The Penny Ferry - Rick Boyer (21 page)

"Charlie!"

I walked through the dining room. Compared to the
living room it was almost untouched. They had broken no china, yet
all the pieces had been shifted in the cabinets. The silver, worth
perhaps thousands of dollars, had been extracted and tossed in a
heap. But none of it appeared to be missing. Same story in the
kitchen. My study was a wreck, with its desk in the same condition as
Mary's. They'd hit every room, and obviously spent time and effort in
each in direct proportion to the room's capacity for concealment. I
was boiling mad, but inwardly relieved that nothing had been taken.

I was still thinking this when I entered the
darkroom; then my heart sank. It wasn't a total wreck; it was just
gone. The enlargers were still there. But the cameras were gone. All
gone. The two multidrawered Shaw-Walker metal cabinets were gone.
Twenty years' worth of negatives, our life on Elm, gone. Mary found
me leaning against the bench. She told me later I looked like I was
ready to sink right through the floor.

"Good Christ," I groaned, "I wish
they'd taken anything but that. The paintings, rugs, stereo stuff,
jewelry . . . even the cameras can be replaced. But not those
negatives."

"That cardboard box, Charlie. That little box
with Tom's front teeth inside. That's what they were after."

"And dammit, if I'd left it on my study desk
where they would have found it right away, they wouldn't have done
all this."

"Where did you leave it?"

"In Brian's office, for safekeeping.
Safekeeping! And look!"

Mary crinkled up her face a bit and her eyes got
shiny. The corners of her mouth turned down.

"Oh no," I said. "This is something to
get upset about, but not to cry over. You don't cry over property;
you cry over people. You cry over Roy Abernathy, not stuff like
this."

Roy Abernathy was a thirty-three-year-old father of
four who, a year and a half ago, had noticed pain in his right
testis. In the space of fourteen months he had been transformed from
a strong carpenter into a moaning, panting, babbling,
ninety-four-pound, shriveled sack of agony. As a registered nurse,
Mary had performed the post-mortem care on what was left of him while
Moe Abramson had done his best to arrest the avalanche of despair and
depression in his now institutionalized wife. The children were fast
changing from floating, speechless zombies of shock into truants and
thieves.

So much for the Abernathy family. It's just one of
those minor incidents that makes it a wee bit tougher to put on the
spruce duds of a Sunday morning.

Mary let out a low moan and came apart at the seams.
Now why did I have to mention Roy Abernathy? But perhaps it was best
to have her cry. I walked her downstairs and we sat on the ruined
couch together. I wondered. If there was a plan to the Great Going
On, was what had just happened to us retribution for my clutching
those luscious globes of flesh? And then a little self-hatred and
guilt went into the stew pot along with the disaster and the
horrendous, pyrotechnic trauma and injustice delivered to the
Abernathys.

And I realized life had outdone itself. The needle
had now fallen below boring. It was all the way down into the Dead
Zone.
 
 

CHAPTER TWELVE

"Everybody should believe in somethin',"
mused a dejected Sam Bowman as he hefted the jug of Cutty Sark and
poured himself a magnum load. "I believe I'll have me another
drink."

It was two in the afternoon the following day. We
were having a powwow in the Adams kitchen. If you could call it a
powwow. I couldn't. It looked more like a wake. I opened a bottle of
Bass by ale while Joe set the Krups machine to growling and produced
cappucinos for Mary and himself. Kevin O'Hearn took the whisky jug
from Sam when he was finished and gave himself a double-barreled
slug, then returned to fiddling with the little Sony television,
tuning in a soap. Brian Hannon was smoking one of my Montecruz
coronas and sipping a Sprite. O'Hearn eyed the soft drink with
disdain.

"Don't you want some Cutty, Brian?"

"Yes I do, Kevin. But if I had some, then I'd
have more and more and more. Then things would go blank and I'd
disappear and you wouldn't see me for months, and I'd wake up in an
ash can in Panama City. So I'm having a Sprite."

"Oh. Had it bad eh?"

