Read The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling for Free Online

stew and drunk Dutch beer. Or I could have been home in my own little bed.
    I stayed where I was and I waited.
     
    At one-thirty I got to my feet. I hadn’t heard a sound within the house for an entire half-hour. I padded silently to the stairs, crossing right over the master bedroom where I hoped my hosts were sleeping soundly. I went down the stairs, treading ever so gingerly on my crepe soles, and I crossed the second-floor hallway and went on down the other stairs to the ground floor. It was no great feat to remember to avoid the fourth step from the top; I’d obsessed on that very subject for the past twenty minutes.
    The lights were out once again on the ground floor, except for the indomitable dragonfly lamp in the living room. I didn’t have to use my penlight to find my way to the library, but once I was in that room I played its beam here and there.
    Arkwright had paid the room his nightly visit. He’d left a pool cue on top of the table, along with the cue ball and one or two of its fellows. A small brandy snifter stood on a leather-topped table beside one of the big chain. It was empty, but a quick sniff revealed it had recently held cognac—a very good cognac at that, judging from the bouquet.
    There was a book next to the snifter, Sheridan’s Plays, bound in red leather. Bedtime reading.
    I went to the bookshelves. Had Arkwright inspected the little green clothbound volume as part of his nightly ritual? I couldn’t tell, as it was right where I’d found it earlier in the evening. But it was his treasure. He’d probably had a look at it.
    I took it from the shelf and just managed to fit it into my jacket pocket. Then I nudged the surrounding volumes so as to fill up the space where it had been.
    And left the library.
     
    He had turned off the alarm to enter the house, then reset it once he and Elfrida were inside. All the while, of course, the alarm system continued to guard all of the house but the kitchen door. I now left through that very portal, closing it after me and relocking its three locks by picking them in reverse. I had to leave the chain bolt dangling and I couldn’t do anything about the bolt I’d hacksawed earlier. Nobody’s perfect.
    I was very damned close to perfection, though, in the way I restored the alarm system, rewiring it to render the kitchen door once more unbreachable. Every impulse urged me to quit Arkwright’s property while I had the chance, but I spent a few extra minutes, and only an imperceptible scrap of electrical tape hinted that the wires had ever been tampered with.
    Professionalism? I call it the relentless pursuit of excellence.
     
    I had almost reached the end of Copperwood Crescent when the police car turned the corner. I managed to furnish a smile and a perfunctory nod without breaking stride. They went along their merry way, and why not? They’d seen only a well-dressed and self-possessed gentleman who looked as though he belonged.
    They hadn’t seen any palmless rubber gloves. Those wound up tucked in a pocket before I left the Arkwright driveway.
    The Pontiac was where I’d left it. I hooked up my jumper wire and was on my way. In due course I was back on West Seventy-fourth Street. One nice thing about swiping a car from a hydrant is you can generally put it back where you found it. I did just that, pulling in next to the fireplug even as a brindle boxer was lifting a leg against it. I unhooked my jumper wire and got out of the car, careful to push down the lock buttons before I swung the door shut.
    The boxer’s equally brindle owner, leash in one hand and wad of paper towel in the other, admonished me that I was risking a ticket or a tow. I couldn’t think of an answer so I walked off without giving him one.
    “Crazy,” he told the dog. “They’re all crazy here, Max.”
    I couldn’t argue with that.
     
    In my own apartment, nibbling cheese and crunching Triscuits and sipping the special-occasion Scotch, I let go and enjoyed the glow that