I climbed two flights of stairs. I loided the fire door, checked the hallway, found it empty, and did the only sensible thing I could think of. Without bothering to put on my gloves, without even taking the obvious precaution of ringing the bell, and certainly without wasting a moment on the mock burglar alarm, I whipped out my ring of picks and probes and let myself into John Charles Appling’s apartment.
CHAPTER Eight
For a moment I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. The apartment was brighter by day than it had been on my last visit. Even with the drapes drawn a certain amount of daylight filtered in, and I thought there were lights on, indicating someone’s presence. My heart stopped or raced or skipped a beat or whatever it does at such times, and then it calmed down and so did I. I put on my rubber gloves and locked the door and took a deep breath.
It felt very odd being back in the Appling place. There was once again the thrill of illicit entry, but it was diminished by the fact that I’d been here before. You can get as much pleasure the second or third or hundredth time you make love to a particular woman-you can get more, actually-but you can’t get that triumphant sense of conquest more than once, and so it is too with the seduction of locks and the breaching of thresholds. On top of that, I hadn’t broken in this time to steal anything. I was just looking for sanctuary.
And that was strange indeed. Less than twenty-four hours earlier I’d been in a state of high tension that didn’t begin to dissipate until I left this apartment. Now I’d had to break into it all over again just to feel safe.