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Usually means a burglar has visited.” “Do you really need a gun?” another voice asked, sounding nervous.
    “There might be somebody in the apartment right now,” the other voice replied. “If there is, I’m going to be ready.”
    The voices were muffled slightly, and the young man thought they were probably in the closet by now.
    “See right here?” the first voice asked. “The phone line was disconnected.”
    Time to go, the young man thought. He peered around the corner of the desk and saw the backs of the two men.
    “He’s probably had a shot at the safe,” the first voice said. “Electronic job.”
    The young man crawled quickly, silently toward the door of the study; in doing so, he had to move past the closet. As he made the door, the first voice spoke again.
    “You stay here,” the voice said, and there was the sound of the action of an automatic pistol being worked. “I’m going to have a look around. You might use the phone on the desk over there to call nine-one-one and tell them there’s been a break-in.” “Right,” the other man replied.
    The young man sprinted nearly soundlessly through the living room, his soft slippers making only tiny noises on the carpeting. He made it down the hall to the front door, opened it, and stepped into the hallway. The elevator and the front door seemed like a bad idea; if there was already a cop car on the block when the 911 call went in, he might meet them going out the door. The elevator door stood open. He stepped inside, pushed in the EMERGENCY button to activate the car, pressed the button for the ground floor, and stepped out of the car just as the doors closed. The elevator started down, and he made for the stairs. Holding his paper bag of tools, he bounded down flight after flight, past the lobby floor to the basement. There had to be a back door for service purposes.
    He emerged into a dimly lit hallway that seemed to have a row of doors leading to storage rooms. He raced past them, made a turn at the end of the hallway, and came up against a door. He put his ear to it, and could hear the sound of a garbage truck outside. Carefully, he opened the door, and as he did, a loud bell began to ring. Coolly, he put his head out and looked around. He was in a sort of concrete pit, with steps leading up to the side street. He closed the door behind him, but the bell continued to ring, both inside and outside the building. Worse, a red light over his head was flashing relentlessly. Now he began to panic. He charged up the steps and ran head-on into a garbage collector holding two empty cans.
    The two went down together, the garbage man hollering, the cans bouncing around the sidewalk.
    “Hey, get that guy!” somebody yelled.
    The young man got to his feet, grabbed his paper bag, and sprinted down the block toward Fifth Avenue, pursued by the garbage men. He ran straight across Fifth, nearly being run down by a police car, its lights flashing. Funny, he hadn’t heard the siren until now. He heard the car doors opening, and somebody shout, “Stop! Police! Stop!” Only one choice here, he thought. He ran straight at the park wall, throwing his paper bag ahead of him, vaulted over the wall, hit the ground on the other side, grabbed the paper bag, and was gone into the brush. They’d never get him now. Cops were too fat to run far. He emerged onto a walkway and ran down it toward Central Park South. The sound of police sirens faded into the distance.
    He had gotten away with it again.
     
Chapter 8
     
    Amanda got out of the Mercedes and looked approvingly up and down the tree-lined block. The nineteenth-century development known as Turtle Bay comprised three sides of a city block between Second and Third Avenues in the Forties; all the houses opened to the rear on a common garden. She knew half a dozen people with houses on the block and recognized it for the highly desirable place to live that it was.
    She climbed the steps of the brownstone and rang the