There was a time when he had a key to her house, and knew the code for the burglar alarm. Both the lock and the code have long since been changed. Still, there ought to be some way to get into the house.
And if he were simply to ring the bell?
She’d come to the door. Late at night she might be on her guard, but in the middle of the afternoon, why, she’d open the door to see who it might be.
And if she recognizes him?
Kristin, he’ll say, it’s so good to see you! And by the time she reacts, by the time that it strikes her that she has no reason to be glad to see him, why, he’ll be inside, won’t he? And it will no longer matter what she thinks or feels or tries to do.
When he’s through with her, the house will be his for as long as he wants it. The hermit crab will have a spendid new shell.
The very moment he turns the corner onto her block, he senses an alien presence. His first impulse is to turn again and slip away, but the feeling that grips him is a little different this time, and he decides on a closer look. He’ll be careful, he’ll take pains to see without being seen, but he won’t turn tail and withdraw, not quite yet.
All the Flowers Are Dying
255
At a Korean market around the corner on Columbus Avenue, he buys three loaves of white bread and two rolls of paper towels. The shopping bag they give him is full to overflowing, but weighs next to nothing. He’s out the door when it occurs to him to add a bouquet of flowers, all wrapped up in green paper. With one arm clutching the bag of groceries to his chest and his free hand brandishing the bouquet, he manages to look ordinary and harmless while screening his features from any eyes turned in his direction.
He walks down her street, moving at the deliberate pace his burdens would seem to dictate. He’s able to glance into each parked vehicle, to check out stoops and doorways. And he sees no one the least bit suspicious, no one who might possibly be a watchful cop.
Why the warning from his guardian angel?
It was, he decided, an echo of the earlier warning. The mind would do that, summoning up the memory of a feeling when presented with a similar situation. And, while the alarm has turned out to be a false one, hasn’t it been useful all the same? Because now he can ring her bell with a bag and a bouquet to block any view of him she might gain through a peephole. That had been a flaw in his original plan, the possibility that there might be a peephole in her front door that would allow her to recognize him before she had the door open. But now she’ll have to open it to know who her visitor is, and what woman could leave the door closed on a man holding a bouquet of flowers?
Perfect.
He has passed her house and walked to the other end of the block, and now he turns to approach it again. He’s two doors away, just steps from the walkway leading to her front door, when something makes him stop right where he is. He takes a moment to visualize it all in his mind, ringing the bell, positioning the groceries and the flowers just so, waiting until the door opens, then pushing hard against the door, forcing his way in, dropping everything, and hitting her once, as hard as he can, in the chest or stomach, to keep her from reacting or crying out until he’s had a chance to draw the door shut behind him.
And he stands there, seeing all of this as clearly as if it is actually happening, when a car drives up and pulls smoothly into a parking space at a fire hydrant directly across the street from her house.
256
Lawrence Block
Two men, and he knows at once that they’re cops.
The driver cuts the engine. His passenger gets out of the car, walks into the middle of the street, and raises a hand to shield his eyes for a look at the house number. Satisfied, he turns and gets back in the car, rolling down the window to give him a better view of Kristin Hollander’s house.
And to think he’d been ready to write off a clear warning as vestigial, a mere echo! Whatever its source, he’d been alerted not to the physical presence of police (who hadn’t been there yet at the time) but to the reality of danger.
He walks at his deliberate pace, his face shielded by the bouquet, his innocence guaranteed by the bulk of his burden, until he reaches the corner and disappears from their view. He walks another block, drops both his bundles in a trash can, and picks up his pace.
If they are watching the Hollander house, they know who he is.
Or suspect it, at the very least. That he did not die in the fire in Brooklyn, that the body in the basement was somebody else’s, that he who killed and ran away has lived to kill another day.
The thought excites him. It is, he knows, a paradox that he who so relishes his anonymity at the same time hungers for recognition. It seems clear that he is a genius, although not in an area much esteemed by the Nobel committee. Still, he has a human desire to be acknowledged for what he is—and a core of good sense that keeps him well aware of the danger of such acknowledgment.
He asks himself once again if it is not perhaps time to disappear. He has the clothes he is wearing, the money in his wallet, along with an ATM card that will give him access to a few thousand dollars in a bank account on the other side of the country. He no longer recalls the name he used to open the account, or the name and location of the bank, but what does it matter? He has the card and knows the PIN, and that’s all he needs to know.
And what else does he have? The keenness of his mind, the strength of his will, and the promptings of his intuition.
And, of course, the knife in his pocket.
Enough to take him wherever he wants to go. Shall he leave, then?
34
The phone call came a few minutes after five. I let the machine pick up, and after we’d listened to my own recorded message, there was a long enough silence for me to think the caller might have hung up.
Then he said, “Well, hello, Matt S. This is Abie.” Elaine was in the room with me, and the color left her face as
