The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  He stopped running. Elle was too far away to see his facial expression as he turned back toward the road, but his posture was slumped, almost limp, as he slowly began to walk.

  The security man who had been driving the burglars’ van was a bit slower and more tentative, but he caught up with the other burglar. The boy had to dive to the side to keep from being run down, and before he could get up again the two in the van got out and punched and kicked him a few times. When they raised him to his feet he began to run again. He had made it close to the end of the field. Until now the field had looked as though it might go on for some distance—maybe to a place where he could hide.

  It didn’t. There was a fence, a chain-link barrier with three strands of barbed wire at the top. The wire was irrelevant, because the young man had his wrists handcuffed behind him. He couldn’t climb anything higher than his waist. He threw himself to the ground and tried to slither under the fence where there was a little slack between two posts, but there wasn’t enough room.

  The two black-suited figures dragged him to his feet and back to the van. When they rejoined the black SUV, they threw him out onto the ground with his partner. They were rougher now, as though the two burglars had cheated by not letting their captors shoot them as they ran.

  The two security men from the van raised their pistols and shot them both in the head. Then the other two security men took off the handcuffs and returned them to their belts.

  They turned off the van’s engine and its headlights, and then all four security men climbed into the black SUV. They turned off the SUV’s lights and drove, bumping over the rough spots and then gliding onto the abandoned road to the street.

  Elle remained facedown and never moved or lifted her head until they had reached the road and driven on for a distance. She knew that the driver would use his mirrors to glance back at the field. When she had given him time to do that, she put away her phone, stood up, and began to head the other way. As soon as she was on solid pavement she ran hard toward her rental car.

  20

  She got into her car, started it, and connected the battery charger to her phone. She was sure the battery must be low by now. Then she too kept her headlights off, drove to the street, and turned to follow the black SUV. She straddled the painted line in the center of the street so she wouldn’t angle off into the drainage ditch.

  She stifled an impulse to go check on the two burglars. She had seen them both shot in the head and then had seen the black-suited killers check them closely while they retrieved the handcuffs from their wrists. These were not people who would have hesitated to fire again if there had been any remnant of life.

  The most useful thing she could do now was to make certain that these killers were who she thought they were. There had to be certainty. So far the only thing she could be certain about was that she had seen two more people caught and murdered.

  Or maybe that wasn’t all that had happened. Maybe the security people had been aware of her presence in the house for some time. Maybe the two burglars had been terribly unlucky and shown up just as the security people had been about to arrive and take Elle out here to kill her. Certainly they hadn’t driven from down near the airport to Beverly Hills in ten minutes. It was possible they had been out patrolling the houses of their richest customers when Elle had triggered an alarm.

  She turned on her lights when she reached the first intersection. It was late now, so the roads were more sparsely traveled. When she saw the stoplight she could also see that the nearest approaching cars were about a quarter mile off. It crossed her mind that the odds of one of them being a police car were higher than they would have been when the roads were crowded, but she accelerated anyway.

  If the next car to reach the intersection turned out to be a cop car, she couldn’t just give up as soon as she saw lights and heard a siren. She would make him chase her.

  If she was going to be caught, what she could do was lead the cops on enough of a chase so there would be plenty of them and maybe a helicopter, and then drive to the building where all the black SUVs parked. The last video she’d taken showed them murdering the two burglars. She didn’t know if the faces of the killers were visible on the video, but their cars, outfits, and equipment had been distinctive.

  She kept glancing at her mirrors, but there were no police cars. Fate wasn’t going to give her the chance to sacrifice herself to make up for Sharon. She was going to have to decide what to do and then take action without anybody pushing her into it. That was the hardest for her. She was good at reacting quickly to threats. She could think clearly and run, hide, or even fight. But to her, as a healthy, athletic twenty-four-year-old, seeing a problem and throwing her life at it seemed nearly impossible. The only thing that had brought her this far had been her guilt about Sharon. She had no idea if that could carry her much further.

  Twenty minutes later the black SUV was approaching the place where Elle had expected it to go. It turned into the driveway at the low white building near the airport.

  She was coming up on the building now. She saw that there were eight SUVs in the lot behind it. The front doors of one of the vehicles opened and the dome light came on. As the driver slid off the seat, he took off his black baseball cap, and Elle saw the blond hair freed from its confinement and realized this was a woman. As Elle watched, the woman ran her hand through her hair, disarranging it and making it stand up to cool her head.

  Elle’s car reached the driveway in front of the building and went past. She held the two people walking toward the back of the building in her rearview mirror before she lost sight of them.

  She glanced back again and saw a second black SUV make the left turn into the driveway and head around the building. That had to be the men who had stayed to secure the door and reset the alarm. She supposed that her shocked and emotional state had made her drive faster than either of the SUVs. The killers seemed much calmer and more controlled than she felt. And they didn’t seem to have trouble remembering that they wouldn’t get bothered by the police if they obeyed the traffic laws.

