Sleep is not usually a problem for me. I am in fact what you’d call a sound sleeper: I could sleep through a volcanic eruption, if we had volcanos in Northern Virginia, although we don’t, so it doesn’t come up, but I could if we did, if I had to.
Anyway, there I was, wide awake in the middle of the night, and that was unusual, so something must have awakened me.
I lay there for a while, trying to figure out what it could have been, and then gave up and decided I’d better go check the house, make sure everything was as it should be.
Getting out of bed quietly is not the sharpest tool in my toolbox, and Emily stirred, groaning, as my feet hit the hardwood floor.
“Come back to bed, Eddie,” she said blearily, patting the empty space beside her.
I ignored her and padded downstairs, taking care to avoid Mister, who is Emily’s lazy-ass cat, a big ball of fat dipped in dirty white fur, with a nasty disposition and a set of claws and a spitting hiss…everything you know and love in a feline, right?
Mister, by the way, is a female. Don’t ask me how she got saddled with the name Mister. I have no idea—she was a part of the household before Emily and I met—and, frankly, I couldn’t care less. She’s a cat, remember, and I am definitely no cat lover.
Emily, by the way, is my mistress. It’s an old-fashioned word, I know—you tell me a better one, and I’ll use it. We’ve been together now for six, close to seven years. You hear a lot of “they met cute” stories out there, but Emily and I did not meet cute. I don’t really want to talk about it. Let me just say that I was in a bad way back then, and she totally rescued me. I owe her a lot—I’m not exaggerating when I say that I owe her my life. I would do anything for that woman, even cohabitate with a damn cat.
In the kitchen, I drank some water, which woke me up pretty thoroughly. I prowled through the living room, the dining room, the laundry room, looking for something wrong, out of place.
It was in the archway leading to the family room that I found it. Heard it, I guess I should say. There was a faint scraping at the window. It was almost inaudible, but I have excellent hearing, and this must have been what had awakened me.
Keeping out of sight, I slipped across the soft pile carpet. And now I could see it, a shadow on the glass that moved slightly with every scratch.
There was someone outside the house, trying to jiggle the window open.
I hate to admit it, but I am not a tough guy. Truth be told, I suppose I’m what you might call a little on the scrawny side, and a situation like this was completely out of my wheelhouse. I wouldn’t know what to do with a gun if I had one, and calling the cops was out of the question. I learned that lesson back when I was still on the streets. But what if this jerkwad was after more than just the family silver? What if he was here to hurt Emily? What if he was here to kill her?
I couldn’t live with myself if I let anything happen to her.
I looked around the room for something I could use as a weapon, but who was I kidding? A weapon? Me? Mister would probably have a better chance of fighting off an intruder than I would—I’ve had direct personal experience of those claws I mentioned earlier, and, trust me, they can inflict some damage.
No, if I was going to do anything to prevent whoever that was on the outside from coming through the window, I was going to have to figure out something other than a hardware approach.
And what—I suddenly thought—if there was more than one of them? What if it was a pair of drug-addled teenagers, or a whole gang of—you should excuse the expression—cat burglars? This was going to be challenging enough as a one-on-one encounter. If I had to take on an entire freaking army, then I’d better think strategically.
I’ve never actually read Sun Tzu—truth be told, I’m not much of a reader—but I’ve heard Emily talk about him and that book he wrote, The Art of War. That’s an interesting concept, by the way, war as an art form. And one thing I remember Emily saying—on the phone, I think, one of her late-night gabfests with a girlfriend from her college days—was this: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Now that sounded more my speed. Subdue the enemy without fighting. Huh. Interesting. But what did it mean, exactly? And how would it work in this particular case?
Looking up from my hiding place, I saw that whoever it was outside the window had given up on the idea of prying it open bare-handed. He was holding some kind of implement now—a screwdriver?—and trying to draw a circle on the glass. Guy had apparently seen too many movies—or not enough of them. Did he really think he was going to punch a hole through the pane without making enough noise to wake up the household?
He or they, I mean. Whoever.
“Subdue the enemy without fighting,” I reminded myself.
Well, “If it were done when ’tis done, ’twere best it were done quickly.” That’s another one of Emily’s: Shakespeare, if memory serves. Hamlet? No, not Hamlet, that other one she likes. Macbeth.
So I crept closer to the window and filled my lungs with air and barked, three of my sharpest, and—what do you know?—the bad man dropped his screwdriver and scurried off out of sight.
Pretty darned proud of myself, I pushed through my special door and went out into the backyard and found the screwdriver and lifted my leg, and then I went back inside and padded up the stairs—giving that useless snoring bastard Mister a wide berth as usual—and I jumped up onto the bed and snuggled in beside my mistress and went back to sleep.
Josh Pachter’s short stories have been featured in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and many other periodicals and anthologies since the late 1960s, and his translations of crime fiction by Dutch and Belgian authors appear regularly in EQMM. The Tree of Life (Wildside, 2015) collects all ten of his Mahboob Chaudri stories in a single volume; Styx (Simon & Schuster, 2015) is a zombie-cop novel he wrote collaboratively with Belgian author Bavo Dhooge; and Amsterdam Noir (Akashic Books, 2018) is a collection of dark fiction he edited with Dutch crime writer René Appel. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, Laurie, and their dog, Tessa. www.joshpachter.com