Cheating at Solitaire (20 page)

Nina emerged from the shadows of the patio, and the three of them surveyed the scene like a battlefield, their eyes scanning for snipers or land mines or worse, Cassie's Bubble Fun Push Mower, which lit up and played music anytime you touched it.

Then, as if moved by the hand of God, a dense cloud swept across the night sky, blotting out the moon. The three of them bolted, like lightning, for the fence. They stood side-by-side with their backs flat against the completed section, breathing hard. Julia fought the feeling that they were practicing for a police lineup. Beside her, she heard Lance's steady breathing and felt his arm press against hers.

"Last chance to turn back," she said, more for his benefit ban Nina's, but Lance was already gone, ducking quickly and silently around the end of the fence. All she and Nina could do was follow.

Darting across Myrtle's backyard, Julia's heart was pounding.
Am I this out of shape?
she wondered, feeling as though she were trying to breathe water. She'd never been so grateful to see a wall in her life as when they reached the house and dropped to their knees next to Lance, who was already crouched beneath the unlocked window. She heard the walkie-talkie crackle, and it sounded like a freight train in the silence.

"Windows are black," Caroline said. "We are a go."

When this is over,
Julia decided,
I'm sending Caroline on a very long, very exotic vacation.

She leaned against the cranberry-colored brick that covered every wall in the development. The window above her was double-paned and double-hung, but luckily, it didn't have a screen.

Lance looked at Nina then locked eyes with Julia, an unspoken "get out of here" passing between them. But Julia nodded toward the glass, and his gaze changed to "here goes nothing."

He applied gentle pressure to the window, and it eased silently up. Beside her, Julia could feel Nina gloating. Lance turned to Nina, who tucked the walkie-talkie into the zipper pocket of her black fleece pullover. He leaned over and cupped his hands, and she gave him her right foot as if they'd practiced the maneuver a hundred times before. Her hands went to Lance's shoulders.

With no more breath than a whisper, he said, "One, two . . . " On three, he lifted until her head, shoulders, and waist disappeared into the darkened window, and Nina shimmied the rest of the way inside.

Julia listened for a crash. In movies, there's always some kind of shatter as the person going through the window lands on a stray pot or sleeping cat. Nothing. The silence seemed im-minently worse. Julia couldn't help herself—she leaned into the window and whispered,

"Nina!" but Lance clamped his hand over her mouth before she could make another sound. She tasted the rubber of his latex gloves and felt his warm breath on the back of her neck as he whispered, "Wait."

Her eyes stayed glued to the black, empty expanse of the kitchen and keeping room.
Where
was Nina?
Fear boiled inside Julia. She strained to see something inside the darkened house.

She was about to fight free of Lance's grip and call out for her best friend again, when Lance turned her to face the backyard, where Nina stood on the dewy grass, hands on hips, a "what are you waiting for?" expression on her pinched face.

Lance took Julia's hand and led her around the corner of the house. They'd gone patio door to patio door in less than two minutes. The
Italian Job
people didn't have anything on them.

As they stepped into the keeping room, Julia knew for certain that Myrtle wasn't playing with a full deck. The mess that filled the room went far beyond sloth. Julia looked at the mountains of junk on every free surface and became impressed that Nina had made it silently through the obstacle course that lay between the keeping room and the patio doors. Old newspapers were stacked everywhere, each pile two or three feet tall. Julia did some quick calculations and remembered that Caroline and Steve had moved in at the end of the summer, roughly eight months before. Myrtle had moved in at about the same time, and Julia guessed from looking at the piles of papers that the woman hadn't thrown a single one away during all that time. The sight of all the newspapers made Julia cringe with the thought of how difficult it might be to find the manuscript if it was anywhere other than in its box, and if the box was somewhere other than the garage.

She felt a tug on her sleeve and turned to see Lance wordlessly urging her forward. Nina was already trotting into the kitchen, dodging unopened bags of flour and cases of canned food. She moved as though the bulk groceries were laser beams, using the swift, precise motions of someone who's watched way too many episodes of
Alias.

Better make it an exotic vacation for two,
Julia decided, realizing that both Nina and Caroline needed to find a legal outlet for their energy.

