The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

who’d dropped into my bookstore late one afternoon, closed up a few minutes early, took her for a drink and to a movie at the multiplex over on Third Avenue, and then put her in a cab and never saw her again. I had her phone number, and of course she knew how to reach me, but neither of us said “I’ll call you” and neither of us did. She’d never walked into my store before, and she never did afterward, either.
    And the last time I’d actually been to bed with a woman…well, I don’t know when that was. I’d had a genuine girlfriend for several months, and that had come to a bitter end sometime during the winter, not this past winter but the winter before. Then sometime the next spring (which is to say last spring, which would make it approximately a year ago) I’d acted out.
    Acting out. I’m not sure when we first started calling it that, orwhat we used to call it before that convenient term came into widespread use. Misbehaving, maybe. Whatever you want to call it, I reacted to having my heart broken by doing three things in dogged succession. First I stayed more or less drunk for the better part of a week, but all that did was give me head-banger hangovers and a perfectly suitable case of postalcoholic remorse. Then I started chasing women in a rather frantic fashion, and even managed to catch some, though the ones I landed were the sort any self-respecting sportsman would have thrown back. Finally, I went on a burglary spree, in the course of which I must have averaged a break-in a night for close to two weeks. I was a one-man crime wave, and the risks I took don’t bear thinking about, but at least I wasn’t suicidal about it. I didn’t have a deep unconscious desire to get caught, and nobody caught me, and when I finally came to my senses and settled down again, at least I had a tidy sum tucked away in my rainy day account. I came out of it ahead, which is more than I could say for the drinking and the woman-chasing.
    And since then…well, since then I’d been as sexually active as a priest who took his vows seriously. I’d helped Carolyn compose her listing for Date-a-Dyke (“LOOKING FOR A SPRING FLING? Five-foot-two, eyes for you. Bright and cute and funny, you can think of me as the long-lost bastard daughter of L. L. Bean and Laura Ashley. Love scotch, love New York, hate softball, and limit myself to two cats. My meaningful relationships always lead to heartbreak or LBD, so how about a meaningless relationship?”) but wouldn’t hear of cobbling up an equivalent listing for myself. It was, I told myself, a phase I was going through. I was evidently not yet ready to have a woman in my life, and when I was I would automatically change the vibe I put out, and women who now had the good sense to steer clear of me would suddenly think I was catnip. Just a question of time, I told myself. Time. That’s all.
    So when Law & Order packed it in I watched the first five minutes of the local news, then surfed my way around the channels, watching thirty seconds here and two minutes there, not getting caught up in any of it, perhaps because I didn’t stay with anything longenough to give it a chance to catch me. I thought about calling Francine (“Hi, I saw you on Law & Order tonight, and I swear I couldn’t take my eyes off the jury box. You absolutely lit up the screen!”) and looked for her number, but I’d recopied my address book since we stopped seeing each other, and she hadn’t made the cut. I reached for the phone book and put it back when I realized I couldn’t remember her last name. Then I channel-surfed some more, and then I turned off the TV and stood up.
    All of the foregoing is by way of explanation for what I did next, and maybe it explains it, but it doesn’t justify it. The whole thing’s embarrassing, so I won’t dwell on it. I’ll just report it in plain English.
    I went to my closet, opened up the hidden compartment, gathered up my tools and gloves, put on my windbreaker,