Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

were still there. He climbed into the Jeep, laid his cane on the seat beside him, and started up the engine. “Well, no luck,” he said aloud. He U-turned and started up the steep hill leading to the outskirts of town and eventually his house, but then on second thought pulled over, two wheels up on the sidewalk, yanked on the emergency brake, and turned the lights off. He sat thinking, talking to himself, then abruptly got out, closed the door, and, swinging his cane almost jauntily, like an English banker, climbed the steep sidewalk until he came to the alley behind the building containing her apartment, where without a glance to left or right he turned in. He moved past garbage cans and huge, square bins, past rusty, louvred ventilators and metal-faced doors, and stopped directly below the black silhouette of a raised fire escape. Nowhere in the darkness around him was there any sign of life. A television voice cried out, “Stop right where you are, Ferguson!”

He tested in his two hands the security of the canehead’s fit to the cane, then reached up as far as he could, trying to hook the bottom of the fire escape and pull it down. He was short by a good three feet. He tucked the cane under his arm and went back to the nearest garbage can. It was full, and when he moved it water sloshed in the bottom, but he lifted it, trying not to get garbage on his clothes, and carried it, as quietly as possible, back to the fire-escape extension. Standing on the can-lid, he found he could reach the fire escape with ease. It would not budge, perhaps frozen in position by old rust. “Bastard,” he whispered. He pulled himself up on the cane, holding it with both hands, so that his feet rose off the garbage lid. Still nothing—at first. Then, as he was about to call it quits, something gave: with a faint sandy groan the extension tilted a little, then sank gently toward him. He swung free of the garbage can and, when his shoes touched solid ground, climbed hand over hand up the cane until he caught hold of the fire escape itself. With one hand he jerked the garbage can out of the way. Seconds later he was up on the tar-and-pebble roof, where he could look in through the windows of the third-floor apartments. How he would get to her bedroom window, still a floor above him, he did not know, but he was convinced now that he would make it.

Carefully, so that no one below might hear him, he crossed the roof, keeping low and avoiding the third-floor apartment windows. There were four of them, three of which were dark. As he passed the one lighted one—lighted only by the flickering bluish fire of a television set—he raised up enough to peek in. He saw a clutter of bulky, dark shapes—an immense old wooden wardrobe with its doors hanging open, shapeless, colorless clothes draped on the doors; overstuffed chairs that looked rotten with age, some of them piled high with unopened boxes and plastic-bagged electronic parts; several TV sets in various stages of disassembly; a sturdy antique piano-table piled high with odds and ends (jumper cables, new-looking plastic clocks, a stack of dirty clothes); a round-front dresser with glass handles, also cluttered; an old-fashioned glass-doored bookcase packed tight with old magazines. Exactly in the middle of the room, with his back to the window, sat the man who had collected all this—an immensely fat man wearing steel-rimmed glasses and what appeared to be a policeman’s hat. He had on a filthy gray workshirt with the sleeves rolled as high and tight as they would go; the rest of him was hidden from Mickelsson by the overstuffed chair the fat man sat in and the steamer trunk beside it, piled deep, like everything else in the room, with junk.

Preparing to duck his head and move on, Mickelsson nearly missed the most interesting thing of all. Later it would seem to him that it was the first thing his eyes landed on, and that, by some quirk that only a Dr. Rifkin could explain, his eyes had moved away from it, the brain refusing to register what it saw, flashing Will Not Compute. Stacked among other things on the steamer trunk, right by the man’s bloated, hairless left arm, lay a glass refrigerator tray filled with money: packages of bills wrapped in colored paper bands, packages of the kind Mickelsson had dealt with in his undergraduate days, when he’d worked as a teller at Wisconsin Farmers Trust.

Now, though Mickelsson had made no sound, the fat man’s head began to turn. The profile came into view, small-nosed, small-chinned, alert. Mickelsson waited no longer but ducked below the window ledge and flattened himself as well as possible against the sooty brick wall. He held his breath, listening, but if the man in the room was moving—rising, coming to look out—the noise of the television masked the sound. Minute after minute he waited, still as a rock. Just as he was deciding it would be safe to move away, he heard the soft rattle, directly above him, of a window-shade being pulled down. His muscles locked and for nearly a minute he held his breath. At last he did breathe again, but still he did not move. Even when he heard the television channels switching he remained as he was; the fat man might well have a remote-control switch. It was equally probable that he had a gun.

He looked straight up and realized, after he’d stared at it a minute, that what jutted out above him was the iron-mesh floor of a fire escape. It went directly past her window. He should have known, of course, that there had to be a fire escape, though he could not have hoped it would give him immediate access to her room. He had not noticed