Donald Westlake - Smoke

Monday morning, June 26 of this year, Geoff Wheedabyx awoke alone and happy, leaped out of bed, and went off to shower. He didn't always awake alone, but he didn't mind it. At forty-seven, he'd been married twice and divorced twice and, while still friends with both ex-wives, he saw no reason to marry a third time. He essentially agreed with the philosophy of W. C. Fields, who once said, "Women to me are like elephants. I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one."

Geoff liked to look at women, and more, hence the choirsinging cap and the black fedora, but to an even greater extent he liked to go on being an overgrown boy, hence the fireman hat and the policeman hat and the hard-hat hat. For a cheerful grown-up boy, who can actually legitimately wear all those hats, life is a pretty sweet proposition, all in all.

Geoff had a bachelor's kitchen skills: he threw food at the stove, then ate it, then cleaned up. By 7:40 A.M., he was done with all that, and carrying his second cup of coffee into the office, ready to go to work.

Geoff's office, a large room, was nevertheless crowded. His police-department file cabinet stood next to his fire-department file cabinet stood next to his construction-company file cabinet. His firematic books and police manuals and building codes bulletins and lumber brochures were all tumbled together into rough bookcases he'd made himself, evenings. On the walls, wherever there was space among the calendars, safety posters, work schedules, and area maps, Geoff had pinned up FBI wanted posters, not because he ever expected to see any of those hard-looking fellows here in Dudley, but because their pitiless faces helped to remind him that, small as all his operations might be, he was still engaged in serious business here.

As a police department, his operation was about as small as you could get: himself and two part-timers, who were mostly employed for traffic control when things like the circus or the horse show or the bluegrass festival were in the neighborhood. The rest of the time, the Dudley, New York, police department was just him, as backup to the state police, who handled all the real criminal work: burglary, DWI, possession of a controlled substance. (Once, there'd been a small Ziploc bag of some sort of white powdery controlled substance actually here in this office, locked in the bottom drawer of his grandfather's old oak desk over there between the two front windows, locked in there for two days, waiting for State CID up in Albany to send somebody down and pick it up. Oh, how Geoff had wanted to open that bag, just take a sniff, maybe a tiny taste; but he'd been good, and left that evidence alone, and regretted it ever since.)

This morning, as usual, he phoned the state-police barracks down toward Pawling to find out if anything he should know about had happened during the night — like more escapees from the boys' reformatory over by the Connecticut state line — but this morning, happily, there was nothing. Next he called the firehouse out at Futterman — Dudley was just backup to their fire department — and they'd also had a quiet night. So then he made some lumberyard and hardware-store calls, put on his hard hat, and went out, locking both the office door and the front door behind him, because there were just too many things in the office, like guns and flares and radios, that kids might take too intense an interest in, and he didn't want to be responsible for some dumb kid blowing his fingers off or something.

The Dudley PD owned a fine black-and-gray police car, two years old, equipped with stuff you wouldn't believe possible, but Geoff rarely used it. In fact, he mostly kept it parked just this side of the town-limit sign at the west end of Market Street, to remind eastbound drivers they weren't on the Taconic Parkway anymore and should slow the hell down. What Geoff drove instead was his 4 X— 4 pickup equipped with flashing red light, police radio, CB radio, walkie-talkie, handgun mounted under the dash, fire extinguisher, and, oh, Lord, just tons of stuff. Including at the moment, three sheets of C-D exterior plywood and some boxes of nails and a can of joint compound and some other construction-company stuff in the back.

The pickup was parked in the drive outside to the left. Geoff boarded it and took it the two blocks to the house where he was enclosing the back porch downstairs and creating a new screened porch on the second floor above it. He arrived at three minutes to eight, to find two of his three construction-company employees already there, yawning and scratching and drinking diner coffee out of plastic cups. The third guy pulled in about ten seconds later, and then they went to work.

The deal is, as everybody knows, construction crews cannot work, can simply not work, unless country-and-western music is playing on a crappy little portable radio under everybody's feet. On the other hand, Geoff had to be aware of his radios in the pickup, just in case there was a fire or an ambulance emergency or some call for the police department, so an electrician friend — who should have been here this week, by the way, but of course he wasn't — had rigged a white light on the pickup's dashboard that would flash through the windshield if anybody tried to call. And Geoff always left one transmitter on in the office, that could be received by the police radio in the pickup, if anybody tried to make contact with him back there. A voice, a phone ringing, anything like that in the offices would transmit to the pickup and switch on that white light.

It came on this morning a little after ten. It would come on like that once or twice a week, and was never any big deal. Today, one of the guys on the crew noticed it first, and said, "Your light's on, Geoff," and Geoff put down his hammer and left the porch and went around to get behind the wheel of the pickup.

He listened. No voice, no telephone, no walkie-talkie. Nothing. So why would the light go on? Did somebody just ring once, at the office, and then hang up? Geoff was about to switch off the light and go back to work when his police-department radio began to make scratching sounds.

Well, hell, so that's what it was. When he'd put in this system, the electrician — where the hell was he, by the way? — had said it was so sensitive it could pick up a mouse eating an apple in the office, which was okay with Geoff since he had no varmints in his house at all. Except maybe now he did. Listen to that scratching — sounded like the damn thing was eating a baseball bat.

The door opened.

What? Geoff leaned closer to the radio. Had he heard what he'd thought he'd heard?

The door closed. Footsteps. A file drawer opened.

"Well, hell," Geoff said, and reached for the handgun under the dash. Tucking it into his jeans, removing his nail apron, flipping the tail of his T-shirt over the gun butt, he got out of the pickup, called to his guys, "I'll be right back," and walked the two blocks back to his house, passing along the way a gray minivan with city plates and a strange woman at the wheel, who didn't look at him as he went by. Something to do with it, whatever it was.

Already he knew this wasn't kids. It was a burglar, picking locks, deliberately breaking into that specific room in that specific house and going right away to the filing cabinets.

Half a block this side of his house, Geoff turned off and walked down a driveway, then across some backyards. He'd grown up in this town, and until the age of thirteen the backyards and fields and lower tree branches and barn interiors had been his primary routes, leaving the ordinary streets and roads for the use of unimaginative grown-ups. You didn't forget those childhood patterns: Geoff could now come at his house from eleven different unexpected directions.

Letting himself quietly into the house through the back door, he paused to remove his work boots, then in his tube socks eased through the house to the closed office door. Leaning close to it, holding his breath, he listened at first to silence, and then to a squeak — his office chair, the son of a gun was sitting in his office chair — and then the undeniable scrape of his bottom drawer opening, the one that was always kept locked, but which this alien burglar son of a gun had picked or pried open. God dam it!