Brian's big balding head swiveled like a gun turret
and two streams of pungent smoke cascaded out of his nostrils.

"How many people have you known who've had
alcoholism good? Hmmm?"

O'Hearn returned to his soap, and Brian to his Sprite
and stolen cigar. Brian's story, replete with fled wife and kids,
wasn't a happy one. This somewhat accounted for his rather acerbic
wit and sarcastic humor. But a nicer guy never lived. Except Moe.

"
Okay Doc, we hand it to you. That makes two in
a row. You're batting a thousand. So spill. How'd you know they'd
burn Sam's safe?" Brian interrogated me.

"Didn't. Like I told Sam, just a hunch."

"Good hunch," returned Brian. "You got
any more hunches?"

"Yeah, like on the Sox game Sunday?" asked
O'Hearn.

"They just about done it to me," said Sam,
tossing off the last of the amber fluid. "They just about broke
me down now. Kill my partner, break open my place. S'all ruint now."

He shook his handsome head slowly. He was dressed in
a cream-yellow Windbreaker. His hands and forearms were veiny, his
chin clean and taut. Tiny little white pinpricks of whisker showed on
his nut-brown jowls where he hadn't shaved— the reverse image of my
Calabrian brother-in-law, who patted him, softly on the back.

"C'mon, guy," said Joe. "Remember, the
damage done to the office and safe is all covered. Covered well.
You'll/lose a coupla hundred, max. Thanks to Doc here you took the
cash out and stashed it at Nissenbaum's. Good thing too. You had no
proof of it at all. It was just a giant-sized hunk of petty cash,
right? You wouldn't have gotten a dime on it, I'll bet. But it's
safe, so don't worry."

"What I gonna do for a partner?"

We all stared at the table and sighed. There was a
lull in the talk, which added further to the gloom. Mary asked Joe
about Johnny Robinson's car.

"They towed it four blocks away in the dead of
night to a deserted garage, which is where the Lowell police found
it. The rocker panels had been ripped off, seat upholstery torn
open—"

"And they also, what did they do, burned up
Sam's safe? What do you mean, burned?" asked Mary.

"They broke into Dependable's office— came in
through the roof— and burned the safe, honey. Burned it," I
said, lighting a pipe.

"See, Mare," said her brother, "there
are several basic ways to open a safe without the combination. The
famous one is by cracking it, or moving the lock dial delicately back
and forth until the tumbler-pins fall into place. Then the safe can
be opened. This is a great method, but it takes infinite skill and
hours of time. Most crooks nowadays have neither. Also, the old
pintumbler safe locks have been replaced by disc locks and other
sophisticated stuff. It's almost impossible to crack a safe anymore.
Now Sam's safe is— was— an old pin-tumbler Mosler. It could be
cracked, but it would take a long time and it's in an exposed
position. That leaves the other methods: peeling, blowing, punching,
and burning."

Brian erupted in a choking fit; he had tried to
inhale my stogie.

"
That's a no-no, fella; you'll kill yourself,"
I warned.

"Peeling a safe is strictly for amateurs,"
continued Joe. "When you peel a safe you don't have the
knowledge, skill, or tools needed to do a professional job. What
you're doing is, you're attacking the steel casing of the safe rather
than the door. You're going after the body, and you start at an edge
of the casing and peel away the layers of steel with cold chisels and
sledges, wedges, pickaxes . . . anything. It takes about eight hours
of sweaty work to peel even a small safe, and it's noisy as hell. You
can only peel a safe that's isolated in some old warehouse where
nobody will hear the noise."

"
Right," said Brian, whose eyes still
watered. "Had a junkie tried to peel the safe in the lumberyard
last year. Could hear him a mile away. Caught him before he'd even
made a dent in it. Poor slob. But punching's different. Now that
takes a little skill, and it's much quicker. Problem is, it's also
noisy."

"
Yeah, noisy, but it is quick," said Joe.
"Usually the guy who punches a safe will plan to skedaddle
before the heat arrives. What you do is, you drill into the safe door
with a low-speed, high-torque drill with a good Swedish bit. You put
the hole just to the side of the dial in the door, angled in toward
the center. Then you stick a heavy metal punch into that hole and
whang it with a baby sledge. Ping! The back of the lock is knocked
right off, and in you go. Noisy but quick."

"But you gotta have a good drill, and it takes
an hour, and several bits, to get that hole," said Brian.

"I wanna tell about blowing a safe," said
Kevin, who'd spun around in his chair to face us. Cops. They'll talk
your ear off. Everybody's seen the movies about this, where the guy
packs in the vials of nitro, called soup, and then hides behind the
mattresses while the building blows up. Well, it ain't like that. Now
they don't use nitro, which is dangerous as hell. They use plastique.
Black-market plastique, and they place it just right. Then they ramp
it with a hemp-and-cable mat and detonate it electrically. Boom! Off
comes your door and you're in."

"Yeah," said Brian, "but not as easy
as that. One: how and where do you get the funny putty? Not so easy,
and a federal offense if you're even caught with the stuff. Two: you
still gotta drill the holes and know how to place the charge. You
gotta study the box before hand. Blowing a box is like cleaving a
diamond, you get one shot. . . and you can wreck the box and
everything that's inside. Also of course, you can kill yourself."

"True, true," said O'Hearn philosophically.
He returned to "The Young and the Restless."

"Still," mused Brian, "blowing a box
remains the quickest way in. If speed is all that counts, and you
don't worry about the noise—"

"— or the danger—"

"— or the danger, then you can't beat it. But
burning's the most popular method now."

"Oh for sure," said Joe, lighting a Benson
& Hedges with his Orsini lighter.

"Where'd you get that fruity lighter, James0e?"
asked Brian.

Joe cuddled the instrument in his big hairy paw and
glared back.

"This is a class lighter, Hannon. Cost three
hundred bucks. Made in Italy. In Florence. Only reason you think it's
strange is because it's class."

"I just said it looks a little fruity is all. I
guess a lot of stuff made in Italy is fruity, like those chacha
boots."

"Izat so? How fruity is a nine-millimeter
Beretta? I guess the Israeli army doesn't think it's so fruity. How
about a Lamborghini, or a Ferrari? I notice there are no
high-performance racing cars named O'Grady. Eh?"

Brian squinted at him, like a leopard on a limb.

"About the only thing they make in Ireland is
Guinness . . . as if the Irish need any more of that— "

Brian slammed his palms down on the table and rose to
his feet. O'Hearn slammed down his shot glass and rose to his feet.

"Shut up, Joe, or I'll paste you one," said
Mary.

"Everybody keep quiet, or I'll paste everybody,"
I said.

"But you're just a doctor," said O'Hearn.

"Kevin, you obviously haven't seen Doc Adams in
the gym or on the pistol range," said Joe.

Gee, he made me feel like Captain Marvel. I liked
hearing that. Any guy who's almost fifty likes to hear that.

"I want to hear about burning safes," I
said.

"
Aren't they steel? Then how can you burn them?"
asked Mary, getting another cappucino.

"You use an oxyacetylene torch, Mary," said
Brian. "It'll cut through anything. Burning is pretty slow, but
it's dead quiet and safe. In the old days the only problem was
lugging those big gas tanks to the box. How can you hike those big
cylinders up to a roof and through a skylight? Can't. But recently
they've come out with these little bottles, tanks you strap on your
back just like scuba tanks. With hoses and gauges. Only instead of a
mask on your face you're carrying the torch. You climb into the joint
and walk up to the box and start burning it. Right around the lock
face. She falls away when you cut through the facing. It's kind of
like punching, only slower. . . but dead quiet."

Sam Bowman spoke up. We'd almost forgotten him, he'd
been so polite and quiet.

"Doc. What tipped you off was those guys come to
look at my roof."

"Yep. Seemed to me they came and inspected your
place at a pretty convenient time. So I warned you. But it was only a
really vague hunch. I wish I'd have caught on to this."

I glared down at the crumpled brochure describing the
high— efficiency oil burner, which I was holding in my hand.