A failure he may have been, but Fred wasn’t stupid. He knew they were talking about the envelope full of money tucked safely in his pocket. Carefully, he moved deeper into the crawl space badly bruising his knees on the ceiling joists, clenching his teeth in an attempt to stifle his groans of pain.
Several hours passed before the house subsided into darkness, the only sound the soft snores and heavy breathing of the man and woman below. Frantically they had searched the house for the thief. Fred had heard the mumbles of their conversation as they sat downstairs for a long time. Now, after a futile attempt at love-making they were asleep. It had been curious to Fred that they had not called the police. Perhaps the money was stolen. In any event, it was now his.
His finger scabbed over, with a ragged tear in the right thigh of his jeans and in a flurry of insulation, Fred lowered himself into the closet. The cat meowed softly as Fred crept, on hands and bruised knees into the bedroom. The cat meowed once more and jumped from the bed. Perhaps the man on the floor wanted to play. The woman in the bed moaned softly, uttering some indecipherable words before pulling the covers off the man’s naked back. The
man shivered. Fred flattened himself even further into the scatter rug. For its part, the cat jumped and began walking up Fred’s back. Without waking, the man yanked the covers back over himself.
The cat dug in its claws as Fred crawled, teeth gritted, to the bedroom door, dragging the bunched up scatter rug with him. Having fun, the cat leaped from Fred’s back to chase drifting pieces of insulation blown free by the hot air duct as Fred crawled past. Standing now, Fred made his way down the stairs as he heard the uttered curse of the man and the soft plop of a pillow hurtled at the playing cat. Not surprisingly, it did not occur to Fred that his insulation trail would have been illuminated had the man turned on his bedside lamp to deal with the rambunctious feline.
Outside at last, Fred resisted the temptation to rip open the envelope now weighing heavily in his pocket. He would wait until he reached the relative safety of his car–one block over and two down a few doors from Robie’s Easy Convenience.
The explosion, when it came, sent the roof of the car through Danielle Labarge’s and Micheline Dubuc’s living room window. Fortunately, they were asleep in the upstairs front bedroom. Only the steering wheel came through that window implanting itself a good four inches into the wall above Danielle’s head after decapitating Micheline’s favourite glass elephant en route. Strangely enough, it was the spray that woke Danielle. It had splashed liberally onto her closed eyelids, a direct result of an elephant head landing at velocity in the glass of water on her bedside table.
Two blocks up and one block over, a man switched on a light in response to a muffled explosion. Momentarily a look of worry crossed his face, quickly replaced with a smile. It would be easy enough to make another letter bomb.
Fred’s car wasn’t very valuable. It wasn’t like it was new or anything. Fred had been fortunate. He hadn’t felt a thing. The envelope bomb, while it hadn’t been designed with mercy in mind, was remarkably efficient. Given Fred’s ineptness, the police were surprised that he would set his hand to blowing open safes. After all, Fred was not his grandfather, a man who had been a safe cracker of some renown. As for Fred, perhaps he wouldn’t be a failure in the afterlife.
