“That’s comforting to know. Who might we have to get away from?”
“The kind of people who, if they catch you trespassing, cut your feet off with a reciprocating saw and urinate on you while you bleed to death.”
“I have no experience of such people,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be of much use to you.”
“Nonsense, Quinn. You’ve got everything it takes, which I knew you would all the while I waited two years for you finally to show up. You’re the right stuff. Anyway, my sense is that no one’s at home right now.”
“Is your sense of a thing like that as reliable as your presentiments?”
“Oh, heck no. It’s more like a hunch.”
The Buick was so old that it had a bench-style front seat. Her handbag stood between us. She withdrew from it the pistol she loaded earlier, while we’d talked about tigers, peaches, and car sickness.
“Should I have a gun?” I asked.
“Do you know how to use one?”
“Not really.”
“Then we won’t give you a gun until Grandpa can teach you.”
“Better be soon,” Sparky said. “I’d hate to see his head blown off, which is sure to happen if we don’t get him geared up.”
“I don’t like knives,” I said. “They’re too personal. What will I have if I don’t have a gun?”
“Your wits,” she said. “That’s all you’ll need when you’ve also got me.” She took a roll of blue painter’s tape from her purse.
“What’s that for?”
She smiled and pinched my cheek. “You’re a question monkey, aren’t you, dear? Come on, let’s go.” She got out from behind the wheel, and her grandfather took her place as she walked around the back of the Buick.
Reasonably certain that we weren’t going to do anything as mundane as paint a room in the target house, I got out of the car and closed my door and met her on the sidewalk.
The evening was quiet except for music issuing from a residence across the street. Instead of one grim variety or another of the stultifying noise with which narcissists tortured their neighbors these days, the night was graced by Mozart’s K. 488. I knew the concerto because Sister Theresa was a Mozarthead, and this was her favorite piece by the composer, which she had often played while we studied ants and whatnot. With bats kiting soundlessly overhead and eating unsuspecting insects in midair, with the black moonlight-dusted mountains thrusting at the stars, this music seemed to seep into the desert dark as if from another, better world.
As Bridget and I walked back to the house that interested her, where perhaps foot fetishists waited with a reciprocating saw, a soft breeze sprang up. Overhead, the fronds of palm trees whispered as we approached the front door.
“If I’m wrong and someone’s home after all,” she said as she rang the bell, “then we’ll just say we thought that Bill and Mary Torgenwald lived here. We’ve been given the wrong address.”
“Why Torgenwald?”
“It sounds more real than Smith.”
“Eric and Inga would seem to go with Torgenwald better than Bill and Mary.”
“My imaginary friends,” she said, “are the children of the children of Swedish immigrants, so they’re third generation and thoroughly Americanized.”
After she’d rung the bell three times without a response, she led me to the back of the residence. Stucco property walls and tall cypresses screened the yard. In the moonlight, the grass appeared to be dead and matted flat.
The back door was hinged on the left and featured four panes of glass. Bridget peeled strips of blue tape from the roll and began to cover the lower pane on the right.
“You’re going to break the glass,” I said softly.
“With as little noise as possible,” she whispered. “Bill and Mary won’t mind.”
“What if there’s an alarm?”
“Won’t be. An alarm system would suggest there’s something here worth stealing. That’s the last thing these people want anyone to think. The house is in poor repair, a dump. Your average burglar sees no reason to bother with it.”
“We’re not your average burglars.”
“We decidedly are not.”
When the pane was fully taped, she hammered with the butt of the pistol, producing quiet thumps. The cracking of glass was hardly audible. When she pushed on the tape, the fractured pane fell out of its frame and into the room beyond with a soft clatter rather than a sound you’d associate with breaking glass if you were a neighbor.