  Elle kept going, never letting her foot touch the brake pedal. She couldn’t let the bright red brake lights come on and draw attention to her car. She coasted into a turn toward the airport parking lots on Aviation Way. She reached Lot C, took a ticket from the machine, waited for the barrier to rise, and entered. She parked and patiently sent all of her photographs and videos to each of her internet addresses and then to her Iron Mountain account. Then she looked at the clock on her phone screen to see if she had enough time left before dawn.

  The walk was longer than she had expected. She always had tried to get to and from the airport as fast as possible, and most of the surrounding land was flat, ugly, and dirty. She was able to stay a bit back from the road along this stretch, because it was mostly parking lots on one side and dying businesses on the other. She didn’t want to get caught in somebody’s headlights and look like an easy victim, so she hurried.

  She trotted part of the way because she was impatient with the distance and frightened of people. She couldn’t think of anybody she would like to meet out here right now, so she tried to stay out of any light, no matter how faint. Then the building was in her view, and she slowed down but stayed away from lights while she studied it.

  When Elle Stowell looked at a building it was a special kind of look, a burglar’s look. If an ordinary person studied this building he would see a wide rectangle about one and a half stories high, with no windows or doors in front. It sat on a concrete pad with a paved parking lot in back that had painted spaces for two rows of twelve vehicles. The nearest spaces were now taken up by ten identical black SUVs. A person might think that a flat-roofed building with no windows was just about impregnable, so it probably had been built to protect merchandise. And this one was close to a major airport, so it had probably been put here for shipping and receiving. He might even note that the outer walls were stucco, which was the most durable, cheapest, and lowest-maint
enance covering.

  Elle saw those things, but she saw more. A four-sided building was actually a six-sided structure, because the roof and the underside were penetrable surfaces too. The impervious building had to have ventilators to keep the air circulating. It was in Southern California, where a windowless building with no air-conditioning was an oven. A building couldn’t serve as a business without bathrooms, which meant there were water pipes going in and sewer pipes going out. The place had electricity, which required insulated lines running from the nearest step-down transformer to the building and then inside.

  A building intended to store goods of any kind would have originally had big doors, like garage doors, so the merchandise could be brought in and out on pallets by forklifts. They would be in the back of the building, and if not, then they had been decommissioned, taken out, and maybe boarded over and covered with stucco. They could be another way in.

  She stayed back to study the roof. She couldn’t see all of it yet, but she knew that many commercial buildings had some source of natural lighting that kept electricity costs down—skylights, usually. A skylight with a rectangular frame and a translucent plastic bubble was cheap. If it wasn’t nailed down it could be lifted.

  Warehouses almost all had concrete floors. Many of them had drains built into the floor so they could be cleaned with a hose, and some of the drains were not pipes but channels covered with fitted steel plates. But she was not making decisions about the place yet. She was just looking.

  If a building was too hard to break into there were other ways. Often the easiest was to take advantage of common failings of human beings—carelessness, laziness, inattention, and impatience. Burglars sometimes came and went unseen because nobody had secured a door, fixed a latch, or gotten up and checked to see what had made a sound. Burglars had gotten into warehouses by climbing into loads that were to be driven inside.

  She took pictures of the building from three sides with her phone, and then she went to the fence that separated the building’s parking lot from the open land that lay between it and the margins, runways, and taxiways of the airport. She had to walk almost a hundred yards before she found a place where the fence was vulnerable. There was a hole that had been dug under the fence, apparently by a dog, and filled in. She was able to loosen the dirt and expand the hole with her knife and her hands until she could slip under.

  Once she was on the weedy ground she was able to walk back to the area behind the stucco building. She stopped and lay down, looking at every feature she could see. Right now there were ten identical black SUVs, but only three private cars parked farther from the building. The killers she’d seen arriving must have gone home.

  There was only one set of double doors. They were made of glass, and they allowed her to see the general structure of the place. She could see a small open space like a waiting room and, beyond it, a long corridor with doors on both sides. She could see she had been wrong about the big garage doors. The present double glass doors had taken the place of a single large door. If there had ever been others, they must have been along the windowless surface that faced the road. She took pictures, turned and withdrew back to the hole where she had slithered through, and walked to Lot C. Now she knew what they were and where they would be. She would have to figure out what to do.

  21

  She drove from Lot C to Century Boulevard and looked at the hotels. She picked one with a sign that said guests could park cars in its indoor lot during their plane trips. She didn’t know whether anyone in the black SUVs had seen her rental car, but there was no reason to multiply the risks with every decision.

  Elle went inside the hotel. The man and woman who were at the desk for this desolate shift didn’t appear to notice the way she was dressed or how tired and rumpled she was. They had obviously learned that it wasn’t possible to tell by appearance whether a reasonably pleasant-looking young woman in Los Angeles was a criminal or a rock star, so they treated her like a hybrid of both, neither friendly nor unfriendly, scandalized nor impressed. She was a person standing upright and holding a credit card. That was all she had to be.

