Magic Line Read Free

that said ‘Bestway Carpet Cleaning’ was as good as invisible.
    The Bestway van was still two doors away when the garage door began to roll back down. It was closed by the time Robin pulled up at the foot of the driveway and parked. Earl hit the switch on the big vacuum and they swung the rear doors open so the sound of air roaring through the hose filled the street. They got out, Earl with his clipboard up in front of his chest and Homer with the towels hiding the revolver in the bucket, and walked sedately up the driveway.
    Robin and Zeb had already trotted up the driveway and along the side of the house to the backyard. That was the plan, for the two of them to get around in the back while the men inside were still in the garage. Zeb carried the glass cutter in his fist, so it didn’t show. Robin had the suction cup under his big shirt, on a cord around his neck.
    â€˜That lady on the corner’s coming outside,’ Zeb said.
    â€˜She’s just getting the mail,’ Robin said. ‘She’ll go right back in to the babies, forget about her.’
    Earl and Homer were almost at the front door. Earl had his pens on a pocket protector, his brutal face screwed into a weird little smile above the clipboard. The heavy-duty metal door, double locked, the only really secure door on this working-class street of cheap, ageing bungalows, had pulled Robin to this stash house like a magnet.
    Back of the house, on the cement slab that passed for a patio, they saw the blinds were closed like always inside the sliding glass door. That’s what Robin liked so much about this job: the way the men running this stash house kept everything in the back closed up tight. The door and the double window overlooking the yard were always shut and locked, blinds down, drapes closed.
    For two weeks Zeb had biked and driven around this house and hidden in the empty house with the ‘For Sale’ sign three doors away. He had never seen anyone look out the back window or walk out the sliding door and sit on the cement by the dying cactus.
    â€˜Dumb shits think it keeps them safe to keep the blinds closed,’ Robin had said, grinning at the weed-choked backyard the last time they watched it. ‘Just makes our job easier.’
    Watching the window now, smiling the odd, humorless smile Zeb had noticed on him lately, Robin pulled on surgical gloves. Why don’t I have some of those? Zeb wanted to ask but didn’t dare start an argument now.
    Robin pulled the suction cup out from under his shirt – the roomy blue denim shirt that he had bought in a thrift shop just for this job. Gathered below a broad yoke, it looked old-fashioned like the Dutch Boy on paint cans, but had a modern left sleeve with a zippered small iPod pocket where Robin kept his radio. ‘Radio’s better than an iPod,’ he said. ‘I can get anything I want on it and nobody can trace it.’ Not being traceable, Zeb noticed, had become very important to Robin.
    He set the suction cup in place on the window, six inches from the latch. It was actually called a dent puller, but glass installers used them, too. He’d ordered it from Amazon – $2.39 plus shipping, he’d told Zeb, chuckling, and there wouldn’t be a local record of the purchase. Robin thought of everything these days; there was a new little line between his eyebrows and when he wasn’t smiling that too-wide smile under the bright eyes, one side of his mouth had begun to turn down in something like a snarl.
    Zeb cut a big circle around the suction cup with the glass cutter. One little squeak was all the noise it made. He could hear people moving around inside, and some quiet talk he couldn’t understand. A drawer opened somewhere near the window. Some rustling, then the drawer slid closed and the drawer-pull clicked against the plate. Zeb felt as if his ears were growing.
    Robin pulled on the suction cup. Nothing moved. He turned his