Lance and Julia followed Nina's lead, with far less precision, When the three of them reached the door that led to the garage, | Lance placed his hand on the knob, and Julia felt him silently count to three. Then he opened the door, and they all piled in, with perfect SWAT team precision. Well, almost perfect.
I
Lance collided with a bicycle. Nina knocked a rake, a hoe, and a snow shovel off a rack. Julia stubbed her toe and turns' bled onto the hood of Myrtle's Cadillac.

For a minute, they were all as quiet as church mice, looking at each other through the diluted glow of Lance's flashlight.

"Caroline," Nina whispered into the walkie-talkie.

"Caroline," she said again, risking a little more volume. "Do you see lights?" she asked, then nervously added, "Over."

Julia's mind flashed back to the diagrams spread across the changing table. She recalled the layout of the first floor, remembering that the master bedroom was upstairs—
upstairs, above
the garage.
Ridiculous excuses log jammed in her mind.
Oh, yes, officers, we're the community
yard-sale committee. . . termite
.
inspectors . . . sleepwalkers?

"Caroline?" Nina asked again, this time not hiding the panic that they were all beginning to feel. A long, eerie silence followed before Caroline's static-riddled voice came through the walkie-talkie.

"Sorry guys. Nick was wet." ! "Caroline," Nina snapped,
"are there lights?"

A terribly long moment passed while, presumably, Caroline checked the window. "You're clear, Alpha team, proceed as planned. Operation is a go."

"Alpha team"?
Maybe it wasn't a vacation Caroline needed—maybe it was there a— "Pit bull!"

Nina hissed.

Julia spun around to see a big brown dog in a spiked leather collar standing at the top of the concrete stairs. The dog was looking at them as if it didn't know whether they were intruders or circus performers hired for his entertainment. Its front legs were perched on top of a giant bag of dog food. In the glare of the flashlight Julia could just make out the swinging flap of the doggie door.

"Oh, boy," Lance said. He eased toward the now-growling animal. "Hey, boy," he said. "How ya doing there, big guy? You don't need to bark. No. You don't need to bark." Then Julia saw Lance's hand move to his pocket, and moments later he was holding an uncooked hot dog.

With a gentle flick, he tossed it onto the concrete landing. But the dog was unsure which piece of meat looked better, the weenie or Lance; it looked between the two of them, sniffing. Then it lowered its head and began to eat.

Julia watched in amazement, but Nina summed it up best: "Holy crap."

Lance didn't stop to marvel at his accomplishment. Instead, he turned to them and whispered,

"Let's get out of here, quick. I've only got a few more with me."

"How did you know to bring hot dogs?" Nina asked.

He raised his eyebrows. "Not all crazy people lie."

"Okay," Julia said. "Let's spread out and find that manuscript. It's in a medium-sized brown box."

"You mean like those brown boxes?" Nina said and turned. The beam of her flashlight swept across the garage, illuminating a mountainous pile of boxes, each nearly identical to the one Myrtle had hauled from Caroline's curb.

"What kind of freak
is
she?" Julia asked, no longer trying to mask her voice.

"The kind who's gonna send us to prison if she finds us," Lance said softly. "Now let's look and get out of here."

With the mountain before them, it was pretty safe to assume that new arrivals were at the top.

Plus, upon closer inspection, Julia noticed that not all of the boxes were plain or brown. Some had mailing labels, or black-and-white pictures of TVs and computer monitors, with instructions written in English, Spanish, and Japanese.

"It was plain?" Lance asked.

"Yes. A plain brown box. No writing of any kind. Probably two feet square."

"Like that one?" Nina asked, and sent a beam of light upward to a shelf that must have been fifteen feet above the concrete floor. The three of them stood with their heads craned back so far that they could have seen straight up to Heaven if it hadn't been for Myrtle's bedroom directly above them.

"How in the world did she get it up there?" Julia asked.

"You're sure that's the one?" Lance asked.

There wasn't a doubt in Julia's mind.

