Crashed

As the name Rush suggests, amyl nitrate is fast, but in my cranked-up state the dogs’ reaction seemed to happen in stalactite time: first, the growls shut down, then the noses stopped shoving inward, and then I heard a series of rewarding yelps as the amyl interacted with the astonishingly sensitive nasal apparatus that guided all those teeth. The yelps scaled into the soprano range, and the muzzles disappeared. To my infinite relief, I heard nails scrabbling down the stairs.

But another dog was banging against the door to Mrs. Huston’s clothes room. I picked up my bag, which weighed about fifteen pounds, and put it against the door, which I’d left ajar. Then I took a peek through the crack in the door and saw the dog about fifteen feet away, hurling himself mindlessly against the closed door. I stuck my hand out, yelled “HEY!” and ran like hell.

The dog hit the door as I hit the dressing room, but I could hear the door collide with my bag, giving me maybe two extra seconds, and by the time the door banged open I was most of the way through the bathroom. About a tenth of a second after I ducked behind the open door to Mrs. Huston’s Palace of Clothes, the dog shot into the room at fifty miles an hour. I could see it trying to brake, putting on the skids with its rear legs, as I stepped around the door and slammed it behind me. Two seconds later, the dog’s body buckled the door from the other side, but it opened in that direction, so I didn’t waste a thought on it.

In the bedroom, the hallway door still yawned open, and the small area of the hall I could see was miraculously dog-free. I grabbed the painting and my bag and headed into the hall. I was five feet from the top stair when the Rottweiler in Mrs. Huston’s mega-closet came straight through the door, just a black streak and a bunch of white wood chips.

I slung the painting, keeping it as flat as possible, at the stairs, and heard it start to bump its way down. I tossed my bag over the banister. The dog covered the fifteen feet between it and me in less time than it takes to bite your tongue, gathered itself down on its haunches, and jumped.

I jumped.

I jumped straight for the top of the banister, where I wind-milled my arms for a sickeningly off-balance second, and then-with the dog three feet above the hardwood, teeth first, and closing fast-I shoved off and sailed into space, twenty feet above the gleaming marble floor of the entrance hall, flailing my way through the thinnest of thin air toward the thick gold chain that supported the crystal chandelier.

And got my hands around it, but it was slick with grime, and I slid down it almost as fast as I’d been falling until I managed to hook a couple of fingers through the links in the chain. I nearly dislocated both shoulders, but it stopped me. I hung there, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth as the chandelier jingled like a full-scale carillon beneath me, and watched the dogs assemble below. The one who had burst through the door trotted downstairs to join the other two. And there they stood, looking up at me like I was a squirrel whose time was up.

And then, just to make the moment more special, another dog, big enough to take the other three like aspirin, shouldered its way into the hall with a growl so low it rattled the crystals in the chandelier. The other three backed off to a safe distance, but kept their eyes on me.

There was a little creaking sound, and the chain-and I-dropped about three inches. I reflexively looked up and was rewarded by a nice eyeful of plaster dust. Then something snapped, and I dropped another three or four inches, and it was raining small pieces of ceiling. The dogs started barking in anticipation, and why not? Dinner was about to be delivered via airmail.

An idea flashed through my mind, more like an image, really, and not a particularly persuasive one. The stained glass in the door. My feet, breaking it cleanly. My body, following my feet to land uninjured and intact, on the front porch. The dogs pouring through the broken-no, no, stow that, deal with it when it’s necessary.

And what was the alternative, anyway?

I swung my legs back and forth, and, with much creaking, the chandelier and I began to travel in an arc, a huge jangling pendulum. A sound like boick heralded another drop-maybe a foot this time, but I was getting a pretty good swing going. I focused my eyes directly on the stained glass, visualized a clean passage through it, and, with the adrenaline-heightened vision of those about to die, I saw:

The thick chicken wire … running through the glass.

I had exactly enough time to think noooooooooooo before the chain pulled free from the ceiling and I was plummeting downward, way too fast, with the chandelier’s long icicles floating away from it below me like the world’s biggest, most glittery spider, and then it hit the marble with a noise so loud it could’ve been heard over the Big Bang, and an explosion of crystals, crystal fragments, and crystal dust billowed out in all directions, and the terrified dogs scattered to the cardinal points of the compass as I landed on top of it all.

No time to hurt, no time to bleed. I got up, snatched my bag, grabbed the painting, opened the door, and pushed the SUB ZERO carton outside. I slammed the door shut just as the first dog hit it with all his weight, and I hauled off and kicked the door back, creating an entirely new level of canine insanity inside.

With trembling hands, I loaded my bag and the painting into the carton, tilted back the dolly, and wheeled the whole thing seventy-three shuddering feet and nine inches to the curb. It took me a couple of tries to get the rear doors of the van open, but when I did, I just upended the dolly into the back-the carton wasn’t supposed to be heavy any more, anyway-and slammed the door. Then I went around to the front, got in, and leaned forward until my forehead was resting on the steering wheel.

Just as I was getting my breathing under control, something cold touched the back of my neck, and a man’s voice said, “Well, look who’s here.”

3

Hacker

The face in the rear-view mirror possessed more distinctive characteristics than you’d normally find in a whole room full of faces. The eyes, black as a curse, were so close to each other they nearly touched, barely bisected by the tiniest nose ever to adorn an adult male face. I’d seen bigger noses on a pizza. The guy had no eyebrows and a mouth that looked like it was assembled in the dark: no upper lip to speak of, and a lower that plumped out like a throw pillow, above a chin as sharp as an elbow.

It wasn’t a nice face, but that was misleading. The man who owned it wasn’t just not nice: he was a venal, calculating, corrupt son of a bitch.

I said, “Hello, Hacker.”

“Is the painting in the box?” Hacker asked.

“What painting? I just delivered a refrigerator. I’m exploring the dignity of honest labor.”

The gun pushed its way between a couple of vertebrae. “Okay,” I said. “What do you think, I forgot it?”

“Sounded like a bunch of werewolves in there. And you got little cuts all over you, you know that? If I pull this gun back a couple inches, you going to be stupid?”

“I’ve already been stupid,” I said. “I try to keep it to once a day.”

“Good. Well, I can’t tell you what a thrill this is. Catching Junior Bender in the act.”

“For someone with your record, it must be.”

“I should read you your rights,” Hacker said.

“If you could.”

“You ain’t taking this seriously, bro.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“What’s to think about. I got you.”

I checked the side mirrors again. Sure enough, something was missing. “Okay, you got me,” I said. “But why?”

“Whaddya mean, why? I’m a cop, you’re a crook.”

“With no record at all. And where’s your black-and-white?”

Hacker’s eyes flicked away from mine in the mirror. “Somebody’s prolly driving it.”

“And your partner?”

“Charlie? He’s got the day off.” He lifted the barrel of the automatic to his face and scratched his chin with