Predictably, the controls for the security system were in a locked box mounted next to the panel.

It took a few minutes to jimmy the lock. I could have done it faster, but I was afraid of the noise. I’d always been good at working locks, a skill put to good use as a teenage car thief. Or car borrower, as I liked to think of it, since I always gave the cars back.

Inside was a chaos of multicolored wires, but I knew what it all meant. I’d installed a system in my house in Stamford and this didn’t look that much different.

Before I touched anything in the box I used a heavy pair of wire cutters to sever the phone trunk that emerged from a conduit sticking through the concrete floor. I waited again for the hot scream of alarm, but nothing happened. I sorted
out the lines that fed the sirens inside and outside the house and snipped those. Still nothing. For good measure I disconnected the 120-volt line and backup batteries for the system.

The house was now deaf, dumb and blind.

I climbed the basement stairs and came out into the kitchen. It was lit by the glow of the LEDs on the kitchen appliances—coffeemakers, ovens and microwaves. I scanned the ceiling corners for motion detectors and found two. No blinking red lights. I moved on in search of stairs to the second floor.

It must have been somebody like Nathaniel Hawthorne or Zane Grey who wrote that Indians understood that absolute silence was impossible, so instead moved in random patterns, blending in and mimicking ambient sound. They probably didn’t have to deal with creaking floorboards or the hum and whir of central air-conditioning.