The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [115]
Lucius nodded. “Yes, but even if you had one, it’d be hard to create an opening big enough for a person.”
“You mean, for an adult person,” I said. “That’s how they generally set them bars. But…”
The Doctor looked at me, and it seemed like he couldn’t decide whether to be excited or stern. “Stevie—are you suggesting that you could get inside?”
I nodded with what you might call extreme reluctance. “There’s some stables right next door to the house. I noticed that much. Good place to hide out and then move from. Spread the bars, get inside, and go check out the basement. If we find the kid, I can bring her out.”
“And what would you find her with?” Lucius asked.
Shrugging, I answered, “I got a friend—” I felt the Doctor’s eyes on me. “I had a friend, anyway. Kid who does second-story jobs, like I used to. We call him Hickie the Hun, ‘cause he claims his family were German aristocrats, way back. They weren’t, though—Dutch, something like that. Anyways, he’s got this trained ferret. Name’s Mike. Hickie keeps him in a sack on jobs. Mike can get through all kinds of narrow openings.” I pointed at the diagram again. “And I could get him in there. Got a hell of a nose, does that animal.”
“But how does it know what it’s looking for?” Miss Howard asked.
“Hickie’s got this trick,” I told her. “He puts something that either looks or smells like what he’s trying to lift into Mike’s cage and don’t feed him until he learns to fetch it. It don’t take too long, generally. A few days.”
Lucius pondered the matter for a minute, then looked to Dr. Kreizler. “Doctor,” he said, his voice making it clear that he understood the risk but was excited, anyway. “This could work.”
“Wouldn’t we have to find a way to get the Hunters out of the house, though?” Miss Howard asked.
“Just the wife,” I answered. “And if she’s spending time with Goo Goo Knox, well… all we gotta do is wait for her to leave some night. I don’t guess her husband takes care of the kid, if he’s as bad off as you all say. So she probably stows the baby while she’s out. I’d go in through the ground floor—the kitchen, probably. After that, straight to the basement. They sleep on the top floor, right? We heard the husband while we were outside.”
“That’s right,” Lucius said quickly.
“So it’d be pretty simple to pull it off while he was there. I done that kind of thing plenty of times. Not with a kid, maybe, but how much different than a sack of goods can a kid be?”
There wasn’t much more to say about the actual job, so I knew what was coming next: the Doctor said, “Would you both excuse us, please?” and took me by the shoulder toward the back of the room. There he folded his arms and looked at me for a second; then he turned away and stared out the window.
“Stevie, there is a great deal about this plan that makes me uncomfortable.”
“Me, too,” I said. “You got another idea, I’m all for it.”
“That’s just the problem,” he answered. “We don’t. And you know that.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t think of it to start with, Cyrus did. Anyway, it don’t—it doesn’t have to be such a big deal. You give me one of the detective sergeants to keep watch, and if we’ve got the calash ready in the stable, we oughtta be fine. A gun and a badge’ll take care of anybody but the Dusters, and by the time they find out what’s going on, if they ever do, we’ll be long gone.”
There wasn’t any way, of course, that the Doctor was ever going to be happy about me either putting myself in danger or going back to my old thieving ways; but he knew, to judge from the look on his face, that we didn’t have any choice. The fact that Miss Howard and Detective Sergeant Lucius were all for the idea only put the icing on the thing. And so by two o’clock I found myself once again heading down into my old neighborhood, to try to locate Hickie the Hun and his ferret, Mike.
CHAPTER 21
I figured to find Hickie swimming somewhere down by the East River waterfront, even on what was, for New York, a cool summer’s afternoon: the kid was as fond of water as a fish. On top of that, where there were ships there