Free Watch Your Back by Donald Westlake

he’d stopped, he could do his own frowning at the house. What was it Tiny was trying to figure out?

    “I’ll get out here,” Tiny said, opening the right–hand door. “Go around the block and pick me up.”

    “Okay.”

    Driving on, Judson saw Tiny just stand back there, head cocked to one side as he looked upward at the house. Upward. At what?

    By the time he’d circled the block once more, he’d worked it out. Tiny was on the other side of the street now, looking not at the house but at his watch. Fortunately, there was a fire hydrant on that side, so Judson slid in there, and as Tiny got back into the car, Judson told him, “You could boost me up.”

    Tiny finished entering the car, shutting the door, adjusting himself on the seat, and only then did he look at Judson’s right ear and say, “To what?”

    “The alarm box. That’s what you’re trying to figure out, isn’t it? How to reach the alarm box.”

    “Drive on down and make the left.”

    “Okay.”

    It wasn’t until they’d made the turn onto Madison that Tiny spoke again: “Go up to Seventy–second and take the left. Why would I wanna reach any alarm box?”

    “I don’t know, ”Judson said, stopping for the light at Sixty–ninth. He was beginning to think maybe he’d been just a bit too much of a smart–aleck. “I could be wrong.”

    “You think so?”

    “I dunno.”

    The light turned green, and as Judson drove on, Tiny said, “One time, in the can, I knew a guy, said he knew how to break out, we could use the ductwork from the main boiler. I was too big and I didn’t like the idea, but this other guy said it sounded great, he’d go first, so he went first, only he went the wrong direction.”

    “Did he get back?”

    “Some ash did.”

    Judson thoughtfully made the left on Seventy–second, and Tiny said, “We’ll go into the park.”

    “Okay.”

    “We wanted to get into a museum one time,” Tiny told him, as he drove slowly through the heavy two–way traffic of Seventy–second Street. “One of the guys said he’d go there in the afternoon, hide himself in the mummy case, come open up for us at four in the morning. We get there at four in the morning, he doesn’t show. Turns out, there’s no air in the mummy case, so first he falls asleep, then he falls dead.”

    “Gee, that’s too bad,” Judson said, and stopped at the red light at Fifth.

    “Wasted a night,” Tiny said. “I was with some people once, we were in a penthouse, the owners weren’t home. There was a power outage, that whole part of the city, this one guy said he could find the fire escape, he already counted the windows.”

    With gloomy foreboding, Judson said, “He counted the windows wrong?”

    “No, the floors.”

    Judson nodded. “Mr. Tiny,” he said, “do any of your stories have happy endings?”

    “Not so far. The light’s green.”

    So they crossed Fifth Avenue into the park, with a stream of traffic. “Stay on the transverse,” Tiny said, when the option came to angle right northward toward the boathouse. They kept westward instead, Ramsey Playfield and then Naumburg Bandshell on their left, Bethesda Terrace with its fountain on the right. “Pull over to the right.”

    “I don’t think I can,” Judson said, looking in the mirror at the traffic behind him.

    “I think you can.”

    So he did, and stopped half off the road, angry drivers de–touring around him. Swarms of people walked around the park in the August sun, many of them going up and down the broad stone steps leading down to the fountain and the lake beyond.

    Tiny rolled his window down as he said to Judson, “Honk.”

    So Judson honked, and two men who’d been loitering off to one side of the steps suddenly looked their way, then waved and walked over.

    “One in front, one in back,” Tiny told them when they arrived, and after a brief, silent, unmoving struggle of some kind out there, the cheerful, sharp–nosed one got into the front