Persuader

side of the garage block for a preliminary distant look at the wall. It was still all lit up. The lights blazed harsh and blue and angry, like a stadium. The lodge was bathed in the glow. The razor wire glittered. The light was a solid bar, thirty yards deep, bright as day, with absolute darkness beyond. The gate stood closed and chained. The whole thing looked like the outer perimeter of a nineteenth-century prison. Or an asylum.
    I gazed at it until I had figured out how to get past it and then I headed around inside the cobbled courtyard. The apartment above the garages was dark and quiet. The garage doors were all closed, but none of them had locks. They were big old-fashioned timber things. They had been installed way back before anybody had thought of stealing cars.
    Four sets of doors, four garages. The left-hand one held the Cadillac. I had already been in there. So I checked the others, slow and quiet. The second had yet another Lincoln Town Car in it, black, the same as Angel Doll's, the same as the one the bodyguards had used. It was waxed and shiny and its doors were locked.
    The third garage was completely empty. Nothing in it at all. It was clean and swept. I could see broom tracks in the dusty oil patches on the floor. There were a few carpet fibers here and there. Whoever had swept up had missed them. They were short and stiff.
    I couldn't make out the color in the darkness. They looked gray. They looked like they had been pulled out of a rug's burlap backing. They meant nothing to me. So I moved on.
    I found what I wanted in the fourth garage. I opened the doors wide and let in just about enough moonlight to see by. The dusty old Saab the maid had used for her marketing was in there, parked head-in close to a workbench. There was a grimy window behind the bench. Gray moonlight on the ocean outside. The bench had a vise screwed to it and was covered in tools. The tools were old. Their handles were wood that had darkened with age and oil. I found a bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle. The handle was bulbous, turned from oak. The spike was maybe two inches long. I put it into the vise, maybe a quarter-inch deep. Tightened the vise hard. Pulled on the handle and bent the spike into a neat right angle. Loosened the vise and checked my work and put it away in my shirt pocket.
    Then I found a chisel. It was a woodworking item. It had a half-inch blade and a nice ash handle. It was probably seventy years old. I hunted around and found a carborundum whetstone and a rusty can of sharpening fluid. Dabbed some fluid on the stone and spread it with the tip of the chisel. Worked the steel back and forth until it showed bright. One of the many high schools I went to was an old-fashioned place in Guam where shop was graded by how well you did with the scut work, like sharpening tools. We all scored high.
    It was the kind of accomplishment we were interested in. That class had the best knives I ever saw. I turned the chisel over and did the other face. I got the edge square and true. It looked like high-grade Pittsburgh steel. I wiped it on my pants. Didn't test the edge on my thumb. I didn't particularly want to bleed. I knew it was razor sharp just by looking at it.
    I came out into the courtyard and squatted down in the angle of the walls and loaded my pockets. I had the chisel if things needed to stay quiet, and I had the Glock if it was OK to go noisy. Then I scoped out my priorities. The house first, I decided. There was a strong possibility that I would never get another look at it.
    The outer door to the kitchen porch was locked, but the mechanism was crude. It was a token three-lever affair. I put the bent spike of the bradawl in like a key and felt for the tumblers. They were big and obvious. It took me less than a minute to get inside. I stopped again and listened carefully. I didn't want to walk in on the cook. Maybe she was up late, baking a special pie. Or maybe the Irish girl was in there doing something. But there was only silence. I crossed the porch and knelt down in front of the inner door.
    Same crude lock. Same short time. I backed off a foot and swung the door open. Smelled the kitchen smells. Listened again. The room was cold and deserted. I put the bradawl on the floor in front of me. Put the chisel next to it. Added the Glock and the spare magazines. I didn't want to set the metal detector off. In the still of the night it would have sounded like a siren. I slid the