It might have taken them a little longer, but these were smart, resourceful men, and they would have found a way. The safe? This was a different matter. It was one thing to find out the security code for the whole house, but the combination to the safe hidden in the master bedroom closet? No, that would live only inside the owner’s head. Maybe in the wife’s head. Maybe in one other person’s head, a trusted confidant or the family lawyer, in case of emergency. Beyond that… well, you could go ahead and find the owner, tape him to a chair and stick a gun in his mouth, but then you’d have a whole different kind of operation. If you wanted to do this clean, then you needed a boxman to get you into that safe. A bad boxman would probably end up cutting through the wall and dragging the safe right out. A better boxman would leave it in the wall and use a drill. A great boxman… well, that’s exactly what I was hoping to demonstrate.

The problem was-and I was glad Manhattan didn’t know this-up until that point in my young life, I had never once opened a wall safe. I mean, I knew it was the same idea. It’s just a regular safe built into a wall, right? But I had learned on freestanding safes, where I could really get my body up next to them and feel what I was doing. As the Ghost had said so many times, when he was teaching me how to do this… It’s like seducing a woman. Touching her in just the right way. Knowing what was going on inside of her. How do you do that if every part of the woman except her face is hidden behind a wall?

I shook out my hands and stepped up to the dial. I tried the handle first, made sure the damned thing was actually locked. It was.

I could see the Chicago brand plate, so I dialed the two “tryout” combinations, the preset combinations that the safes are shipped with. You’d be amazed how many people never change them.

No luck on either of those. This was a conscientious safe owner who set his own combination. So now it was time to go to work.