The Fool's Run

ticking away, the sweat gathering on my forehead.
    “Look through the cabinet and around the desk. See if you can find anything that looks like a list or a serial number, maybe,” I whispered to LuEllen. “It might be written right on the desk, or on the top of a file . . . anywhere.”
    “Right,” she whispered back. Suddenly we were dealing in whispers.
    I unscrewed the plate over the phone line and clipped a bug in place. LuEllen riffled through the files in the cabinet and checked the desk, top and bottom, but found nothing.
    “Look under the covers of the books,” I said.
    She started going through them as I was screwing the strike plate back on the phone outlet. She’d just put the last book on its shelf, and I was dropping the screwdriver into my bag, when the garage door went up.
    We froze and looked at each other. There was a beat of silence, then another beat, and then a car door slammed.
    “Shit, he’s home,” LuEllen hissed, as the garage door came down with a bang. Her face was deathly pale. “And he’s a cop. He’ll have a gun.”
    “Did you lock the house door behind you?”
    “Of course.”
    “So now what?”
    “Get all the tools. Get everything,” she whispered violently. We shoved a couple of extra bugs and the disk copies into the bags.
    “In here,” she said, pushing me into the bathroom. She stepped back out to the computer area and looked quickly around to make sure we’d left nothing behind. Satisfied, she followed me into the bathroom and eased the door shut.
    “Open that window,” she whispered urgently.
    The bathroom window was one of the slanted type, with the hinges on the bottom. It pulled down forty-five degrees.
    “There’s no way we can get out of that,” I whispered to her. “Maybe he’s just here for a minute, we can wait, and he’ll leave.”
    There was a click and a mechanical hum, and LuEllen shook her head. “That was the central air. He’s going to be here for a while. And I’ll tell you something. He’ll find us. He’ll be down here in ten minutes.”
    “How do you know?” Whoever was upstairs was clumping through the kitchen—heavy footsteps, a man, and probably a big one.
    “Because. Because they always do. It’s a rule,” LuEllen said. “Something about vibrations. If you hide in somebody’s closet, they’ll look in the closet. If you hide under the bed, they’ll look under the bed. Get that window open.”
    I pulled it open, and LuEllen said, “Help me.” I boosted her up, and she pushed on the screen until it popped outside with a noisy crack.
    “Shit,” I whispered.
    “No sweat, the central air will cover us,” LuEllen grunted. “Now push me up as high as you can. Right up against the ceiling.” I pushed her higher, and she got her arms out on the grass. Her stomach was a solid slab of muscle, and she kept her entire lower body as rigid as a pipe as I fed her over the glass and out onto the lawn.
    She was a small woman, and the fit was tight. The chances of my following her were exactly zero.
    “Give me my bag,” she whispered down to me. I handed it to her, and she pushed the screen back up against the window. “When you hear talking, you go right out through the garage. Out through the garage, around back, and wait behind the fence, you hear? And close this window.” I had no idea what she meant. Her oval face looked down at me, and then she was gone. I shut the window and locked it.
    One second later, Denton started down the basement stairs. LuEllen was right; he’d find me. I stood back from the bathroom door and set my feet. If I hit him hard, and just right, he’d be down and I’d be out. But if I missed, he almost certainly carried a gun, and he was in his own house. The door to the family room opened and I started shallow breathing.
    The doorbell rang. LuEllen. Denton grunted and turned back up the steps. I eased the bathroom door open. From the base of the stairs, I heard him open the front door, and a flustered LuEllen asking about a park, where it was, tennis, girlfriend apparently gave her wrong directions, decided to walk, smells so good with the rain . . .
    Denton stepped out on the front porch. I crossed the kitchen to the garage door, noticed with unnatural clarity the bologna sandwich on the kitchen table, the three envelopes sitting next to it, the sign on the wall: TRY OUR FAMOUS PEANUT BUTTER & JELLY SANDWICH. It was like a slow-motion pan in a movie. I resisted an impulse to take a bite from