Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

They stared at each other across the kitchen table.

A job with maintenance: out of the question. Down in the tunnels with his flashlight, although he almost didn’t need it, knowing his way around so well, Freedy got angry just thinking about the idea. What did she want him to do: go backward in life? That wasn’t the way to financial success. Freedy knew the way to financial success, he and Estrella had watched hundreds of infomercials and she’d figured out what they all had in common: make a plan and stick to it. There was one other part, Freedy recalled as he came to the junction of D36 and Z13-aboveground everything had a fancy name, but down in the tunnels it was just A this and B that, the letters standing for tunnels and the numbers for buildings-one other part to the formula, what was it? Oh, yeah: have an idea. First have an idea, then make a plan, then stick to it. He already had his idea, a big one-own a pool company in Florida. And a plan-raise the money for it by ripping off high-tech shit at the college and unloading it on Saul Medeiros. Sticking to the plan meant doing it a lot.

Freedy took the turn into Z. Building 13-Lanark, was that the name? — was a girls’ dorm on the quad, or maybe coed; they were almost all coed now. He hated those words: coed, quad. He hated the whole college scene, the backpacks, the notices stuck up all over the place, the sitting in the grass and talking. And the football team: biggest hoax of all. His high-school coach had once taken them all to a game. They-the fucking high-school team-could have beaten the shit out of Inverness. And he himself could have wrecked anyone they had out there. A joke. Didn’t mean some of the college girls weren’t all right; some were. But what he’d never been able to figure out back then was how any of them could be interested in those college boys. Now that he’d been around a bit, he could see how growing up isolated in their rich little suburbs meant the girls never had a chance to meet a real man, let alone a fuckin’ animal. Back then, he’d never made a move on any of them. He’d been just a kid-a big kid, but not as big as now, and no ponytail-and besides, there’d been Cheryl Ann. Those blow jobs. Married a doctor. The only two thoughts he had about her. He tried to fit them together and could not. Wasn’t she a townie just like him?

Night: no maintenance guys in the tunnels at night. Freedy followed Z tunnel under the campus. He hadn’t liked working maintenance but he liked it down in the tunnels. On slow days the workers would sometimes curl up in corners here and there and sleep, but not him; he’d always roamed around till quitting time.

Freedy liked the sounds too. There were sounds down in the tunnels, but not his. He moved silently. Just another one of his skills. He moved silently, heard switches click, the skittering of tiny animals, and sometimes voices from up top, carried weirdly down by the pipes. Like now, at the junction of N, he heard someone laughing. That was kind of weird too, because the sound was louder than the human sounds he remembered, too loud to have been carried by the pipes. He glanced down N, saw it all screened off with cobwebs, remembered it had always been like that, at least as far back as the time he was a summer worker. N led to the old field house, torn down long ago, and beyond that to building 41, now heated with gas. The college was always doing something new, building, tearing down, switching the distro systems, buying up Cheryl Ann’s old house. What gave them the right? Freedy stood there at the junction of Z and N for a minute or so, listening for that laugh again-a woman’s laugh-but it didn’t come.

Freedy moved on. Z did a funny little thing just before building 13. It came to a sort of drop-off, like one of those manholes, except uncovered. No railing or anything, just a sudden black hole in the floor. The tunnel continued straight down for thirty feet or so, maybe more, and you had to pivot and climb down a steel ladder bolted to the walls. The maintenance guys-old drunks, most of them-liked to scare the high-school boys with their stupid stories. Freedy didn’t remember this particular story-something about a broken neck-but he remembered the drop-off and had his beam on it in plenty of time. He climbed down the ladder, crossed a brick floor, shut off his light, put his ear to the door and listened in the perfect darkness.

Silence; not complete, with that low humming of machine noise, but no human sounds. He opened the door a crack, saw little zones of machine glow in the shadows. All systems go. Freedy stepped into the utilities room in the sub-basement of building 13, silent as, as some animal known for silence-tiger? wolf? — but much, much smarter.

