Burglars Can't Be Choosers Read Free Page A

the three-cent jobs in the booklet, and, by all the saints in heaven, no blue box, leather or otherwise.
    Hell.
    This didn’t make me happy, but neither did it make me throw up. What it made me do was straighten up and sigh a little, and it made me wonder idly where old Flaxford kept the Scotch until I reminded myself that I never drink on a job, and it made me think about the cigarettes in the silver dish until I recalled that I’d given up the nasty things years ago. So I sighed again and got ready to give the drawers another look-see, because it’s very easy to miss something when you’re dealing with a desk that is such a reservoir of clutter, even something as substantial as a cigar box, and I looked at my watch and noted that it was twenty-three minutes of ten, and decided that I would really prefer to be on my way by ten, or ten-thirty at the very latest. Once more through the desk, then, to be followed if necessary by a circuit of other logical hiding places in the living room, and then if need be a tour of the apartment’s other rooms, however many there might be of them, and then adieu, adieu. And so I blew on my hands to cool them as they were beginning to sweat a bit, not that blowingon them did much good, encased in rubber gloves as they were, and this may well have led me to sigh a third time, and then I heard a key in the lock and froze.
    The apartment’s tenant, J. Francis Flaxford, was supposed to be off the premises until midnight at the very least.
    By the same token, the blue box was supposed to be in the desk.
    I stood facing the door, my hip braced against the desk. I listened as the key turned in the lock, easing back the deadbolt, then turning farther to draw back the spring lock. There was an instant of dead silence. Then the door flew inward and two boys in blue burst through it, guns in their hands, the muzzles trained on me.
    “Easy,” I said. “Relax. It’s only me.”

Chapter
Two
    T he first cop through the door was a stranger, and a very young and fresh-faced one at that. But I recognized his partner, a grizzled, gray chap with jowls and a paunch and a long sharp nose. His name was Ray Kirschmann and he’d been with the NYPD since the days when they carried muskets. He’d collared me a few years earlier and had proved to be a reasonable man at the time.
    “Son of a gun,” he said, lowering his own gun and putting a calming hand upon the gun of his young associate. “If it ain’t Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s son, Bernard. Put the heat away, Loren. Bernie here is a perfect gentleman.”
    Loren bolstered his gun and let out a few cubic feet of air. Burglars are not the only poor souls who tend to tense up when entering doors other than their own. And trust Ray to make sure hisyoung partner cleared the threshold ahead of him.
    I said, “Hi, Ray.”
    “Nice to see ya, Bernie. Say hello to my new partner, Loren Kramer. Loren, this here is Bernie Rhodenbarr.”
    We exchanged hellos and I extended a hand for a shake. This confused Loren, who looked at my hand and then began rumbling with the pair of handcuffs hanging from his gunbelt.
    Ray laughed. “For Chrissake,” he said. “Nobody ever puts cuffs on Bernie. This ain’t one of your mad dog punks, Loren. This is a professional burglar you got here.”
    “Oh.”
    “Close the door, Loren.”
    Loren closed the door—he didn’t bother to turn the bolt—and I did a little more relaxing myself. We had thus far attracted no attention. No neighbors milled in the hallways. And so I had every intention of spending what remained of the night beneath my own good roof.
    Politely I said, “I wasn’t expecting you, Ray. Do you come here often?”
    “You son of a gun, you.” He grinned. “Gettin’ sloppy in your old age, you know that? We’re in the car and we catch a squeal, woman hears suspicious noises. And you was always quiet as a mouse. How old are you, Bernie?”
    “Be thirty-five in April. Why?”
    “Taurus?” This from