Forty Thieves Read online

  Nicole waited for a few minutes to let her eyes adjust to the deeper darkness while any sounds she’d made faded into the past. Then she walked lightly to the middle of the house, where she reached the stairs up to the two-story addition. Upstairs there was a long central hallway with bedrooms on both sides. The darkness here was relieved a bit by a long skylight that let moonlight in to reflect on the polished hardwood floor. She advanced about twenty feet, looking into rooms as she went, and then stopped. This was as far as she dared to go. If she went on trying to find the room where the Abels slept, she would risk waking them. This spot would serve her purpose. She unscrewed the top of the can and poured a pool of gasoline on the hardwood, and then watched it spread along the hall in the grooves of the floor as she backed down the stairs to the living room.

  She soaked the carpet in the living room because that was the way a person awakened at night would try to get out. Next she went from room to room on the ground floor pouring a stream of gasoline along the outer walls. When she finished the walls she had some left, so she poured a pool under the gas stove, another one in front of the back door, and the last on the floor at the front door. Since the cause of the fire was going to be impossible to miss, she left the top off the empty gas can and set it on the living room coffee table.

  She stood on a chair to climb out the leaded-glass window again, gave Ed a thumbs-up signal, and kept going down the lawn. As she passed the punctured husk of the Abels’ Volvo she stopped to look inside. She silently conceded that Ed had been right. There were dozens of bullet holes in the outer side of each door, but none of the bullets seemed to have made a single hole coming through the inner side.

  Nicole kept going down the driveway to the gate and looked up and down the street. The neighborhood was still quiet. The windows of the houses were dark and the air was still, so all she could hear was the occasional distant swish of a car a block away on the boulevard.

  When Nicole was satisfied she turned toward the house and saw Ed standing at the front of the leaded-glass window, watching her and waiting. She waved to him, and then saw him step to the side of the window, strike a match, and toss it toward the open gap in the glass. His match didn’t quite make it into the house, because the gasoline fumes from inside ignited before it reached the opening. There was a sound like whooomp and a bright orange flame tinged with blue shot outward a few feet and then subsided.

  Immediately the house began to burn. The flames streaked around the rooms and across the floors and slithered up the walls to the ceiling. Each instant made the interior brighter.

  Ed ran toward Nicole along the driveway, and behind him she could see the fire growing, flames rising to light up the windows. She knew that the flames were mostly just gasoline at the moment, but the wood and fabric would be fully involved in a minute or two, and while these flames were turning the living room floor into a lake of fire, others were marching along the unseen hallway to the bedrooms in the back.

  Ed reached her and they sat down just inside the fence in the deep shadow of the tall hedge. They took their MP5 assault rifles out from under their jackets, extended the stocks, pulled back the cocking levers, slid the selectors to auto, and studied the doors and windows of the house. A few seconds later all the alarms and smoke detectors seemed to go off at once.

  Like a shriek in the dark, the loud, high-pitched beeping of the fire alarms woke Sid, and he sat up and reached out to touch Ronnie and reassure himself that she was still there. She clutched his arm once then let go.

  Sid stood, stepped to the wall, felt for the light switch, turned on the lights, and then climbed the stairs and gingerly touched the doorknob. “The metal’s hot. The house must be on fire.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t smell smoke.”

  “Smoke rises, so it’s not down here yet.”

  “We’d better get dressed,” she said, and reached for the clothes she had folded and left on the workbench. She tossed his clothes to him.

  He stepped into his jeans and put on his running shoes and T-shirt, then stuck the pistol into his belt and the spare magazines in his pockets. He handed Ronnie her pistol and spare magazines.

  She pocketed the ammunition. “You know, we probably won’t need these. It could be something normal. A short circuit. I was exhausted, and I could have left the coffeepot plugged in.”

  He said, “It’s time to get out of here.”

  She looked up the stairs. “We can’t go that way,” she said. “I guess it’s got to be the other way into the yard.”

  They made it to the steel door across the basement just as the light went out. The fire alarms had gone off with the light, and the quiet was a relief. Sid unbolted the door and they went through and closed it behind them. They climbed the concrete steps to the cellar door. Ronnie tugged on the bolt.

  Nicole Hoyt watched the doors and windows while the fire burned, but nobody came out. The fire alarms had melted into silence as the fire grew, but they had apparently been loud enough to raise some of the neighbors. Lights came on in houses along the street, and Nicole knew people would be calling the fire department. She waited for Ed to notice, and then realized that he already had. In the light from the fire she could see the muscles in his jaw working. They had wanted to stay long enough to shoot the Abels as they tried to escape from the fire, but time was passing. He looked up the street at the houses again.

  “That’s it,” he muttered. “Time to go.” He stood.

  They both moved to the hedge a few feet apart, put their MP5 rifles against their bellies and zipped their jackets over them, then pushed the foliage aside, reached in to grasp the fence, and pulled themselves up and over.

  They both trotted around the corner of the street to their car. They got in and Ed drove them out of the residential streets onto the boulevard and then to the parking spot in the alley near the office building they had chosen. They got out and stepped to the back of the building.

