Read Online A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page A

being.” I demonstrated the lock, the steel bar that ran across the face of the door and lodged in a hasp on the doorframe. “This key locks and unlocks it,” I said, “but I suggest you just leave it locked all the time. There’s no way to unlock it from the outside. I had him install it without mounting a cylinder on the other side of the door. You never come in this way anyway, do you?”
    “No, of course not.”
    “So it’s permanently sealed now, for all practical purposes, but you can let yourself out with the key if you ever have to get out in a hurry. But if you do, you can’t lock it after you. You can lock the deadbolt with the key, but not the police lock.”
    “I don’t even know if I have a key for that door,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep it closed all the time, and I’ll keep the deadbolt and the police lock both locked.”
    “Good.” We returned to the living room. “Now here,” I said, “I had him mount two police locks. One of them’s the same arrangement as you’ve got in the kitchen, a police lock that you can lock or unlock only from inside the apartment, with no cylinder on the outside. That way there’s no lock out there for anybody to pick. When you’re inside the apartment with both locks engaged there’s no way anybody can get in without a battering ram. When you go out, you can lock the second police lock with a key. This is the key for it, with the bumps on it. The cylinder’s supposed to be pickproof, and the key itself can’t be duplicated with ordinary equipment, so it would be a good idea not to lose it or your apartment will be secure against everyone, including you.”
    “There’s a thought.”
    “You’ve got a lot of security here,” I said. “He put an escutcheon plate over the cylinder so it can’t be pried out, and the cylinder itself is some space-age alloy that you can’t drill into. While he was at it I had him install a similar guard over the existing Segal deadbolt. All of this probably amounts to overkill, especially if you’re planning to catch the next plane to Barbados, but I figured you could afford it. And you ought to have decent locks, Motley or no Motley.”
    “Speaking of him—”
    “He’s not dead and he’s not in prison.”
    “When did he get out?”
    “In July. The fifteenth of the month.”
    “Which July?” She looked at me and her eyes widened. “This July? He drew one-to-ten and served twelve years?”
    “He wasn’t what you’d call a model prisoner.”
    “Can they keep you there beyond the maximum sentence? Isn’t that a violation of due process?”
    “Not if you’re a very bad boy. That sort of thing happens now and then. You can go to prison for ninety days and still be inside forty years later.”
    “God,” she said. “I guess prison didn’t rehabilitate him.”
    “It doesn’t look that way.”
    “He got out in July. So that’s plenty of time to find out where Connie went to and, and—”
    “I guess it’s time enough.”
    “And time to clip the story out of the paper and send it to me. And time to wait around while the fear builds. He gets off on fear, you know.”
    “It could still be a coincidence.”
    “How?”
    “The way we said last night. A friend of hers knew you were her friend and wanted you to know what had happened.”
    “And didn’t send a note? Or put on a return address?”
    “Sometimes people don’t want to get involved.”
    “And the New York postmark?”
    I’d doped that out, too, lying on the couch and looking at Long Island City’s skyline. “Maybe she didn’t have your address. Maybe she put the clipping in an envelope and mailed the whole thing to someone she knew in New York, asking him or her to look up your address and send it on.”
    “That’s pretty farfetched, isn’t it?”
    It had seemed plausible while I was stretched out watching dawn break. Now it did look like a stretch.
    And it seemed even less likely an hour later, when I got back to