  They sent her to the fourteenth floor, which Elle knew was always the thirteenth mislabeled for the people whose idea of the borderline between reality and nonsense was flexible. She wasn’t one of them, so she just hoped it would be quiet so she could recover.

  The shower was good and the bed was good, so she was unconscious very soon. In spite of a continuous slow-moving set of nightmares, she stayed asleep. The dreams had been getting bloodier and grislier since the deaths of the three art lovers, and the deaths of the two young burglars now made them even worse. All through the night she was cleaning up blood. Every dream person shifted the responsibility for hiding bodies and cleaning the pools of blood to her. They were her corpses to manage. After a long night of this labor she awoke in the afternoon and went downstairs to the restaurant for breakfast.

  While she ate she wandered the world on the screen of her phone. She found a site that said it would forward whatever she wanted to the recipient of her choice anonymously, through a site in Moldova. She paid and then tested it by sending one of her own sites a “Happy Mother’s Day” message. She paid again and transferred the movie she had made of the deaths of the two young burglars to the Los Angeles police. She chose a fifteen-day delay for its forwarding. If she couldn’t do anything to the killers within that time, she would probably be dead. The address she used was the homicide division office downtown. The detectives would recognize what they were seeing, and maybe the movie would help them with the various interlocking murders, including Elle’s own.

  When she had finished breakfast she went to the front desk and extended her reservation for another week. Then she drove to an enormous hardware and building supply store.

  As she drove, she thought about why the murders of three strangers had taken over her life. It was because of the ones after that, the killing of her friend Sharon and her almost-boyfriend Peter in Sharon’s apartment. She knew nothing about the motive for the first killings, but she knew about that one. The killer had come for Elle, and when he didn’t find her, he killed the ones he found.

  These people had no feeling, no sense of how precious life was. Her experience of growing up was simply trying to be alive—helping to find enough so everybody in the house got to eat, and then remembering not to eat everything up before there was something in the house to replace it. She had learned to be quiet and unmoving when the person at the door or walking past was a threat. And she remembered practicing her social skills, smiling and giving the expected answer whenever a school official asked about her or her family—the answer of happiness, health, and conformity. When she was sick she hid it so no meddling adult would turn her over for medical care that her grandmother couldn’t pay for. That would have been a disaster, because there was no sin as bad as not having any money.

  She got good at spotting other people like her. When one of them was held up to scrutiny, trying to make the lies brief and reassuring the way she did, their eyes would meet and she would try to convey with a nod that they were the same and that she understood. Sometimes it felt like being a member of an alien species that looked like people but weren’t. They had to pretend to be like everyone else or they’d be unmasked. It was all just so they could be left alone and allowed to live.

  Elle had never learned to assume everything was going to be all right, because most of the time it wasn’t. Sharon had grown up differently, and she’d had a right to think that if she did nothing to harm anyone else, nothing would happen to her. It probably would have been true, but now she was dead because Elle had brought the trouble to her.

  Elle pulled her car into a space at the giant hardware store and pushed a big orange shopping cart ahead of her. The place was organized just like a supermarket, with signs at the ends of aisles with numbers on them and categories like “Lumber and Carpentry,” “Plumbing,” “Lighting and Electric,” “Ventilation and Filters.�
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  Elle went through the store picking out equipment: a battery-operated variable-speed electric drill, a portable welding outfit with small oxygen and acetylene tanks, short hoses, and a protective face mask. The emphasis was on miniaturization and light weight. Everything was going to be used once and then discarded. She also picked up a can of flat black spray paint, one of white spray paint, and a piece of sheet metal two feet wide and four feet long. She bought titanium bits, hacksaw blades, and a few other compact hand tools.

  When she was back in her car she drove to the Valley and stopped at the Unseen Eye, a store that sold security and spy gear. There were nanny cams, bugs, pinhole cameras, and a variety of other gadgets. Some of them were designed to be installed by electricians, but other items were meant to get the curious amateur hooked on eavesdropping, spying, and the darker uses of technology. She happened to notice a display of transponders for attachment to cars, and it included models exactly like those she’d had removed from her car on the way home from Las Vegas. She was startled by the fact that their familiarity gave her a sensation that was almost like pleasure.

  She went straight to the displays of items that were in the glass cases along the counter, where bits of technology were presented on velvet-lined surfaces, like jewelry. This was a business that was about size, and the smallest devices were the best and most expensive. Some were disguised—computer drives, cameras, recorders, or microphones in the barrels of recognizable brandname pens, watches, compacts, sunglasses, car key fobs. There were miniaturized devices intended to be attached to or hidden inside clothes, purses, luggage, or virtually any product a person could buy.