He recalled the slat, and his mother pushing on it.

She always had a hiding place. She called them her “safes.” Protectors, safes…he supposed it was common for single mothers to think this way.

He punched the unnailed side. The slat flew up.

Below, a dark, cobwebby hidey-hole exposed itself. He reached inside.

Back in the living room, he asked the children if they might want to go out for ice cream.

With pleasure he recognized as socially unacceptable, he pictured in his mind the fear their parents would feel, coming home and finding the children gone.

Sadistic, yes, but also just plain righteous.

He had come home to an empty house. He had known fear.

“No,” said the boy regretfully. “We’re not allowed to leave the house.”

He didn’t press and said his good-byes to the children, who appeared relieved to see him go. Did they somehow understand him to be an anomaly, not an acceptable part of a typical afternoon?

They seemed like nice kids, and he would have enjoyed teaching their parents a damn good lesson. Of course, the whole idea was nuts-he would have been caught. What on earth was wrong with him?

Pulling open the front door, since the children remained inert in front of the television, he felt satisfied with his activities of the day. He didn’t want undue attention. He pictured the parents coming home, their panic. It would be enough that he had come in, looked around, taken nothing, at least, nothing they knew they had.

“Who should I say came over?” the little boy asked as Ray prepared to leave.

Ray cracked the door open long enough to say, “Clint Eastwood.”

He did not have a cowboy hat to tip, so he merely nodded and let himself out, fingering the object he had found, which was now safe in his jeans pocket, and locked the door before pulling it shut.

On his way back home, he stopped in downtown Los Angeles, waiting patiently at a hydrant until someone on the street left a spot, then whipping into it, cutting off an Acura and an Infiniti, because unlike them, he didn’t give a damn if they scratched his car. What he gave a damn about was getting the goddamned space.

He breathed a few times, locking the doors remotely, ignoring the bitter invective spewing noisily from the Acura, accompanied by a hand pounding on the car door for emphasis. Two doors down, a dusty shop quaintly spawned in the days when even radios had sex appeal held a jumble of cheap electronics.

“Can I help you?” said the clerk in a three-piece suit, as unsuited to his surroundings as an arguing attorney at the beach instead of the bench.

“I need a cassette player.”

The clerk chewed his mouth. “Hmm.” He gestured for Ray to follow, and Ray did, down past aisles of plastic parts, earphones, wires, gadgets for every conceivable purpose, and some probably inconceivable.

He showed Ray car cassette decks.

“Portable,” Ray said.

The clerk’s brow furrowed. “Man, why you want one of them old things anyway?”

“You don’t have any?”

He put up a hand. “Of course we do. Just not much call for them these days. Wait a sec.” He turned his back to Ray and disappeared through a door at the back of the store.

Ray browsed the aisles, finding himself interested in a number of things that might be useful at some point, including miniature lighting fixtures for his models. He piled a few things on the counter. By the time the clerk returned with a very old-fashioned boom box that would run on batteries, he had managed to run up quite a bill.

“You’ll need headphones.”

“I have some.”

Outside the store, the Acura had disappeared. At Ray’s old hydrant spot, another car waited to fill another empty parking space, nature abhorring a vacuum. Ray put his purchases into the trunk of his car, slammed it shut, and drove off. The other car, with only inches to spare, slipped in behind him.

Back to Topanga, speeding, braking, tailgating, cursing. It was five in the afternoon and Ray was out of control, weeping and shouting in the car, not knowing what he was even shouting.

A cold shower. Ignore the phone messages and the computer. He pulled on running shoes and went outside and ran through the hilly neighborhood like the wind.

It worked. He came back to himself.

Calm now, walking back up the drive, he thought of the innumerable anonymous tenants who had lived on Bombardier Avenue over the past decades. Someone else must have found the loose board, used the opportunity it presented.

But he had proof they had not. He had seen his mother putting that board into place. He had been watching her. He always watched her with the jealous attention of the only child. That house hadn’t been renovated in thirty years. He had established that personally. The board merged with a thousand other rickety things that developed, and never merited special attention.

He went inside, found the museum plans where he had left them by the front door, and pulled a black cassette tape out of his pocket, turning it over and over in his hands, scrutinizing it. No label. Normal bias. Sony. At the bottom he could see where the white part of the slender tape met brown. Someone had rewound the thing, but the tape was loose.

In the kitchen, he located a pencil and wound the tape tight, using exaggerated care.

He kept headphones in the entertainment unit in the great room. Not wanting to be interrupted, he went around the house locking doors and even arming the alarm. He put the headphones on, adjusted them for fit, then plugged them into the cassette player. Static, then:

“You know why I’m calling,” what sounded like his mother’s voice, reedy, younger, said.

“Did I scare you?” said a male voice.

“Yes! Yes, you scared me. I looked outside-” She paused, sounding terrified, and said, “Please don’t do this. You’re ruining our lives. I’m begging you-”

“You can fix this. I’ll never call you again. Never follow you. You know what I want.”

“Next time I’ll call the police!”

“Oh, no you won’t.”

Click.

Ray listened all the way to the end of the tape, flipped it, and listened to the other side. Static.

He listened to it again. Then he stopped and started it, writing all the words down.

T he morning presentation wowed them. After Ray and Denise offered up their goodies and Martin wheeled out the rest of the irresistible feast, the museum people stopped just short of signing the deal on the spot. Ray ignored Martin privately while putting on an attentive face. Afterward, Martin flew through the office making more noise than usual, playing up how normal everything was. The rest of their coworkers cowered and ran away when they saw him coming.

“You have a phone call,” Suzanne said to Ray when the meeting finally broke up, “on hold.”

Back in his own office, he picked up the phone. “Yes?” He spent most of the next hour coddling Achilles Antoniou, who had a million questions and doubts.

Once he hung up, consumed with the voices he had heard on the tape from the house in Norwalk, while he should have been noting changes that had been suggested during the meeting, he thought about weapons. He sketched the knife his mother kept sharp. He drew a gun going off. Now this was confidence. This was power. You could destroy somebody like Martin, who was a plague on the world, in an instant.

He drew a noose.

Twenty-eight miles from her office in Santa Monica brought Kat to the house on the eastern edge of Torrance near the 110. She noted the mileage in her book, then stepped out into the blazing afternoon. The moment she closed her car door behind her, her ears reeled from the freeway roar and she imagined filthy, invisible particles rushing on the wind, forcing their way into her lungs.