by CJ Alexander
Brigitte wasn’t home when the bogus cable guy parked his van in front of her house at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning. He knew that she always left for work between 8 and 8:10 AM, and that day proved to be no exception.
Posing as a jogger, he’d been casing this moderately upscale neighborhood for weeks. Today would be his first hit. He’d have to lay low afterward, which was not a problem. Dozens of suburbs surrounded the city, inhabited by trusting souls with homes ripe for robbery.
The uniformed man opened the back door of the van, removed a coil of cable and a carryall full of equipment. Nobody gave him a second glance. Why would they? Everyone was getting free HBO and wifi nowadays.
He headed to the rear of the house, selected a mallet from his bag and knocked out a pane of glass. So far so good – no hidden security system. He dropped in lightly through the kitchen window and quickly cased each room.
Because she always dressed to the nines with high heels and short skirts, he first rifled through her bureau, hoping to find sexy underwear or intimate toys. Nothing interesting.
His next stop, her desk, had one locked drawer. With practiced ease he picked the lock and extracted a thick legal folder tied with elastic, and stowed that in his carryall. It looked promising – it might contain cash, bearer bonds, maybe even a valuable stamp collection. He never knew. It could be anything. After a cursory search of the rest of the house, he left through the back door, strode to the van and drove away.
When Brigitte got home that evening, she almost fainted at the sight of the broken window. She removed the pepper spray from her handbag and cautiously entered the house. Relieved to find nothing amiss, she perched on a kitchen stool, and was soon soothed by the familiar sounds of the ticking clock, the humming refrigerator. After a few minutes her adrenaline subsided, and she quietly crept down the hall to her study.
As she switched on her computer, she noticed that her locked desk drawer was ajar. “Oh my God! My letters! My letters!” She gasped, then sank to the chair…those letters, full of intimate details about erotic trysts, were from the mayor, the popular married mayor, with whom she was having an affair. If this information got out, she’d lose her job, and he… She shook with anger and panic… Why would anyone steal her letters? More importantly, who did?
Brigitte swallowed hard and dialed his secret number.
CJ Alexander is blog creator, host and editor of the Whitesboro Writers Group. She’s been writing for fun since forever, and in 2015 she finally decided to find out if her fiction had any merit in the publishing world. Eight of her stories are soon to appear in various anthologies compiled by Horrified Press of Great Britain.
