Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

Neal didn’t bother to answer. He knew this bit. Graham was just trying to distract him, disrupt his concentration.

Graham continued: “Eight points. Tempting. You can give a touch and still make. Of course, the stupid bastards would find a way to give up a safety in the last twelve seconds and bust your balls.”

“Where’s the goddamn earring?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Graham said pleasantly. There were far worse ways to kill a Saturday afternoon than torturing Neal: watching college football, for example.

Au ugly suspicion hit Neal. “Is this earring on, as they say, your person?”

“That would be, as they say, devious.”

“Because if it’s in your underwear, I’m not looking for it.”

Graham was tempted to say something about this Carol girl but thought better of it, sixteen-year-old love being a sensitive sort of thing. “So if I tell you to search my drawers, you wouldn’t take it the wrong way?”

Neal rifled through Graham’s chest of drawers. This wasn’t too hard. The socks were neatly balled and organized by color. The underwear was folded. There were little plastic containers for formerly loose change. Neal got a quick surge of hope when he found the little tray containing cuff links and tie tacks, but there was no earring. Nor was it under the laundered shirts, stiff in cardboard and tissue paper, nor under the sweaters.

“You told me to search the drawers!”

“So?”

“So it’s not there.”

“Gee.”

Neal tried the closet next: coat pockets, shelves, the works. In a moment of inspiration, he searched the vacuum-cleaner bag. Nothing. While he was zipping it back up, Graham slid off his stool and came over.

“You’re going about this all wrong, son.”

“Figures.”

“The key to finding an object is not to look for it.”

“I can do that.”

Graham ignored the remark. “Don’t search for the object; search the space. Don’t run around looking where you think the object might be; look at what is. Got it?”

Neal shook his head.

“Okay,” Graham said, “you got the room, right? That’s what is. In the room, there is supposed to be an earring, right? That’s what might be. What are you going to look at, what is or what might be?”

“What is.”

Graham was getting excited. “Right! So you search the room!”

“That’s what I was doing!”

“No, you were searching around the room.”

Neal sat down in the easy chair. “I’m sorry, I don’t get it.”

Graham went to the fridge and got out a beer and a Coke. He handed Neal the Coke. “Okay, you like to read, right?”

Graham was thinking real hard. “So when you read, do you skip all over the page? Read a word here, a word there?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Wouldn’t make any sense.”

“So what do you do?”

“Well… you read paragraphs… and sentences.”

“Okay! So break the room up into paragraphs! Read the room!”

Now Neal was getting excited. He didn’t quite have it, but the connection was almost there. “Yeah, but how do you break a room up into paragraphs?”

“Divide it up into cubes.”

“Cubes?”

“Sure. It would be squares, except squares are only two dimensions, and rooms are three dimensions. Then you search a square at a time. Search the whole square. Don’t look for the object; search the cube. If the object is there, you’ll find it. If not, move on to the next cube.”

“That makes sense.”

“How about that? Now find the earring while I finish my beer and look for investment opportunities,” Graham said. He returned to his stool and perused the point spreads.

Neal found it in the fifth cube, beneath the radiator.

He held the earring up in triumph.

Graham nodded. “The cube system is good, of course, when you are looking for some specific object, but it’s even better when you are just searching for something.”

“What do you mean?”

Graham sighed in mock exasperation. “Sometimes, Neal, you’re sent into an apartment, or an office, or a house just to see if there’s anything peculiar, out of the ordinary; with the cube system, you’re unlikely to miss anything, like maybe a twelve-inch mahogany dildo carved like Mount Rushmore or something.”

“Because you’re just looking, not looking for something, and therefore you’re not narrowing your vision with preconceptions.”

“If you say so, son. We’ll pick this up next week. Now get out so I can watch Ohio State massacre Wisconsin in peace.”

“We’re done?” Neal asked, visions of Carol Metzger dancing in his head.

“For today.”

Neal scrambled for the door.

“Neal!”

Neal stopped in the doorway. He knew it was too good to be true. Graham was probably going to send him out to look for something, like a gum wrapper he had initialed and left in Times Square.

“Yeah?”

“You got money for the movie?”

How did he know? “Yeah…”

Graham extended a ten-dollar bill. “You’ll want to take her somewhere decent afterward, get a bite to eat.”

Neal shook his head. “Thanks, Graham, but I don’t want-”

“Take it. You’re a working man; you deserve a little walking-around money. Take her someplace they have napkins.”

Neal took the money. “Thanks, Graham.”

“Get out; I wanna see the pregame show.”

Neal split. Graham went back to his paper, but his mind was more on Eileen O’Malley, who had been sixteen when he was sixteen, and who had blue eyes that could stop your heart.

“You give good search, Neal,” Joe Graham said one Saturday morning during one of their weekly training sessions.

“Thanks.”

“You read a room really very well.” This was true. Neal had just finished searching Graham’s apartment for an M amp;M, a brown one, the regular kind, not the peanut. He had found it in less than ten minutes, taped in the water tank of the toilet.

“But,” Graham said as Neal winced, “Helen Keller could come in here, know the place was tossed.”

“Isn’t she dead?”

“Doesn’t matter. She could still tell.” This week, Neal actually had a Saturday-night date, a real date, with Carol Metzger, so he was in a particular hurry. Nevertheless, he was annoyed that Graham was never happy. What did he want?

“Go search my top drawer.”

That’s what he wanted.

Neal went to the drawer and visually divided it into cubes. He lifted up the plastic tray full of change, saw nothing very interesting, and was about to set it down when Graham told him to freeze.

“Look at the way you picked it up,” Graham said. He waited for an answer.

Neal didn’t have one. He had just picked the damn thing up, that’s all. He shrugged.

Graham continued, “You picked it up diagonally, at an angle.”

“I should be shot.” What the hell difference did it make?

“You have to lift this straight up. Straight. Why?”

“Oh yeah, so you can set it down in exactly the same place.”

“You’re not as stupid as you look. Of course, that would be impossible. Now practice.”

“Practice?”

“It’s not as easy as it seems, lifting things straight up, setting them down. I’m going to practice on a cold bottle of Knickerbocker.”

So Neal spent an hour and a half lifting things up and setting them down, and it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. He found the best technique was to stand at a little less than arm’s reach, with his elbow slightly bent and wrist cocked downward.

“What about fingerprints?” he asked Graham. Have you ever thought of that, wise guy?

“Yeah, well, if you’re tossing an FBI agent, you might want to bring gloves along, but if you do it right, your average homeowner isn’t gonna know you’ve been there, never mind think about fingerprints.”