Smoke

did. Listen to that scratching — sounded like the damn thing was eating a baseball bat.

The door opened.

What? Geoff leaned closer to the radio. Had he heard what he'd thought he'd heard?

The door closed. Footsteps. A file drawer opened.

'Well, hell,' Geoff said, and reached for the handgun under the dash. Tucking it into his jeans, removing his nail apron, flipping the tail of his T-shirt over the gun butt, he got out of the pickup, called to his guys, 'I'll be right back,' and walked the two blocks back to his house, passing along the way a gray minivan with city plates and a strange woman at the wheel, who didn't look at him as he went by. Something to do with it, whatever it was.

Already he knew this wasn't kids. It was a burglar, picking locks, deliberately breaking into that specific room in that specific house and going right away to the filing cabinets.

Half a block this side of his house, Geoff turned off and walked down a driveway, then across some backyards. He'd grown up in this town, and until the age of thirteen the backyards and fields and lower tree branches and barn interiors had been his primary routes, leaving the ordinary streets and roads for the use of unimaginative grown-ups. You didn't forget those childhood patterns: Geoff could now come at his house from eleven different unexpected directions.

Letting himself quietly into the house through the back door, he paused to remove his work boots, then in his tube socks eased through the house to the closed office door. Leaning close to it, holding his breath, he listened at first to silence, and then to a squeak — his office chair, the son of a gun was sitting in his office chair — and then the undeniable scrape of his bottom drawer opening, the one that was always kept locked, but which this alien burglar son of a gun had picked or pried open. Goddam it!

Geoff took a deep breath, held the handgun in his left hand — a Smith & Wesson Police Positive .32 revolver, tested semiannually on the firing range but never fired otherwise, up till now — squeezed the doorknob with his right hand, stopped to be sure he was calm enough for all this, then turned the knob, shoved the door open, stepped in, pointed the revolver toward the desk, and cried, 'Hold it right—'

There was nobody in the room. Geoff stared around, this way and that, and there was nobody in the room, the place was as empty as when he'd gone out.

There'd been no scratch marks or damage on the door, either, come to think of it. Was he crazy? Was it a mouse after all?

The bottom desk drawer over there was open. From this angle, he could just barely see it. And his office chair was tilted backward at an unusual angle. Geoff squinted, pointing the handgun at that chair. He waited.

The chair squeaked. A tiny, reluctant, embarrassed squeak, but a definite squeak.

'Okay,' Geoff said. Now he was sure of himself. Back to the doorway, handgun pointed firmly at the seat back, he said, 'I don't know how you're doing that, mirrors or whatever it might be you've got there, some kind of city trick I've never heard of, but that's okay. I don't have to see you to know you're there. And I don't have to see you to shoot you, either, so you'd best be very careful.'

The chair squeaked again, even more reluctantly than before, this time sullenly, mulishly as well.

'I said be careful,' Geoff told it. One small part of him was amazed to listen how he was talking so calmly and self-assuredly in an empty room, but the rest of him was just doing his job. All of his jobs, all the jobs he'd been trained for, taking state-police classes and fire-department classes and CPR training and ambulance-rescue instruction and all the rest of it. Emergencies were what he did. If the emergency is you talk out loud in an empty room and point your handgun at a perpetrator you can't see, that's okay. You cope.

Geoff said, 'That chair's giving you away, you know. I'll know if you try to stand up out of it, so you shouldn't try that, because then I will have to shoot you, because otherwise I might not know where you are. So just stay in the chair.'

Nothing. Silence.

'You're not fooling me, you know,' Geoff said.

Nothing. Silence.

'Well, this is just silly,' Geoff said. 'All I have to do is call a couple of friends of mine, and they'll come here and throw ropes around you and the chair while I hold this gun on you, and then we'll turn you over to the state police and let them send you back to the city or whatever they want to do with you. Is that woman in the van with you?'

A sigh sounded, floating in the air.

Geoff nodded. 'Yeah, I thought she was.'

The chair squeaked again, this time loudly and unashamedly. Papers on the desk ruffled and crumpled. It was Geoff's guess that the perp had put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. He almost felt sorry for the fellow, and might have, if the fellow weren't in the process of burglarizing Geoff's own house, own office, and own desk. Sympathy in his voice, he said, 'You want to tell me about it?'

'Out of all the police departments in all the small towns in all the world,' said a faint forlorn voice from the general direction of the desk, 'why did I have to pick this one?'

'Maybe you underestimated us hicks,' Geoff suggested.

'Oh, don't do that city-country shit on me,' the nothing in the chair said, sounding aggrieved. 'We're all just people, goddam it.'

'Well, that's true,' Geoff said, feeling suddenly abashed. He tried to be a decent person, and didn't like all at once to find evidences of prejudice in himself. 'I apologize if I was being anti-city,' he said, 'but you have to admit, what you're doing there, whatever it is you're doing, it isn't something anybody around Dudley could do.'

'That's right. So nobody's gonna believe you,' the whatsit in the chair said hopefully, 'so you'd just make trouble for yourself, so probably the best thing would be, you just let me go.'

'They don't have to believe me,' Geoff told him. 'They can believe you.'

The next sigh from the chair was counterpointed by a sudden loud knocking at the front door. An instant later, a woman's voice out there called, 'Hello? Anybody home?'

'There's your friend,' Geoff said.

'Never saw her before in my life.'

'You're not seeing her now.'

'If I could see her, I've never seen her before.'

Knock knock. 'Hello? Hello?'

Geoff said, 'Is my front door locked or unlocked?'

'Unlocked.'

'Why don't you call her in, then?'

'It's your house.'

'You unlocked the door.'

Knock knock. 'Hello? Anybody? Freddie?'

Sigh from the chair, long and heartfelt. 'Come on in,' the burglar called.

'Freddie?'

'It's unlocked!'

'You be good now, Freddie,' Geoff warned, and stepped back into the doorway, so he could look simultaneously at his office chair and the front door, which opened.

The woman from the van, now that he got a better look at her in his open front doorway, was an attractive girl, like one of those movie actresses that play girls from Brooklyn but aren't really. Except this one probably was. She stared at Geoff, much more astonished and frightened by his appearance than he had been by her boyfriend's nonappearance. 'Who — who are you?'

'Well, the householder,' Geoff said. 'Also the chief of police. Come on in. Might as well close the door behind you.'

'No, I, I was just, he's not here, sorry, I was just, uh, looking for my friend.'

'Freddie. Come on in,' Geoff invited again, being very calm and easygoing, trying not to spook this girl more than she was already spooked. 'Freddie's sitting at my desk,' he said.

She came in, she shut the door, and she looked at Geoff with deep mistrust. 'I don't know what you mean,' she said.

Now that she was inside, Geoff let her see the gun. Gesturing with it, he said, 'I'd like you to come into the office, please,' and he put more of his official tone into his voice.