Metzger's Dog by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

whispered. “Besides, maybe he kept more cocaine than these guys.” He pushed past them into the room and set the box on the floor. The others followed.
    In the dim glow of the single window, the room looked like the waiting area of a doctor with an impoverished practice. There were couches and mismatched chairs arranged to face a receptionist’s desk. A few worn magazines and crumpled newspapers were inexpertly stacked on a coffee table.
    “My turn,” said Immelmann, who knelt to pick the lock on the door to the inner room, then slowly pushed the door open. “No alarm here either, but this could be the place.”
    “Why?” said Kepler.
    “There’s a little safe in the corner.”
    “Of course that’s it,” said Chinese Gordon. “Do you see any other rooms? Watch it with the safe. That’s sure to be wired.”
    Kepler and Immelmann walked up to the safe. Kepler chuckled. “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”
    “What?” snapped Chinese Gordon.
    “Go down and start the engine, Chinese. There aren’t even liquor stores with these things anymore. It’s a joke. It’s wired, all right. Come here.”
    He pulled a length of wire from the spool on Gordon’s belt and snipped the wire off, then looped it and taped it to the strip of wire on the wall. Then he yanked off the wire to the safe and said, “Now it’s not.”
    “I have something to do,” said Chinese Gordon. “Wait for me here.”
    “Don’t take too long,” said Immelmann. “We’ll have the safe in the box in a minute. Just have to cut some bolts.”
    Chinese Gordon took the stairs to the third floor. It took him only a moment to find the office he had noticed earlier, and he had no trouble opening the lock. He had expected things to be easy, but this reminded him of a dream he’d once had in which the walls of buildings were made of a thick, soft concoction like cheese.
    Inside, he found a line of doors on a long hallway. He studied the doors and the placement of the rooms and decided on the one at the far end of the hall. It would be either a broom closet or the boss’s office. It must be on the corner of the building, so that meant a chance for two windows. The professor he’d seen before was definitely of two-window rank.
    He opened the lock and smiled. It was the boss’s office, all right. There was a big desk and an old manual typewriter. No secretary would use a machine like that. The walls were lined with books, the sort of books that cost too much unless you got them free. Chinese Gordon scanned the office. There was no safe, no display case for something rare and valuable. He moved his face close to the painting on the wall, but even in this light he could see it was only a commercially printed reproduction of an Utrillo street scene. He’d stayed in a motel once where the same print hung over the bed.
    Maybe it was a waste of time. They could have been talking about bolting down the office machines. He sat on the desk and thought. The younger man wasn’t the type for bolting down typewriters. In a five-hundred-dollar suit he wasn’t selling burglar alarms, either. Whatever it was had to be valuable. Upstairs Kepler and Immelmann were loading a million dollars in cocaine the university had been keeping in what amounted to a jewelry box, but the man hadn’t been up there. He’d been down here.
    Chinese Gordon rushed into the hallway and began opening doors. He peered into each room for some sign that it might hold something worth stealing. There was nothing. In the fourth room he stopped. Inside was a computer terminal. Shit, he thought. What if they were just worried that somebody would come in and access their fucking data base? For an instant he considered smashing the screen of the terminal. It would have given him pleasure, but he controlled the impulse.
    Everything about the way the rooms were arranged would induce the feeling that the farthest office was the safest. It had to be there.
    Chinese Gordon went back to the boss’s