A Safe Place for Dying by Jack Fredrickson Page B

wobbling and falling through the hoop.
    â€œYes,” Leo shouted, waving his skinny white arms like a scarecrow on speed. “Game called on account of victory.” He snatched the ball before I could grab it, tucked it tight against his stomach
like a wide receiver hugging a miracle catch, and started running for the opening in the fence. I hustled to catch up with him.
    â€œDidn’t you tell me Chernek has increased security at Gateville?” he asked as we slowed across the hard dirt and tufts of crabgrass.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIsn’t that doing the right thing?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œIsn’t paying off the bomber the most reasonable thing they can do? Especially since the last time they paid off, the guy stayed away for close to forty years?”
    There was nothing to say because he was right. We got to Endora’s purple Grand Am.
    Leo’s worried eyes scanned my face. “You’re sure it’s wise to watch the drop behind their backs? What if you scare the guy away, and that causes him to blow up another house?”
    â€œWhat’s my alternative?”
    â€œLet it alone. You’ve done what you were hired to do, which was to have the letters examined.”
    I held out the keys to the Jeep. He shrugged, shook his head, and gave me the keys to Endora’s Grand Am.
    I got to the parking lot behind Ann Sather’s at five thirty. Though the temperature was still in the upper eighties, I wore my blue Cubs cap, dark Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a tan jacket with the collar turned up. I looked like a pervert.
    I pushed up the overhead door, drove the car in, got out, and pulled the door down. The mold cultures in the garage were fetid from steaming in the sun all day. I took off my jacket, cracked open the service door for some air, and tried not to breathe. Stanley had said he would make the drop right at dark. I had three hours to kill.
    I’d done a couple of dozen surveillances. Most of them were for insurance companies, on people who’d filed false injury claims, but
two were for runaway kids, and one was on a guy suspected by one wife of having another wife. All were agonizing, hours and hours of looking at nothing. I like surveillance like I like warts.
    I pulled out a small, old wood kitchen chair from Endora’s trunk and sat in the shadows of the side window with my beat-up college copy of Thoreau’s Walden. I need to read Thoreau every few weeks because he chucked it all and went to a rustic cabin in the woods to think. For him, life got understandable when he realized that rich people were herd animals. I wondered what he would have thought of people lumbering along in mammoth S.U.V.’s, chatting on cell phones about luncheon plans or tennis games with other people lumbering along in their own big S.U.V.’s. Thoreau was a pacifist, an environmentalist, and a nonviolent person, but I like to think that he would have been mightily tempted to drive the whole herd, still chattering, into Walden Pond.
    I read Thoreau until eight thirty, when it got too dark to see the words. I put the book back in the car, took out my ancient Canon F.T.Q.L. with the long lens, set it on the folding tripod I’d brought, and checked the focus. It was just about dark. I pulled the chair closer to the window to wait.
    At nine, a big, square light went on behind Ann Sather’s, likely from a timer. It flooded the area around the Dumpster with bright light, and I wondered if the bomber had thought to check out the back of the restaurant at night before he sent the note. When he came for the money, he was going to be lit up like Wrigley Field during a night game. It was dumb, and he hadn’t made dumb moves before.
    At nine twenty, two kids came out of the shadows of the side alley, bouncing a basketball. It echoed loudly off the brick walls of the buildings. The kids moved diagonally across the empty parking lot, passing the ball back and forth in