Lance steadied a ladder while Julia climbed almost to its highest rung, teetering.
Don't look
down, don't look down,
she chanted to herself. She pried open the four corners of the box and, with a mini-flashlight in her mouth, saw what she hadn't seen in years. She pulled out early drafts of
Table for One,
old short stories she desperately wanted to stop and read, letters she'd received from Caroline and Nina that had inspired her to keep writing.

"We don't have time for a stroll down memory lane," Nina whispered. "Find the blasted book!"

Julia dug in again, wincing with paper cuts as her hands slid down between the pages, until panic began to set in. "It's not in here. I don't believe it. It's not. . ."

"Are you sure?" Lance asked.

"It's not in here!"

"Get down," Lance said, gesturing to the safety of the floor.

She stared down at him, so calm and safe on the ground beneath her, then she considered hurling herself off the ladder.
Better to end the humiliation here.

"Just get down," he soothed. "We'll figure something out."

Julia began the long descent. At the base of the ladder, Nina put her arm around Julia's shoulders to comfort her as Lance asked, "What was it in?"

"That box," she cried, pointing again to the top shelf.

"I mean the manuscript, specifically. It wasn't just loose in there, was it?"

"No," Julia said, remembering. "It was in one of those accordion-type files that expands and has a flap that goes over and a piece of cord that wraps around."

"Okay," Lance said. "You and Nina are going to go home now, and I'm going to go into the house and look for that file." "Nuh-uh," Nina said.

"Three of us will be three times faster," Julia suggested.

"Yes, and three times louder," Lance replied. "That triples our chances of getting caught, and we haven't exactly been good at this so far."

"I'm not leaving you," Julia said defiantly.

"Me either," Nina said, sounding offended that she might get cut out of her own master plan.

Lance looked at them, seemingly weighing his options. "Fine. But we're just doing the downstairs. Agreed?"

Nina and Caroline looked at each other. "Agreed," they said in unison.

Lance handed the dog another weenie, and they were heading into the kitchen when Nina stopped and said, "My flashlight! I laid it down to help hold the ladder. I'll be right back."

"No," Lance said. "You two go on. I'll get it."

He disappeared before the walkie-talkie came to life with Caroline's muffled cry: "Abort!"

Julia and Nina froze.

Again, Caroline hissed, "Abort! Abort! Abort!"

Julia looked around for Lance; Nina was running in place, rotating from the waist up like a compass spinning out of control looking for north. All Julia could think of was Lance, finding Lance, getting Lance out of there.

"Closet!" Nina grabbed Julia and squeezed in beside her just as light came streaming through the frosted glass of the pantry door.

"Who's there?" Myrtle yelled. "You! Who are you?"

No!
Julia thought but couldn't scream. She saw a solid, six-two form walk in front of the frosted glass.

"Oh, hoo!" Myrtle squealed like a schoolgirl. "This is so exciting! I knew my Johnny wouldn't forget my birthday," she said. "Every year he does this!" she exclaimed with glee. "Every year he gets me a stripper!"

WAY #56: Turn up the music and dance.

There's only one remedy that's certain to take the blues away. If Put on your favorite CD, turn
up the volume, and dance like nobody's watching, because, lucky for you, nobody is!

—from 707
Way to Cheat at Solitaire

" I've heard of cop strippers before, but you must be a new £ kind," Myrtle said, pondering it.

"You must be a robber
5
stripper!"

Lance tried to remember the cab ride. He'd heard a good offer from a beautiful woman, but somehow that cab had brought him to a cluttered kitchen where he was being propositioned by a geriatric klepto.
Next time,
Lance told himself,
keep walking.

"So, whatcha waiting on? Neither one of us is getting any younger."

Caroline had been right about the whiskey, Lance realized.

Myrtle was sloshed. She wasn't stumbling or slurring her words like a cheap, once-in-a-blue-moon drunk. Instead, she had the body control of a full-fledged alcoholic. Lance knew both kinds of drunks better than he would have liked; that's something that comes with the territory when working behind a bar. Who can drive? Who can't? Who's faking sobriety? Myrtle was an accomplished fake, but her glazed expression and ruddy skin betrayed her. The fact that she had two different color socks peeking out from beneath her hot-pink muumuu didn't help her case, either.