  Ed had already prepared the way into the building hours earlier. He had used a crowbar to pry the shield away from the lock and a flexible shim to pop the door open, and then taped the latch bolt down so the door would be ready when they arrived. He opened the door and they were in. He pulled the tape off the lock, and they ran to the first-floor elevator, rode it to the top floor, and then climbed the stairs to the roof access door.

  They stood on the roof and stared down at the quiet street, which was now lit up with a waving, flickering light from the flames. They both took out their rifles, found firing positions, and studied the Abels’ house. After a few seconds Nicole said, “I can see the house and some of the yard pretty well because of the fire, but I still can’t see anybody coming out.”

  “I can’t either,” Ed said. “A lot of times when you try to burn somebody out at night, the smoke kills them before they wake up.” He kept watching in silence for a full minute before he added, “There’s also the fact that all houses burn different. Sometimes the space in the center for the open-beam living room channels the heat up into the peak and it burns like instant hell. They could be crispy critters by now.”

  “Should we test?”

  “Yeah. Get ready.” Ed shouldered his MP5 and aimed at the shadow of a big tree in the Abels’ yard.

  The silence was shattered by a shot, and Sid saw dirt kick up twenty feet from either of them. They both crouched. “Don’t fire back!” he called to Ronnie.

  “I can’t. I don’t see them.”

  “They don’t see us, either. They’re trying to draw fire so they’ll spot a muzzle flash.”

  They waited for a few seconds, and there was another shot. This one hit in the shadow of a tree on the left side of the yard.

  “That time I saw the flash,” Ronnie called out. “They’re on the roof of that office building over on the boulevard.”

  “Okay,” Sid said. “Do you have your phone?”

  “Yes. I’ll call it in.”

  While Ronnie called 9-1-1, Sid plotted a route to the office bu
ilding. In this part of the city the zoning prohibited office buildings over four stories tall, so the shooters were only about sixty feet up. Their view was probably hampered by the upper boughs of the tall trees in the neighborhood, and even by some of the newer houses, all of them two-story mini-mansions built to nearly cover their lots, and shouldering right up to each other.

  Ronnie’s voice came to Sid. “I called it in.”

  Sid said, “I think once we’re out of this yard we can make it to that office building without giving them a shot at us.”

  “I’ll meet you at the far side of the Fogels’ house.”

  Sid moved into a spot where he was out of the shooters’ view behind the hedge on the right side of the yard. He saw Ronnie emerge from the shadows, run along the side of their burning house, then into the hedge. It looked as though she had merged with it, but he knew she had reached in among the leafy branches to clutch the chain link fence and pull herself up and over it.

  There was another shot, and bark sprayed from the tree that Ronnie had just left. Sid backed into the area along the front fence, sidestepping to keep from separating from the foliage or presenting a human shape to the shooters on the office building rooftop. He knew he would be visible for a second or two when he reached the bare iron gate.

  Sid reached the end of the gate and crouched beside the electric motor. He heard the distant sirens of the fire trucks and police cars and knew that this was the moment. The shooters would be distracted for a few seconds, looking for the emergency vehicles. He flipped the manual switch to engage the motor’s battery power, and as the gate rolled along its track to the side, he ducked low and slipped out.

  He ran eight steps along the sidewalk before the shots began. There was automatic rifle fire, a burst of it chipping the sidewalk behind him at first and then adjusting to hit the pavement ahead of him, but always to his left. Apparently the shooter had only had a glimpse of him as he cleared the gate, but the tops of the magnolia trees along the street had given him cover the rest of the way.

  The fire engines were not far off now, and their sirens were making dogs all along their route answer them with howls. Sid and Ronnie ran along the dark space between two houses onto the next street. A hundred feet beyond it was the boulevard.

  Sid and Ronnie turned toward the office building and made their way along the lighted boulevard, past closed stores and coffee shops. They put their guns in the backs of their waistbands under their shirts and hurried along. Sid said, “Keep your eyes open for anybody coming this way carrying anything, and look at every car. They could be hoping to shoot us out here.”

  “I am,” Ronnie said.

  They reached the front door of the office building, found it locked, and kept going to the side. At the rear of the building was an alley with an entrance to the parking lot that took up the ground level. The entrance was covered by a steel cage for the night, but around the rest of the lot, there was only a four-foot concrete wall.

  The Abels went over the wall into the lot and ducked down immediately to keep from being seen. They crouched, ran to the wall of the building, and found the door to the stairwell. Sid ran his hand along the edge of the protective plate over the lock. “It’s been jimmied,” he said. “The plate’s bent outward.”

  Ronnie said, “This looks like the only way in. I hate doors that are the only way in.”

  “Me too,” he said. He tugged on the door, but it didn’t open, so he reached into his pocket, opened the pocketknife on his key chain, pushed it into the crack between the door and the jamb where the plate had once protected it, depressed the spring, and tugged the door open.

