Hard Stop Read Free Page A

gentle curves of the main road, I tried to look like a titan of industry out for an evening stroll, willing the backpack full of burglar’s tools into invisibility.
    George had about a quarter mile of driveway. Spotlights buried in the ground illuminated the tangled branches of sycamore trees overhead. I took a parallel course over the lawn, staying well inside the dark edges.
    When I reached the house I went around back and located a basement window. I took off the backpack and sat cross-legged, listening. All I heard were bugs in the woods and the monotonous swoosh of traffic washing up from the Merritt Parkway.
    I pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. Then I took the glass cutter, and, using the window frame as a straightedge, starteddrawing the tool across the glass. Certain repetitive motions bore me to death, but I put up with myself long enough to carve deep scores into the glass. Then, after wiping everything clean with a paper towel, I stuck two wads of plumber’s dope to the center of the window. I twisted galvanized screws into the dope to give me something to grip, then, using my fist like a hammer, gently tapped until I felt it bust inward. I turned the glass in the hole and drew it out, placing it carefully on the ground.
    Then I sat and listened to the bugs and traffic for a few more minutes. No screeching alarms, no sirens.
    I used a miniature Maglite to examine the window. As expected, there was an alarm sensor mounted to the frame, a magnetic type that went off by breaking a circuit when the sash was opened. Something I didn’t need to do with the glass out of the way.
    I slithered through the hole and dropped to the floor, dragging my pack behind me with a string tied to the straps. Using the Maglite, I searched around for the electrical panel, which I found near the furnace. Predictably, the controls for the security system were in a locked box mounted next to the panel.
    It took a few minutes to jimmy the lock. I could have done it faster, but I was afraid of the noise. I’d always been good at working locks, a skill put to good use as a teenage car thief. Or car borrower, as I liked to think of it, since I always gave the cars back.
    Inside was a chaos of multicolored wires, but I knew what it all meant. I’d installed a system in my house in Stamford and this didn’t look that much different.
    Before I touched anything in the box I used a heavy pair of wire cutters to sever the phone trunk that emerged from a conduit sticking through the concrete floor. I waited again for the hot scream of alarm, but nothing happened. I sortedout the lines that fed the sirens inside and outside the house and snipped those. Still nothing. For good measure I disconnected the 120-volt line and backup batteries for the system.
    The house was now deaf, dumb and blind.
    I climbed the basement stairs and came out into the kitchen. It was lit by the glow of the LEDs on the kitchen appliances—coffeemakers, ovens and microwaves. I scanned the ceiling corners for motion detectors and found two. No blinking red lights. I moved on in search of stairs to the second floor.
    It must have been somebody like Nathaniel Hawthorne or Zane Grey who wrote that Indians understood that absolute silence was impossible, so instead moved in random patterns, blending in and mimicking ambient sound. They probably didn’t have to deal with creaking floorboards or the hum and whir of central air-conditioning.
    It took a long, nerve-wracking time, but I finally found George Donovan’s bedroom, which I was deeply grateful to see was free of Mrs. Donovan. Better yet, it had Mr. Donovan, lying flat on his back on top of the bedspread, snoring like an unlubricated chain saw.
    I took the last few steps and stood by his bed. I flicked on the little Maglite and stuck it in my mouth. Then I vaulted onto the bed, landing with my knees astride Consolidated Global Energies’ Chairman of the Board. His eyes popped open.
    “Hi, George,” I said, after