King Maybe Read Online Free Page B

little bend in the nail file—which is harder than it sounds—when the Slugger started hollering at Mr. Back Stairs, telling him to get various parts of his anatomy back inside. That supplied a spike of energy that made the bend a bit easier, and, holding the nail file in my left hand, I backed all the way out onto the sill, still in a crouch, until I was clear of the window’s path.
    Now for the first hard part.
    The window casing was a good, thick, dependable two-by-six, and the wall was shingled, giving me little spaces between the casing and the tops of the overlapping shingles into which I could insert my fingertips. With nothing but that and the four inches of windowsill beneath my feet to support me, I leaned in just far enough to reach up and pull the window down. It wouldn’t go all the way down, because the latch on the inside was in the closed position, but at least it would look locked. I was breathing heavily when the realization hit that I had just eliminated my only quick and easy route back into the house, and the psychological effect was instantaneous: the space beneath me suddenly yawned, darkened, and deepened until those eighteen feet between me and the flagstones felt like eighty.
    Now for the second hard part. And wouldn’t it be cool , I thought, to be able to climb a rope?
    But I couldn’t, and I didn’t have one anyway, so it was jump or die, or perhaps jump and die. A step four feet down and eighteen inches out separated me from the top of that ivy-clad, one-foot-wide wall. Piece of cake , I thought. On level ground it would be a long step. Of course, on level ground it’s not such a deep step. I thought of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, my father’s favorite cartoon character and one of the few things we both enjoyed, Dad and me watching reruns of good old Rocket J. Squirrel together, me laughing whenever he did.
    Rocky flew with his arms spread wide, and I thought, Who am I to argue with Rocky? I slid the nail file into my pocket, turned around very carefully, opened my arms, and pushed off. In midair I spread my legs, too, guiding myself to the top of the wall along an imaginary path of the sheerest, purest yearning and landing flat on my belly on top of it, gripping it for dear life with my arms and my knees. I knotted my fingers into the ivy in case of . . . I don’t know, an earthquake and just lay there, thinking briefly about breaking into tears but remembered that I wasn’t finished yet. I still had to lock the window screen.
    As I got onto my hands and knees, I reviewed my next steps and found them wanting, an unsettling blend of high risk and low value. I was ninety-nine percent certain that what I was about to do, like having reset the combination dial and making sure that the bedroom window looked locked—all the time-consuming precautions that distinguish the skilled burglar from the chemically addled smash-and-grab, soon-to-be ward-of-the-state thug—was pointless. It had sounded from the beginning as though they’d known I was there. As though I had, in short, been betrayed.
    But there was that one-percent chance that I was wrong, that in fact I hadn’t wasted my time making the replacement stamp to delay discovery of the theft and doing all that other tradecraft, and then there’s also habit. When you can, says Herbie Mott’s unwritten masterwork, The Burglar’s Handbook , you leave the scene exactly as you found it. The longer it takes the mark to discover the theft, the colder the trail.
    So what the hell. The Slugger’s unwearying stream of invective had ranged off to my right, as though he’d jogged in that direction to try to locate the vehicle that had taken out his gate, and now it was swinging left again, as he came back down the street. The other guy was presumably inside the house by now, although he might be skulking behind a couch or something, waiting to spring into courageous action