  They stepped inside and closed the door without letting it make a noise, then climbed the staircase as they had been trained to do, one of them aiming a weapon upward between the railings of the staircase while the other climbed up one flight and then waited on the landing to cover the other, making little noise and listening for more sounds from above them in the building.

  Sid and Ronnie climbed the next flight quickly, turned at the landing, and then saw the door to the roof at the top of the next flight. The door was propped open, so they could see the starlit sky. They moved upward and stepped out onto the roof, looking over the sights of the pistols they gripped in both hands ready to fire.

  The roof was deserted. Sid ran along the roof to a raised section that shielded a second door. Sid flung the door open and took the stairs downward, then came back up. “There’s another staircase that goes to the back of the building. They must have left this door open to draw everybody’s attention away from that one. They’re gone.”

  Ronnie moved to the edge of the roof near the waist-high wall and looked over it at the pavement below. As Sid approached he could see that a few feet to her right there was a scattering of brass casings. He picked one up. “Nine millimeter. Same as the last time, except this time they used full auto.”

  “Oh my God.” Ronnie looked over her shoulder at him, and then pointed.

  The fire at their house was visible through gaps in the trees. The flames were steadily devouring bare, blackened studs and piles of half-combusted rubble. Fire trucks and police cars had arrived and firefighters had run hoses through the front gate, but all they were doing was wetting down glowing spots on charred lumber. Police cars blocked the road to protect them.

  “My house,” she said. “I can hardly believe it. I loved that house.”

  Sid said, “It’s hard to figure out what these people are trying to accomplish.”

  “Other than killing us? Nothing comes to mind.”

  10

  Sid and Ronnie rented a car at the Burbank airport, then drove it to the office of their insurance agent on Riverside in Burbank to break the news about their house and their car. Their third stop was at a gun store a few blocks east on Magnolia, where the owner knew them. They bought a supply of 9mm ammunition for their Glock 17 pistols, a new cleaning kit, and six spare magazines. Just down the street they bought two new laptop computers.

  As they drove west, Sid said, “You’re thinking about the house, aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “You want to drive by there and look?”

  She looked at him in mild irritation. “It’s gone, Sid.”

  “Houses can be replaced.”

  “I was happy there for over twenty-five years. We picked it out together, and worked together there. We raised our kids there. They brought the grandchildren there to see us, so it’s the place they’ll remember us in. The place wasn’t fancy or even very pretty, but I would have liked to die there.”

  “You had your chance last night.”

  “You couldn’t resist that?”

  “Sorry. Look, the only way either of us is going to feel better about it is if we get the people who did it. First we find a comfortable hotel, so we have a place to sleep for now. Then we get started.”

  They checked into a hotel in the western part of the Valley in Calabasas using a credit card in Ronnie’s maiden name, pulled their car around to the rear of the building, and backed into a parking space near the center of the lot so it was unlikely that they would be blocked in. They didn’t like being right next to the building. In an emergency they could push another car out of their way, but they couldn’t batter down a wall of the hotel. They went into their room and began the process of searching the Internet for a rental house.

  It took three days to find and rent the right one. The house was a small two-story building with white clapboards on a street that ended in a cul-de-sac. The house was furnished, and the yard was small and dominated by a rose garden, but it was shaded by trees and looked pleasant to Ronnie. As soon as they signed the rental agreement in the real estate office, they drove to another electronics store and bought two more sets of devices. One was a six-camera all-weather surveillance system that could be monitored and controlled from a computer based anywhere. The other was an array of tiny pinhole cameras, each with its own battery-operated transmit
ter.

  When they reached the house they installed the internal cameras first. They trained one on the front entryway, one on the kitchen door at the back of the house, and one on the upstairs hallway that led to the two bedrooms. Next they installed three cameras outside—one on a tree limb aimed at the back of the house, one under the eaves of the garage to cover the driveway and the side of the house, and one on the roof aimed down toward the front walkway and the lawn. The cameras were not large or obtrusive, but the Abels made an effort to make them difficult to notice.

  When they finished with the outdoor cameras, they spent much more time and effort installing the pinhole cameras. Sid removed a strip of crown molding in the living room, drilled holes near each end, aimed the lens out one, fitted the transmitter into a space he cut in the underlying wall, and put the molding back up. He and Ronnie placed other pinhole cameras in other spots in various rooms. There was one in a box of cereal on a shelf in the kitchen, and one had its transmitter inside a sound system speaker with the camera lens looking like part of the manufacturer’s logo. Others sat in glass-fronted cabinets, bookcases, or under pieces of furniture. One was inside the keypad for the alarm system. Sid opened their computer, signed into the monitoring site for the larger cameras, looked at each image one more time, and then repeated the procedure for each of the pinhole cameras. They made a few adjustments to the angles of the cameras to provide the best coverage of the interior of the house.

  When they finished, Ronnie and Sid walked the house again. She said, “Not bad. They’ll probably see the security cameras, and do something to disable them. While they’re doing that, the pinhole cameras will get plenty of footage of them. Even if they find all of the pinhole cameras, some of them will have recorded them tearing the place apart.”