Donald Westlake - Smoke

The problem was, Freddie had wanted to pull down and close both the door of truck 21409 and the garage door fronting it, neither of which he could do with that guard sitting there. The truck, maybe, almost, since all he'd have to do was reach up to the dangling leather strap and tug on it, and it might not make too much noise as it rolled down, if he did it slowly and carefully. But the garage door was electric, and clanked; he'd heard these doors clank open and shut his last time here.

Well, so he'd adjust. Leaving those doors open and the guard at his puzzle, continuing to avoid the electric go-cart as it whirred around and around in random patterns, Freddie made his way back to the middle of the store, where he'd noticed a ten-foot-high display of pillows, all in a big wire basket, its sides open enough so the customers could reach in and pull out the pillows they wanted. Freddie now climbed up this basket — the wire was sharp and painful against his bare feet — and when he got to the top he flopped onto the pillows and wallowed around until he was really nestled in, and then he lay there gazing up at the ceiling as he waited for the cleaning crew to arrive. He was as comfortable as he had ever been in his life, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't fall asleeeeeeeeee —

Eleven o'clock. The cleaning crew was here. Freddie knew it was eleven o'clock, and he knew the cleaning crew was here, because the sudden racket they made was so loud and so god-awful that he jumped out of sleep like a deer into your headlights, kicking and flailing in such a panic that he was well and deeply buried in the basket of pillows by the time he got his wits about him. Then he struggled back to the surface and lay there gasping a while, listening to all that noise.

No, it wasn't that the building had fallen down. It was just the cleaning crew, that was all, with their vacuumers and compactors, advancing through the aisles like an invading army in tanks.

Freddie lifted his head, cautious, trying to orient himself, and far away, above the aisles, beyond the phalanxes of weed-whackers and battalions of work boots and soft explosions of furry pink slippers, there remained the lit window of the second-floor office, at the same level as himself atop his pillows, and the impassive guard was still seated in there, looking out, directly at Freddie, and not batting an eye.

Right. Time to go to work.

Climbing back down the basket to the concrete floor, the din of the cleaning crew in his ears, Freddie realized he was going to have to make one extra stop along the way, but when he found the men's room it was full of cleaning crew. He could have startled those people if he'd wanted to, but he used the ladies' room instead, then forgot and flushed and that did startle them. He was just barely out of the ladies' when they all piled in, staring, awed.

The puzzle-working guard had abandoned not only his post but his puzzles; the magazine and pencil sat on the chair instead of him. Maybe he'd gone off to have a word — a shouted word — with the cleaning crew.

Eventually that guard would return, if only to get his magazine. Zipping over to truck 21409, Freddie pulled down its door, and if it made any noise even he didn't hear it. Then he pushed the button for the garage door, and down it came, no doubt clanking and squealing, but who cared?

The next job was to get out of here. Freddie made his way to the front, and there was guard number four, now in a chair near the main entrance. So this must be his routine; because the cleaning crew had to go in and out several times in the course of their work, this guard moved from his regular position to cover the unlocked doors while they were here, both to keep unauthorized persons from coming in and to keep members of the cleaning crew from cleaning the place out a little too enthusiastically.

Easy as pie. Freddie walked by the guard, waited till a cleaning-crew guy in his green coverall went out to get something from his truck, and eased through the doors just behind him.

It was July, but it still got cool at night. Feeling a little chilled, Freddie jogged around to the back of the building, which took a long time, because it was a very big building. He and Peg had driven back here last time, which hadn't taken any time at all, and had seen the arrangement, and it was still the same now. Snuggled up against the rear of the building were the trailers, and in the spaces where there was no trailer there was a closed garage door instead. A pair of large floodlights, one at the top of each rear corner of the building, created a flat landscape in sharp white and deep black, with conflicting shadows. The blacktop parking area back here was smaller and scruffier than the one in front, fading off into weedy plane trees and shrubbery at the back, where half a dozen big blunt cabs for those trailers were parked.

Freddie had been involved in hijackings before (though never completely on his own) so he knew how to do the next part, which was to jump the wires on one of the cabs, back it up to trailer number 21409, and switch off the engine. Then, after double-checking that this actually was trailer number 21409, as a pink trip sheet taped to its side confirmed — he wouldn't want to remove the wrong trailer, from an open garage door, which might cause comment — he attached the electrical and hydraulic hoses from the cab to the trailer, restarted the engine, drove very slowly forward a few feet just to be absolutely certain that was a closed garage door he would see back there in his outside mirror — it was — and then he checked the lights and brakes, and everything seemed fine.

It was unlikely the people inside would be able to hear this truck engine anyway, but they certainly weren't going to hear it while the cleaning crew was at work. Freddie slipped into low, did some massive turning of the big wheel, and eased that heavy trailer on out.

He did not go past the front of the building, but turned the other way, diagonally across the empty parking lot and out an exit to a side road, then from there to the main intersection, where the light was red. No traffic went by. No traffic went by. No traffic went by. The light turned green. Freddie made the turn, and drove away from there.

The agreement was, they would meet at the burned-out diner at one o'clock, but Peg was too keyed up to stay at home, not after the eleven o'clock news, when there were no more distractions. She wanted to know how things had worked out for Freddie, and she also had this momentous announcement to make to him once the night's work was done.

If there were no problems, that is. If there was a problem, she certainly couldn't compound it for the poor guy by giving him bad news. So she certainly hoped there weren't going to be any problems, and for that reason and all the other reasons she just couldn't hang around the house waiting, so finally she piled out the front door and into the van, and as a result she reached the burned-out diner forty-five minutes early, and of course he wasn't there.

She parked around behind the diner, lights off, as they'd agreed, and sat in the dark, practicing how she would tell him, her exact words and his exact words, and twenty minutes later headlights appeared over there on the road side of the diner. So he was twenty-five minutes early, if it was him. And if it wasn't him, she hoped at least it wasn't state cops, either here to coop or to check on this van parked in the darkness back here.

But it was Freddie. That is, when the passenger door of the van opened there wasn't anybody there, so that meant it was Freddie. Hardly even noticing that kind of thing anymore, Peg said, "How'd it go?"

"Great," his floating voice told her, as the van dipped and swayed because Freddie was getting in and climbing over the seat and going to the back where his clothes were. "No problems at all. I even got to sleep for a while."