from the novel
Chapter One - Up the Alley
A Saturday night, so some people were about. UMass students waited for the shuttle bus in front of Lizotte's. Older couples strolled out of the Pleasant Street Theater. A Brazilian film; the poster featured lots of brown skin. Gypsy Blue found a crowd in Sheehan's. He stopped for a quick draft and a look-see across Pleasant Street. It always pissed him off, this inviting himself into folks' homes without their knowing it. Sheehan's had a blues band in the basement. It sounded like a happy, rowdy crowd down there. But Gypsy Blue, at the near end of the bar on the street floor, stared through the window at the shops across Pleasant Street. Between the theater and the futon shop stood one building. The first floor had Noho Music on the left and Valley Cycle
on the right. Between them, a doorway led up a stairs to two more floors. Behind a row of
tall windows was one big room above both shops. There lived this girlie Gypsy Blue had
met, a painter. Most of all, he liked the four tall windows on the second floor -- no curtains and dark. Girlie wasn't home; it looked like no one else was home. Good. It usually made this part of his scam easier, made him less pissed off, if he did not have to face the folks. He drained his mug and gave up his place at the bar. Outside, he crossed Pleasant Street. He walked down the deserted alley along the right side of the building. Halfway along, the alley jutted left behind the building. It was about the length of an eighteen-wheeler. A loading dock for the bicycle shop. A parking space for the owner. A few scraggly trees. A rusty fire escape leading to the lofts above. No one other than Gypsy Blue was around. It was not the polite kind of rusty fire escape that came
right to the ground. On this escape, pulleys held the last section high. If during a real
fire you came barreling down it, your weight would lower the last section of rungs. Then
the pulleys would yank it back. Gypsy Blue jumped. Jumped again. It was too high for him to pull down. So he stood on a slanting cellar door. He put one foot as high as he could into a groove between two bricks. Then he grabbed a drainpipe. After a swing and the little push that he got off the bricks and then a good stretching leap, Gypsy Blue hung from the last rung. The pulley chains creaked and the rungs dropped slowly, even under the influence of his two-hundred-fifty pounds. As it had four tall windows in front, Girlie's second floor loft had four tall windows in back. The fire escape took Gypsy Blue to the second window from the right. He peered into the dark room way way down to the Pleasant Street windows. He had been inside once before, when he had sold the stuff to Girlie. Careful not to touch anything. Only ten minutes in her loft last week. One huge room. He figured, sure, she lived with some guy. From the dark, neither was at home. Gypsy Blue tugged on the window. The bottom part divided down the center. Each bottom half would swing open. First, he had to undo the latch and bolt. The latch, just a simple two-inch metal rod, had a hook at the end. He slid his Florida drivers license [ add image ] up the crack to pop the hook. That let him pull the window open more from the top, which swung free, than from the bottom, where a bolt-lock held the window tight to the frame. After noting this bolt during his visit, Gypsy Blue had brought a coat hanger folded in his boot. He unfolded it into a long straight wire ending in a hook. He pulled the window open as far as he could without breaking anything. Then he slid the hanger through the crack. He angled it down until it hooked under the bolt's little button. It took him three tries to ease up the bolt and swing open the window. It was worth three tries. They took only a minute and he did not want to hurt anything or anybody. He rolled on surgeon's gloves -- no Gypsy Blue prints. He had invited himself in simply to steal a tupperware bowl. It held four ounces of this mineral portrait painters like Girlie bought from him. Usually, they took it out of the bowl, this mineral. The hardest part of Gypsy Blue's scam was finding where the crazy artists stashed it.
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by Douglas Anderson
fter he dropped off the hitchhiker,
Gypsy Blue turned left on Massachusetts Route 9. In Northampton, it became Bridge Street.
His spool truck, a Chevy, had the circus painted yellow and blue on both cab doors.
He parked in the Job Matching parking
lot across from the Bridge Street post office. Then he walked two blocks, under the bridge
and up past Fitzwilly's to the corner of Main and Pleasant. At the northeast corner, the
Pioneer Valley Bank sign flashed:
