parking lot. The sun had moved, and the steering wheel had come out of the shade; it was blazing hot when he tried to hold it. He flicked on the radio, and used a crumpled page of the
Going against traffic, it took him only ten minutes or so to drive down toward the ocean and pull up in front of the club. He hung his Handicapped placard on the rearview mirror, and noticed that parked right behind him was a Silver Bear Security Service patrol car. Sadowski was already here.
Inside, the place was nearly empty. The stage lights were off, and a guy with a mop was washing down the runway for tonight’s show.
Greer got a Jack Daniel’s at the bar from Zeke, who asked him in a low voice, “That it?” Zeke also sold him his drugs, especially the ones the VA would never prescribe.
“Yeah,” Greer said. “I’m set.”
Zeke nodded and moved off.
Sadowski was sitting in the back booth, with a beer and a copy of some gun catalogue spread out in front of him. He was a big guy, with a slack face and closely cropped, bristly hair — Greer had once kidded him, when he first got the job at the security service, that he looked like a silver bear, so how could they have turned him down? Sadowski had kind of liked the joke.
“What are you shopping for now?” Greer asked, easing himself into the booth. “An anti-aircraft gun?” Sadowski, he knew, already had a private arsenal better than the one they’d had in Iraq.
“Ammo clips, Captain.”
“I told you, you don’t have to call me that anymore,” Greer said. “And what, they don’t give you ammunition to go with your piece?” He gestured at the pistol strapped in its holster to Sadowski’s side. He was wearing his full uniform — silver-gray shirt, pants, and sidearm.
“Nah, this is stuff I need for home use. Steel-jacketed shells.”
Greer didn’t even ask what he’d need them for. Sadowski was part of some secret militia that was arming itself and getting ready for Armageddon, and whenever he tried to tell Greer about it — or get him to enlist — Greer would just nod, then turn the conversation back to business.
As he did now.
“So, what’s the big rush? You said you had something?”
Sadowski took a swig of his beer and pushed the gun catalogue to one side; under it, there were some folded papers.
“Owner’s leaving tomorrow morning, be gone for one day,” he said, opening the top paper and showing Greer a color photocopy of a Colonial-style house behind a red brick wall.
“Jesus, you could have given me a little more warning.”
“I only found out today.”
Greer wearily reached out and turned the papers around to see them better. Under the picture there was a blueprint, with several points circled in red.
“I have to do any cutting?”
“No, I can give you the codes, if you want ’em.”
“Isn’t that going to be a little obvious?”
“There’s one entrance, in back, that’s not wired yet. It’s part of an addition that was just put on. You can’t see it in the picture.”
Greer studied the papers. For over a year now, he and Sadowski had had a nice little business going on the side. Sadowski would hand over information about Silver Bear clients whose homes were going to be left unattended — clients were instructed to tell the firm whenever they were going to be away for more than twenty- four hours — and Greer would burglarize them. Sadowski received a 25 percent finder’s fee, based on whatever the value of the fenced goods turned out to be.
“Any idea what’s inside?” Greer asked, washing down a couple of Vicodin. He liked to know what he was looking for, and what he might expect to find. He worked alone, and he was not about to start carting out big- screen TVs and desktop computers; he was strictly interested in the small and the portable. Cash, jewelry, maybe a laptop if it presented itself.
“The guy’s a doctor,” Sadowski said, unhelpfully. “They like to wear Rolexes.”
“Then he’ll probably have it on, wherever else he is.”
Sadowski pondered this, then brightened. “But these guys always have more than one watch.”
Greer sighed, folded up the papers and slipped them into his jacket. “He married?”
“No.”
So there might not be much jewelry. Unless… “He gay?”
“Don’t know. Want me to ask around?”
“Christ, no, I don’t want you to ask around.”
Sadowski looked stumped, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. “So you gonna do it or not?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Because he’s only going to be—”
“I said I’ll think about it,” Greer repeated, leaning in close. Then he slipped out of the booth before Sadowski could invite him to a meeting of the Minutemen, or the Friends of the White Race, or whatever the hell it was he kept stockpiling his ammo for.
CHAPTER THREE
There were about twenty-five kids in the group, all sixth graders from a local school, and the docent was having a bad first day. She’d been carefully trained by the museum, given a lengthy test to make sure she knew her stuff, but she’d never actually been in charge of a group, all by herself, and peppered with quite so many questions.
“Where are the dinosaurs?”
That was an easy one. “There aren’t any. The fossils from the tar pits date from the Ice Age, when the dinosaurs were already extinct.”
“What about saber-toothed tigers?”
“Actually, they’re not tigers at all; we call them saber-toothed cats, and yes, we’ve found many of those.”
“How big were they? Were they as big as dinosaurs?”
“No, they were about the same size as a modern-day lion.” She knew she had to move the group along, but there were always stragglers who didn’t want to leave the life-sized re-creation of the giant sloth, or the glass dome covering the plungers immersed in tar. “If you’ll just come this way,” she said, looking in vain for their teacher — wasn’t she supposed to be there, too, for the entire tour? — “we’re coming to an exhibit of one of the most —”
“Could you talk louder? I can’t hear you.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, raising her voice and detecting a surprising quaver. “We’ll see an exhibit of one of the most successful predators in this region.”
“A predator like in the movie?’”
For a second, she didn’t even know what that meant. Then she remembered her boyfriend talking about a movie called
“Probably not. By predator, I simply mean a creature that hunted and killed other animals, for its own survival. A carnivore.”
“A what?”
“A meat-eater. Like all of you.”
“Not me; my mom’s a vegetarian, and so am I.”
“That’s very laudable,” she said, still trying to shepherd them to one of the Page Museum’s most startling displays — a wall where 404 skulls of a creature called the dire wolf were mounted and displayed against a glowing golden light. As the kids approached, some fell silent, and some muttered things that sounded like approval. The
