Chapter Thirty
Ricky found an army-navy surplus store on his walk across the city, where he purchased a few items that he thought he might need for the next stage of the game he had in mind. These included a small crowbar, an inexpensive bicycle lock, some surgical gloves, a miniflashlight, a roll of gray-colored duct tape, and the cheapest pair of binoculars that they had. As an after-thought, he also bought a modest squeeze spray container of Ben’s Bug Juice, with one hundred percent DEET, which, he thought ruefully, was about as close to poison as he’d ever considered putting on his body. It was an odd collection of items, he realized, but he wasn’t certain precisely what the task he had in mind would require, and so he obtained a variety to compensate for his uncertainty.
Early that afternoon, he returned to his room and packed these, along with his pistol and two of his newly acquired cell phones, into a small backpack. He used the third cell phone to call the next hotel on his list, the one he had not checked into yet. There he left an urgent message for Frederick Lazarus to return the call as soon as he checked in. He gave the cell phone number to a clerk, then thrust that phone into an outside pocket of the knapsack, after carefully marking it with a pen. When he reached his rental car, he took out the phone and gruffly called the hotel a second time, leaving yet another urgent message for himself. He did this three more times as he drove out of the city, heading toward New Jersey, each time growing more strident and more insistent that Mr. Lazarus get back to him instantly, as he had important information to pass on.
After the third message on that cell phone, he pulled into the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the Jersey turnpike. He went into the men’s room, washed his hands, and left the telephone on the edge of the sink. He noted that several teenagers passed him on his way out, heading to the bathroom. He thought there was the likelihood that they would grab the phone and start using it pretty quickly, which was what he wanted.
It was on the edge of evening when he arrived in West Windsor. The traffic had been crowded the entire length of the turnpike, cars lined up a length or two apart, traveling at excessive rates of speed, until everything slowed to a horn-honking, raised-voices, overheated crawl past an accident near Exit 11. Rubbernecking further limited the pace, as cars maneuvered past two ambulances, a half-dozen state police cars, and the twisted, impact-shredded shells of two compact cars. He could see a man in a white shirt and tie sitting in a half crouch by the breakdown lane, his head in his hands, obscuring his face. As Ricky crept past, the first of the ambulances took off, its siren starting up insistently, and Ricky saw a state trooper with a measuring wheel start to walk a skid mark on the highway. Another was poised by flares stuck in the black macadam surface, waving people on, wearing a solid, stern, and disapproving look, as if curiosity, that most human of emotions, was somehow out of place, or inappropriate at this moment, when, in actuality, it was merely inconvenient for him. Ricky thought that an analyst’s sort of insight, as telling about who he’d once been, was like the current glare on the trooper’s face.
He found a diner along Route One not far from Princeton where he stopped and killed some time eating a cheeseburger and fries that were actually cooked by a person and not by machines and timers. The day was stretched long with June light, and when he emerged there was still some time before darkness settled in. He drove over to the grave site where he’d been two weeks earlier. The old caretaker was gone, which he’d counted on. He was fortunate that the entrance to the cemetery wasn’t locked or barred, so he pulled the rental car over behind the small white clapboard storage shack, and left it there, more or less concealed from the roadway and certainly appearing innocuous enough to anyone who might spot it.
Before slinging the backpack over his shoulder, Ricky took the time to slather himself in the Ben’s Bug Juice and don the surgical gloves. These wouldn’t conceal his scent, he knew, but at least they would help keep off the deer ticks. The daylight was beginning to fade, turning the New Jersey sky a sickly gray- brown, as if the edges of the world had been burned by the heat from the afternoon. Ricky threw the backpack over his shoulder, and with a single glance down the deserted rural road, started jogging toward the kennel where he knew the information he needed was waiting. There was still plenty of warmth rising above the black macadam, and it crept into his lungs rapidly. He was breathing hard, but he knew it wasn’t from the exertion of running.
He turned off the roadway and ducked beneath the canopy of trees, sliding past the kennel sign and the picture of the barrel-chested Rottweiler. Then he stepped off the driveway, into the shrub brush and greenery that hid the kennel from the highway, and carefully picked his way closer to the home and the pens. Still hidden by the foliage, staying back in the first dark shadows of the approaching night, Ricky removed the binoculars from the backpack and used them to survey the exterior, taking a better look at the layout than he had during his first, truncated visit there.
His eyes went first to the pen beside the main entrance, where he spotted Brutus on his feet and pacing back and forth nervously. He smells the DEET, Ricky thought. And behind that, my scent. But he doesn’t know what to make of it yet. For the dog, it was still simply in the category of out of the ordinary. He hadn’t yet approached close enough to be considered a threat. For a moment, he envied the dog’s simpler world, defined by smells and instincts and uncluttered by the vagaries of emotions.
Sweeping the glasses in an arc, Ricky saw a light click on inside the main house. He watched steadily for a minute or two, then saw the unmistakable wan glow of a television set fill a room near the front. The kennel office a little ways to his left remained dark, and, he guessed, locked. He made a final visual survey and saw a large rectangular spotlight near the roofline of the house. He guessed that it was motion- activated and that the field of range was directly in front of the house. Ricky replaced the glasses in his bag, and maneuvered parallel to the home, staying on the fringe of the underbrush, until he reached the edge of the property. A quick sprint would get him to the front of the kennel office, and perhaps would keep him away from triggering the exterior lights.
Not only Brutus was aroused by his presence. Some of the other dogs in their pens were moving around, sniffing the air. A few had barked nervously once or twice. Unsettled and unsure by a scent that was new.
Ricky knew precisely what he wanted to do, and thought that as a plan, it had virtues. Whether he could pull it off or not, he didn’t know. He was aware of one thing, which was that up to this point he’d only skirted illegality. This was a step of a different sort. Ricky was aware of another detail: For a man who liked to play games, Rumplestiltskin had no rules. At least none that were constrained by any morality that he was familiar with. Ricky knew that even if Mr. R. didn’t yet realize it, he was about to enter a little deeper into that arena.
He took a deep breath. The old Ricky would never have imagined being in this position, he thought. The new Ricky felt a single-minded, and coldhearted purpose. He whispered to himself: “What I was, isn’t what I am. And what I am, isn’t yet what I can be.” He wondered whether he had ever been anything that he was, or anything he was about to become. A complicated question, he told himself. He smiled inwardly. A question that once upon a time you might have spent hours, days, on the couch, examining. No more. He shunted it away deep within him.
Lifting his eyes to the sky, he saw that the day’s last light had finally slid away, and darkness was only moments from descending. It is the most unsettled time of day, he thought, and perfect for what he was about to deliver.
With that in mind, Ricky removed the small crowbar and the bicycle lock, and placed them in his right hand, gripping them tightly. Then he returned the backpack to his back, took a deep breath, and burst from the bushes, sprinting hard for the front of the building.
A bedlam of aroused dogs instantly creased the growing shadows. Yelps, howls, barks, and growls of all sorts and sizes pierced the air, obscuring the scrabbling sound his running shoes made against the gravel driveway. He was peripherally aware that all the animals were racing about in their small pen enclosures, twisting and turning with sudden dog excitement. A world of spastic marionettes, strings pulled by confusion.
Within a few seconds, he’d reached the front of Brutus’s kennel. The huge dog seemed to be the only animal at the kennel with any sort of composure and his was filled with menace. He was pacing back and forth across the cement floor, but stopped when Ricky reached the gate. For a second, Brutus eyed
