over the tripline and onto the pad. Moving very slowly, I traversed the pad. It was as clean as if it had been swept. I was pretty sure that it had been swept.
This house was Plan B. Unlike the one on lot two, a stairway ran down from the pad to reach a lower level. A tripwire, stretched across the stairway four inches above the fourth step down, was virtually invisible. A foot coming down on it would have done the job, whatever the job was. It took me quite a long time, standing absolutely still and cupping my hands around my eyes against the sun’s glare, to determine that it was the only one. I stepped over it, going down, as though it were a foot thick.
When I reached the lower level, I stopped dead and took a long look around. I smelled oranges. What the architect evidently had in mind was a single, awkwardly long room with a glass wall looking out over the canyon, opening onto an outer deck from which one could enjoy the view. My house was in the center of the view.
There were no tripwires stretched over the skeleton of the deck. Dry weeds, thick and coated with dust, pressed up against the sides of the house. I took a loose two-by-four, lay down on my stomach on the deck, parted the weeds, and looked at dirt. Not until I’d checked all three open sides of the deck did I climb down into the brush. The first thing I did when I got there was stamp my feet eight or ten times to let the snakes know I was around. That finished, I jumped up and down twice and waited. Nobody rattled at me.
Getting no closer to the edge of the house than a foot or two, I worked my way around to the west-facing side and started up the hill, moving sideways. I’d gone six feet when I spotted a line of filament running down from the tripwire surrounding the pad, and used the two-by-four to part the brush in front of it. The line ran into a little square silver device, bolted to the wooden frame of the house. Emerging from the center of the little silver device was a long fuse. The fuse traveled three or four inches before it entered the business end of yet another Fourth of July fire cone. The fire cone was pointed out, away from the house. Into the brush.
Something moved behind me.
I froze, trying to will myself into silent invisibility. Whoever it was waited, too.
All I could think of was to get under the house, get between the open timbers that led down into the foundation, get away from the brush. The brush would explode. I didn’t want to burn, but I certainly didn’t want to explode.
I sank slowly to a squatting position. The person behind me moved closer, accompanied by the sound of breaking brush. I had so much sweat in my eyes that the foundation timbers blurred and wavered.
Then he came fast, and I leaned forward and pushed off with all my strength, a human frog trying to get under the lily pad before the hawk hits. I landed on one shoulder and tumbled away, rolling uphill, toward the juncture of the concrete pad and the hillside.
Rolling, in other words, into a corner.
Transformed in seconds from a frog to a crab, I scuttled backward into my corner and watched the brush. I heard something rasping and realized it was my breath.
Then I saw his feet.
They were brown. They were covered with fur. He lowered his head, gazed lovingly at me, and drooled.
“Bravo,” I said thickly. “God damn you, Bravo.” He started to back away. “Good dog,” I said very quickly. “Good Bravo. Stay, Bravo. Stay.” I was working my way toward him on my hands and knees. “Stay, boy. If you don’t stay, you’ll be Barbecue Corrigan. You wouldn’t like that, would you?” I emerged from my lair and twisted my fingers through the kerchief tied around his neck. He made a sound low in his throat, not really a growl, more like a canine “What’s up?” but he didn’t resist. United by a bond of love and cheap cotton, man and dog completed their surveillance.
I found three cones on that side of the house alone. When I got to the top, I brushed myself off, put Bravo into Alice and rolled up the windows for insurance, stepped over the tripwires again, and went downstairs. Anyone hitting one of those tripwires would have started a conflagration that could have burned half of Topanga Canyon. Wilton Hoxley was going in for mass immolation.
The smell of oranges came from one of the corners of the lower room overlooking the canyon. In it I found a tidy litter of orange peels, melon rinds, peach pits, and seeds. The Incinerator, apparently, lived on fruit. When I finally turned to climb the stairs, something gleamed at me from the vertical portion of the fourth step from the top, the one with the fishing line over it. On a small square of brown paper, in gold ink, I read the words: Hi!
How do you like it!
“I’m going to tell Finch to put a man up there,” Schultz said.
“The hell you are. Why? I cut the lines and yanked the fireworks. He’s not coming back. He booby-trapped it and went away.” The phone was slick and wet in my hand.
“He reads the papers,” Schultz said. “That thing doesn’t go off, he’s going to go up and check. He won’t be able to keep himself from checking. Maybe you found it, maybe you disarmed it. There’s nothing in the papers, he’s going to be beside himself.”
“Oh, for the love of God, Norbert. For this kind of thinking, they pay you eighty dollars an hour? He’s not coming back. If it doesn’t go off, then either it’s intact or it’s been discovered. If he thinks it’s intact, he’ll wait until someone trips over it and it makes the front page. If he thinks it’s been discovered, he’ll figure every cop in California is sitting in the sagebrush wearing asbestos and waiting for him.”
“You’re thinking sane” Schultz protested.
“I’m thinking, period.”
“You can’t think sane with this guy. Trust me on this.”
“I’ve been trusting you. Have we caught him so far?”
“What’s the note say? ‘How do you like it?’ Suppose you’re keeping us from preventing his new mission?”
“This isn’t his new mission. This is a prank.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because he isn’t around for the fun.”
Schultz lit up and breathed smoke. “A lot of people could get killed if you’re wrong,” he said. “I can’t keep this from Finch.”
“Then I stop talking to you.”
“Wait, wait. How you going to feel if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not wrong.”
“If you can say that right now, you’re dumber than I thought you were. Let’s say there’s one chance in five thousand that you’re wrong. Let’s say that’s the chance that comes up and he rerigs it and some kid sets it off and fifty people die in their houses. Remember how I felt when he burned the first woman?”
I used the time I needed for reflection to transfer the receiver to my other ear.
“You could be right about his mission,” Schultz conceded. “That sounds good to me. He’s going to want to be there. But if you’re wrong about this, this prank or whatever it is, you’re going to carry it with you until the day you die. There are little kids living up there.”
Five thousand to one didn’t sound good enough. “Only two cops,” I said. “And they can’t be uniforms.”
“Fine,” Schultz said. “I’ll tell Finch.”
“They have to go in on foot, over the fire roads. They can get dropped off about two miles away, at the top of Old Topanga Canyon, and pick up the fire road directly across the road from Deer Creek Ranch. You can get a map from the fire department. They should dress like hikers. I don’t care if they’re packing atomic cannons, they keep them in their backpacks until they’re in position and they know no one is peeking. And they take every foot of the way like they’re in enemy territory.”
“Green Beret time.”
“Eight- to ten-hour shifts,” I said. “No endless line of oversized Boy Scouts trekking heartily back and forth to Happiness Hills Homes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Schultz said impatiently.
Since I had a lot to do, everybody called. I was threading the pipe gizmos into the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom when the phone rang the first time. It was my friend Annie Wilmington, the mother of my goddaughter, inviting me to an eighth birthday party for her son, Luke, on Sunday. I declined. I was screwing the garden hoses onto the pipe gizmos in the faucets when a lady from the Los Angeles Times called to suggest that what was missing from my life was a six-month trial subscription. I told her I wasn’t sure I had six months to live. I was using
