Bernie Rhodenbarr - 09 - The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780060872892
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2007-07-12T12:40:27+00:00

CHAPTER

Thirteen

I woke up eight hours later, well rested, glad to be alive, with a clear head and a feeling that all was right with the world, and if you believe that I know a bunch of really nice guys who’d love to play poker with you.

Because that’s not how it happened at all. A pair of sensations woke me, one centered an inch or so behind my forehead, the other in the pit of my stomach. My head, throbbing, alerted me that to move was to risk death, while my stomach advised me that it was about to reject what I’d been unwise enough to put into it.

I stayed right where I was, eyes clenched shut, trying to will the day away. I wasn’t sure where I was, but it didn’t feel like my own bed. And I couldn’t dismiss the awful sensation that I wasn’t alone in it.

I forced my eyes open, and another pair of eyes looked back at me from only inches away. Little shoe-button eyes, and of course it was Paddington, and that brought it all back, or at least as much as I was destined to remember, the last moment of which I’ve already told you about—marching carefully across the lobby and demanding my room key. I couldn’t recall what had happened after that, but it wasn’t hard to reconstruct, for here I was in my room.

I got up and showered and shaved. My head didn’t literally split in two, nor did I get sick to my stomach. The little kit with my shaving gear, which I’d tucked into my suitcase, held aspirin as well, and a good thing. I put on clean socks and underwear—in case of a traffic accident, or a police frisk—and the shirt and slacks and jacket I’d been wearing the day before.

The shirt and pants were on hangers, I was pleased to note, and the jacket was hung over the back of the chair. That, it seemed to me, was a Very Good Sign. If I’d had it together sufficiently to hang up my clothes, then I couldn’t have been too bad, could I?

Ah, the little lies we try to tell ourselves. Memory, the thief of self-esteem, assured me I’d been in a bad way indeed. Just because I was neat didn’t mean I’d been sober.

Just for openers, telling the cabby to take me to the Paddington had not been the act of a sober man, or even a halfway sane drunk. I had to get back to the hotel, had to figure out a way to reclaim my tools and gloves before they turned up in an evidence locker, had to get my hands on Cynthia Considine’s rubies before somebody else did.

But how? The last I’d seen of the Hotel Paddington, and it of me, I’d been wearing handcuffs and a hangdog expression. If I had to return to the scene of the crime, a bit of indirection seemed called for. Illicit entry via the basement, say. A little capering across the rooftops.

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