Dead Watch

in prison.
    Jake noted his address, then looked it up on his laptop map program. At seven o’clock, he called Madison.
    “This is Jake. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
    “No, no, this is going to be a hellish day,” she said. “I’ve been up since five.”
    “Can I stop by and pick up the key to your New York apartment?”
    Pause. “What are you going to do?”
    “I want to go over it inch by inch. I’ll try to preserve your privacy, if there’s anything you don’t want me to look at.”
    “No, no.” Another pause. Then, “I guess I’d rather have you tear it apart than the FBI. When are you going up?”
    “Right away. I’ve got to do some running around, but I’d like to get the shuttle out of National at noon.”
    “Soon as you can get here.”

    He was at her door at seven-fifteen. Two television trucks were parked in the street, but neither bothered to film Jake. A man with a funny hat was just leaving, heading for a florist’s van. Another woman was inside, Madison’s best horsey friend from Lexington, she said. She gave him the key with a note to the doorman. “I called the doorman, told him you were coming and to let you in.”
    “Is there a computer in the apartment?”
    “Of course.” She was wearing jeans and a golf shirt, and was standing close to him, her voice pitched down. Jake could hear her friend talking on a telephone.
    “Do you know his password? If it has a password?”
    She rolled her eyes. “He was in Skull and Bones at Yale. It’s ‘Bonester.’ ”
    “You gotta be kidding me . . .” He shook his head, smiled: the Ivy League. “Is there a safe?”
    “Yes, but it’s empty. I emptied it yesterday. It’s in the kitchen, actually, under what looks like a built-in chopping block.”
    Her friend was in the living room. They’d walked out to the entry, and as he turned to leave, she caught his jacket sleeve, pulled his shoulders down, and kissed him quickly on the lips. “Be careful. Be careful, please.”

    Then he didn’t want to leave; but he did. He stopped at a convenience store, made a call to Don Patzo in Baltimore. Patzo picked up on the fourth ring, sleep in his voice: “What?”
    Jake hung up. He wanted to talk to Patzo face-to-face.

    Traffic was bad, and all the way to Baltimore, he could feel the kiss.
    There was, in his experience, a wide variety of kisses, ranging from Air, on one end of the spectrum, to Orgasmic on the other. Included were Affectionate, Hot, Friendly, First, Promising, Intense, Good-bye for Good, See You Later, Desperate, Mom, and French, not to be confused with French Officer.
    Had this been a First—which implied a Second—or had it been an Affectionate or Friendly, which weren’t necessarily good? Had she pushed up against him a little? Had he recoiled? He didn’t think he’d recoiled, but he’d definitely been surprised. Should he have taken hold of something? Like what?
    He remembered the old Irish joke, and smiled at it: “Sweet lovin’ Jesus, Sweeney, didn’t you have nothin’ in your own hand?”—“Nothing but Mrs. O’Hara’s ass, and though it’s a thing of beauty in its own right, it ain’t worth a damn in a fight . . .”
    Like being fourteen again.
    He was in Baltimore a few minutes after nine o’clock, used the car’s nav system to find Don Patzo’s house. He got lost, even with the nav system—the maps showed streets going through where they didn’t—wandered around for a half hour, and finally found the place down a dead-end street not far from the water, but with an unpleasant fishy smell about it.
    Patzo was the man who’d tried to teach him burglary before Jake left for Afghanistan. He’d been in prison a half dozen different times in three states, before taking the contract with the CIA, and in class said he didn’t know the exact number, but thought he might have done better than two thousand burglaries. “Quality jobs: wasn’t stealin’ no fuckin’ boom boxes or video games.”
    Jake asked him how he’d gotten caught so often. “Percentages, sonny. Just like in gambling. You figure the odds are a hundred to one against getting caught, then you go in a hundred times, and guess what? The percentages just ran out.”

    Patzo lived in a small, frame house with shingle siding, a concrete-block stoop, and a neatly trimmed lawn. A dozen freshly planted petunias struggled for life in a window box. Jake knocked, knocked again. Patzo came to the door. Jake recognized him, but only