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him in the wall safe.”
    “That thought had occurred to me.” Ari considered for a moment. “I don’t know why our would-be intruder even wanted to get into the downstairs flat. It’s obvious that the front rooms are empty. The only thing of interest he could have seen would have been your father’s desk.”
    “Which is empty, too.” My mind twitched. “Not that our burglar would have known that.”
    I turned in my chair and glanced at a pair of innocuous-appearing cardboard cartons sitting on the floor near the TV. When my sister had given me Dad’s old desk, she’d packed up the things inside it and sent them along, too. I reminded myself that I really needed to go through the papers soon. With one last reproachful glance in my direction, Ari turned away to head for the bedroom and his workout clothes. As soon as he’d taken two steps, I felt the ASTA.
    “Uh, this is going to sound dumb,” I said, “but I have toreverse my opinion. You’d better not go. Someone’s out there waiting for you to leave.”
    Ari raised a hand to the place where he usually wore his shoulder holster. He muttered under his breath, then trotted on down the hall to fetch the gun. I ran an SM:D and felt it like a stab of ice to the heart. Dimly I could sense a car and a threat inside it—no details, however, came to me. Ari returned, armed. He sidled along the wall to reach one of the side panels of the bay window. He pushed the lace curtain back a few inches so he could peer out.
    “See anyone out there?” I said.
    “Just the usual cars. I’ve been keeping track, you see, of the neighborhood vehicles ever since we moved in. Most people try to park in the same spot. None of the cars seem out of place.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Can you locate the threat more precisely?”
    I slid open the wide drawer of my desk and brought out the pad of newsprint paper and box of crayons I keep for running Long Distance Remote Sensing attempts. I leaned back in my chair with the pad on my lap and the crayons right to hand and went into SM:D again. My hand grabbed a gray crayon, scribbled, set it down and repeated the process with blue, green, yellow ocher, more gray. I stared out into space and thought of next to nothing.
    At last my hand threw a spurt of black into the picture and told me that we were finished. I closed down the SM:D and looked at what I’d drawn.
    “He’s on Moraga,” I said, “in a black car parked in front of that blue house on the corner across the street from the Great Highway.”
    “Very good,” Ari said. “That means he can’t see our building.”
    “Not with his physical eyes.”
    Ari said a single word in Hebrew, not a nice one, judging by his tone of voice. “Very well,” he continued in English. “Let’s give him what he wants. We’re going to leave, but we’re only going to drive around the block and see if we can take his license number.”
    To throw our suspect off a little further, I drove several blocks south on 48th before doubling back. We were assumingthat he’d wait to approach the building until he was sure we’d gotten far away, but apparently he valued speed over caution. As soon as we turned onto the frontage street by the Great Highway, I saw that the black car had left the scene.
    “Back we go,” Ari said.
    I spun around the corner onto Moraga and sped up to 48th in the oddly silent Saturn. It never roared at high speeds. Ari’s mystery mechanics really knew their business. I turned onto 48th but saw no sign of the black car.
    “He must have parked around back,” Ari said. “Pull up on the street.”
    I followed orders and parked in front of the neighbors to the north. Just as I killed the engine, I saw someone rushing down our front steps, a slender man wearing tan slacks, a black turtleneck sweater with the neck pulled high, and a wool watchman’s cap pulled down low on his forehead. He had black tattoos on his cheeks, but I couldn’t identify the design. Ari