Chosen Prey

the doorknob. Locked.
    All right. He hurried back down the steps and tried the breezeway door. Locked. He looked around, saw nobody, heard nothing but the rain. The house across the street showed a light at the front window, but the drapes were pulled. He left the shelter of the breezeway nook and walked back around to the front of the garage. Tried the main door: locked down. He continued around to the side of the garage. The next house was only twenty feet away, but a hedge ran between them. He could see no lights, so he lowered the umbrella and walked down the length of the garage, the wet leaves of the hedge flicking against his face and neck, chilling him.
    Now he was in arrest territory, he thought. If somebody caught him here, they wouldn’t listen to a story about dropping by for a cup of tea. He began to feel it in his stomach: the tension, the eager stress of hunting. . . .
    The garage had a back door: locked. Cautious bitch, he thought. The breezeway also had a back door, and it was locked. The back of the house had a two-step wooden deck. He climbed the deck in the dark, tried the door: locked. A double window looked out over the deck, ten feet down from the door. He walked over and looked at it—and found a crack in the armor.
    The window was positioned over the kitchen sink. Probably a replacement from some past remodeling, it was one of the triple-glazed kind that didn’t take a storm window. It was cranked open about an inch, apparently to let some air into the house. A little cool air over the hot dishwater . . . He did it himself.
    He looked around: He was safe enough, with the foliage in the backyard covering him. He grabbed the edge of the window and pushed it back and forth. It gave a bit, a bit more; in two minutes he’d managed to work it open far enough that he could reach inside to the crank, and crank it all the way open. With one last look around, he boosted himself into the window opening, clambered awkwardly across the sink, and stepped on a dish full of water when he dropped to the floor.
    A dog?
    He stopped to listen. Heard nothing but the hum of the furnace. He looked out the window, then reached over and cranked it shut and locked it. There were no lights in the back. Then a furtive sound to his right: He whirled and saw a cat, a gray-striped tiger. The cat took a quick look at him and sprinted for some other part of the house.
    The kitchen lights were off; the illumination came from a couple of lamps in the living room and an overhead fixture in a hall that led back to a bedroom. He needed more light. . . . It’d be nothing but bad luck if she got back this quickly, he thought. He snapped on the kitchen light and looked quickly around.
    As he suspected, he was leaving puddles of water and muddy footprints on the floor. He spotted a paper towel rack, rolled off a few feet of toweling, wadded it up, dropped it on the floor, and used his feet to push it around like a mop. When both his shoes and the floor were dry, he stuffed the dirty towels into his pocket. A box of garbage bags sat on the kitchen counter. He took one, turned off the light, and headed for the garage.
     
    A FTER ALL THAT, the killing was simple, as it always had been. He found a spade in the garage and walked back into the breezeway.
    He waited in the near-dark for twenty minutes, thinking about not much at all. Now that he was here, now that he was committed, there wasn’t much to think about, and he relaxed. In the dim light he could just make out the reflection of his face in the breezeway glass; he looked dark, mysterious. The trench-coat collar cut him nicely along his jawline; he tried a smile, tried to catch a good profile. . . .
    He remembered the time, a cold rainy night like this one, outside of Paris, or maybe it was Casablanca, 1941 or ’42, standing in the shadows waiting for the Nazi to come in. He had a paratrooper’s knife in one hand and could see himself in a mirror, a really design-o thirties woolen military trench coat broadening out his shoulders, a beret . . . well, a beret might be too much, maybe a watch cap, though a watch cap tended to make him look a little like one of the Three Stooges; not a watch cap, then, maybe a fedora, snapped down over his eyes, but you could still see his eyes in the mirror. . . .
    He was working the fantasy when Neumann’s car pulled into the driveway and the garage door started up. Qatar pulled himself back to the present, struggled to