He shone his light around, spotted a fridge in one corner, a small fridge where the maintenance guys would keep their lunches and snacks. Freedy opened it. Each shelf bore a different name tag; he remembered the way they kept their food to themselves. Workies. Freedy helped himself to a ham sandwich intended for someone named Griff. A thick sandwich, the kind wifey might pack for hubbie, but mustard instead of mayo; what kind of wifey was that, Griff? He took a bite or two and dropped the rest in the trash on his way out.

Not out right away of course, but after a careful wolf- or tiger-like peek both ways, and into the sub-basement hall under building 13. Widely spaced low-voltage bulbs in the ceiling cast a dim light. No switches. This was new: had to be a security thing. Freedy didn’t worry. No one around, no reason for anybody but maintenance to be down here-and what difference would it make if anyone did see him? They’d take him for a student, or somebody’s date. It was safe, at least going in. Going out, with the goods-that was a little different. But all of it, the in part and the out part: fun. Yes. At that moment, Freedy understood why people got into skydiving or climbing Mt. Everest. On Everest, though, you wouldn’t have to put up with any of the college shit, like this flyer taped by the stairway: Curious? Come to the weekly Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Club Dance. Music! Food! Prizes! He tore the sheet off the wall, crumpled it up-the sound of the crumpling so clear in contrast to the silent way he’d been moving, clear like the sound system he’d once checked out at some Hollywood guy’s place when no one was home-and went upstairs, into building 13. Lanark, or whatever they called it, a residence, and all the residences had a basement lounge. Freedy checked it out.

TV-but not HDTV; VCR-dying technology, DVD was what the market wanted; microwave-who gave a shit about microwaves? What he had a hankering for, maybe because of the recollection of that killer sound system, was one of those compact stereos, the new kind that hung on a wall, and a laptop or two for dessert. For dessert! That was funny, unlike so-called jokes about bureaucrats. Idea, plan, stick, stick, stick. Freedy left the lounge and went up to the dorm rooms, where the real goodies were.

Stone stairs, each step worn with a depression marking the tread of feet over a hundred years or more; the kind of thing that should have been repaired but was instead considered a point of pride. College shit-they had no idea what the country was all about. Freedy, maybe because of the Everest thing, maybe because he got a little zoned out planting his feet in those depressions, went all the way to the top floor, the third, and entered the hall. Three rooms on each side, all with closed doors but the two at the end; blue light leaked out of one, yellow light, very faint, from the other. Freedy, tiger, wolf, but much, much smarter-there was a word for that kind of animal, started with p, it would come to him-treaded silently down the hall. He peeked into the yellow-lit room.

Good choice. Freedy saw something nice, real nice. The room itself, the living room, sitting room, whatever the hell they called it, wasn’t lit at all; the yellow light came through the partly open bedroom door at the back. And through that opening, Freedy saw a woman, a college girl. A fat college girl, maybe, or if not fat, still far from perfect; and she wore glasses. But that wasn’t the point: the point was she wore jeans and nothing else. Even more-she was doing something interesting. The college girl, kind of fat, glasses, was standing sideways, from Freedy’s viewpoint, and facing a mirror. Freedy couldn’t see a mirror from his angle, but he knew it had to be there, possessed as he was of a brain capable of mental leaps. This girl, not too fat, really, had one of her tits cupped in both hands, was shifting it around a little, gazing at the mirror Freedy couldn’t see; a few moments later, she went through the same routine with the other tit, like she was checking to see if they were identical. Did girls do that? Learned something new every day. An up-close-and-personal moment: it was like they knew each other already, no bullshit, no expense. Add to that the fact of her not being perfect, meant she was probably lonely for a man. In her wildest dreams would she ever think she’d have a chance with a man like him, diesel, buff, a man like him a matter of a few feet away? If he cleared his throat right now, for example: wow. One other thing, an image, a memory. Wasn’t the mind funny, the way it worked? This image Freedy recalled from a porn video, maybe seen on that trip to Mexico, or else the time he’d rented one to watch with Estrella, but she’d been grossed out, letting him down bad. This video memory: a girl with glasses Action central. The girl turned abruptly toward the door, toward him. Started to turn would be more accurate, because Freedy, so quick, was out of sight in the hall almost before the movement began.