Read The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams for Free Online Page A

stethoscope was just camouflage, did you? If all I’d intended was to look like a doctor, I’d have carried a beat-up old Gladstone bag and pretended I was making a house call. No, I was using the stethoscope for the same reason a doctor does: to get a clue what was going on inside.
    If 9-G had been a human being, I’d have closed its eyelids and put a tag on its toe. I couldn’t hear a thing.
    But what did that mean? The Nugents could be sleeping. The kung fu master could be sleeping. Even the rottweiler could be sleeping.
    Let them lie, I told myself. You don’t have to be here, risking life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness. You can pick up your groceries and go home. You’ll eat the bread and the cereal sooner or later. Who knows, maybe you’ll actually like Count Chocula. And paper towels last forever, they’ve got almost as long a shelf life as Twinkies. So—
    I rang the bell.
    It was a buzzer, actually, and with the stethoscope’s assistance I heard it clear as…well, clear as a buzzer. I let up on it, listened to the silence, then buzzed again, a little longer this time. And listened to more silence.
    That little Jiminy Cricket voice was silent now, too. I was on automatic pilot, doing what I do best. Putting the stethoscope back in my pocket, taking out the little ring of picks and probes, and getting down to business.
    It’s a gift. Some guys can hit a curveball. Others can crunch numbers.
    I can open locks.
    Anybody can learn. I taught Carolyn once, and in a pinch she can open her apartment door without her keys. But for most people, even those who work at it, even the sort who make a precarious living at it, picking a lock is a very laborious process. You pick and pick and pick, almost as if you were trying to nag the lock into submission, and your fingers get clumsy and you get cramps in your hands, and sometimes you say the hell with it and jimmy the thing, or rear back and kick the door in.
    Unless you happen to have the touch.
    There were two locks on the Nugents’ door. One was a Poulard, and you may have seen their ads, guaranteeing their product as pick-proof. The other was a Rabson; no guarantee, but a solid reliable lock.
    I had them both open in under two minutes.
    What can I tell you? It’s a gift.
     
    Strictly speaking, I don’t think they should call it breaking and entering. If you’re really good at it, you never actually break anything.
    Unless there’s a burglar alarm. Then, the instant you open a door or window that’s wired into the circuit, you break the electrical connection. When this happens there’s generally a high-pitched sort of whine, and you have a certain amount of time—generally forty-five seconds or thereabouts—to find the keypad and punch in the code that tells the system you’ve got every right to be there. After that you get the full treatment with bells and whistles and, sooner or later, a couple of private cops making an armed response.
    By then, of course, any burglar in his right mind has gone home.
    I took a deep breath, turned the knob, and opened the door.
    No alarm.
    Well, I couldn’t know that for sure. There’s also such a thing as a silent alarm. Open the door and there’s no warning whine, no sound at all beyond the music of the spheres. There’s a keypad concealed somewhere, but you’ve got no reason to go looking for it, and after forty-five seconds it’s too late, because by that time an alarm has registered in the office of the security firm, and they turn up with guns in their hands while you’re filling a pillowcase with the good sterling.
    The thing is, hardly anybody installs a silent alarm these days, except as a supplementary system. What you want a burglar alarm to do is keep burglars out, not give you a shot at catching them once they’re already inside. Most burglars, it pains me to say, are just looking for the easy dollar. They’ve got no calling for the profession. The great majority, once they breach the system