Then he suddenly turned back on the guy, raised his fist and started to swing. All I could do was shove him. That sent his punch angling off to the right, missing our burglar by about half a foot.
“You asshole,” Neil said, turning back on me now.
But Mike was there, between us.
“You know what we’re doing? We’re making this jerk happy. He’s gonna have some nice stories to tell all his criminal friends.”
He was right. The burglar was the one who got to look all cool and composed. We looked like squabbling brats. As if to confirm this, a hint of amusement played in the burglar’s blue eyes.
“Oh, hell, Aaron, I’m sorry,” Neil said, putting his hand out. This was like a political convention, all the handshaking going on.
“So am I, Neil,” I said. “That’s why I want to call the cops and get this over with.”
And that’s when he chose to make his move, the burglar. As soon as I mentioned the cops, he probably realized that this was going to be his last opportunity.
He waited until we were just finishing up with the handshake, when we were all focused on each other. Then he took off running. We could see that he’d slipped the rope. He went straight for the stairs, angling out around us like a running back seeing daylight. He even stuck his long, tattooed arm out as if he was trying to repel a tackle.
“Hey,” Bob shouted. “He’s getting away.”
He was at the stairs by the time we could gather ourselves enough to go after him. But when we moved, we moved fast, and in virtual unison.
By the time I got my hand on the cuff of his left jean, he was close enough to the basement door to open it.
I yanked hard and ducked out of the way of his kicking foot. By now I was as crazy as Mike and Neil had been earlier. There was adrenaline and great anger. He wasn’t just a burglar, he was all burglars, intent not merely on stealing things from me, but hurting my family, too. He hadn’t had time to take the gag from his mouth.
This time, I grabbed booted foot and leg and started hauling him back down the stairs. At first he was able to hold on to the door but when I wrenched his foot rightward, he tried to scream behind the gag. He let go of the doorknob.
The next half minute is still unclear in my mind. I started running down the stairs, dragging him with me. All I wanted to do was get him on the basement floor again, turn him over to the others to watch, and then go call the cops.
But somewhere in those few seconds when I was hauling him back down the steps, I heard edge of stair meeting back of skull. The others heard it, too, because their shouts and curses died in their throats.
When I turned around, I saw the blood running fast and red from his nose. The blue eyes no longer held contempt. They were starting to roll up white in the back of his head.
“God,” I said. “He’s hurt.”
“I think he’s a lot more than hurt,” Mike said.
“Help me carry him upstairs.”
We got him on the kitchen floor. Mike and Neil rushed around soaking paper towels. We tried to revive him. Bob, who kept wincing from his headache, tried the guy’s wrist, ankle and throat for a pulse. None. His nose and mouth were bloody. Very bloody.
“No way you could die from hitting your head like that,” Neil said.
“Sure you could,” Mike said. “You hit it just the right way.”
“He can’t be dead,” Neil said. “I’m going to try his pulse again.”
Bob, who obviously took Neil’s second opinion personally, frowned and rolled his eyes. “He’s dead, man. He really is.”
“Bullshit.”
“You a doctor or something?” Bob said.
Neil smiled nervously. “No, but I play one on TV.”
So Neil tried the pulse points. His reading was exactly what Bob’s reading had been.
“See,” Bob said.
I guess none of us were destined to ever quite be adults.
“Man,” Neil said, looking down at the long, cold unmoving form of the burglar. “He’s really dead.”
“What the hell’re we gonna do?” Mike said.
“We’re going to call the police,” I said, and started for the phone.
“The hell we are,” Mike said. “The hell we are.”
iii
Maybe half an hour after we laid him on the kitchen floor, he started to smell. We’d looked for identification and found none. He was just the Burglar.
We sat at the kitchen table, sharing a fifth of Old Grandad and innumerable beers.
We’d taken two votes and they’d come up ties. Two for calling the police, Bob and I; two for not calling the police, Mike and Neil.
“All we have to tell them,” I said, “is that we tied him up so he wouldn’t get away.”
“And then they say,” Mike said, “so why didn’t you call us before now?”
“We just lie about the time a little,” I said. “Tell them we called them within twenty minutes.”
“Won’t work,” Neil said.
“Why not?” Bob said.
“Medical examiner can fix the time of death,” Neil said.
“Not that close.”
“Close enough so that the cops might question our story,” Neil said. “By the time they get here, he’ll have been dead at least an hour, hour and a half.”
“And then we get our names in the paper for not reporting the burglary or the death right away,” Mike said. “Brokerages just love publicity like that.”
“I’m calling the cops right now,” I said, and started up from the table.
“Think about Tomlinson a minute,” Neil said.
Tomlinson was my boss at the brokerage. “What about him?”
“Remember how he canned Dennis Bryce when Bryce’s ex-wife took out a restraining order on him?”
“This is different,” I said.
“The hell it is,” Mike said. “Neil’s right, none of our bosses will like publicity like this. We’ll all sound a little — crazy — you know, keeping him tied up in the basement. And then killing him when he tried to get away.”
They all looked at me.
“You bastards,” I said. “I was the one who wanted to call the police in the first place. And I sure as hell didn’t try to kill him on purpose.”
“Looking back on it,” Neil said, “I guess you were right, Aaron. We should’ve called the cops right away.”
“Now’s a great time to realize that,” I said.
“Maybe they’ve got a point,” Bob said softly, glancing at me, then glancing nervously away.
“Oh, great. You, too?” I said.
“They just might kick my black ass out of there if I had any publicity that involved somebody getting killed,” Bob said.
“He was a frigging burglar,” I said.
“But he’s dead,” Neil said.
“And we killed him,” Mike said.
“I appreciate you saying ‘we’,” I said.
“I know a good place,” Bob said.
I looked at him carefully, afraid of what he was going to say next.
“Forget it,” I said.
“A good place for what?” Neil said.
“Dumping the body,” Bob said.
“No way,” I said.
This time when I got up, nobody tried to stop me. I walked over to the yellow wall telephone.
I wondered if the cozy kitchen would ever feel the same to me now that a dead body had been laid upon its floor.
I had to step over him to reach the phone. The smell was even more sour now.
“You know how many bodies get dumped in the river that never wash up?” Bob said.
“No,” I said, “and you don’t, either.”
“Lots,” he said.
“There’s a scientific appraisal for you. ‘Lots’.”
“Lots and lots, probably,” Neil said, taking up Bob’s argument.