The Thief Who Stole Midnight (4 page)

"Mike. Leave the damn bag alone and go get me something stronger to tie him up with." She looked over at him with a steely gaze. "And while you're at it, call the cops again. Tell them if they don't get here before eight thirty, we're going to toss this guy off the balcony. He can take his chances in the snow."

Mike sighed. Motherhood had definitely changed his sweet-natured wife. And he was starting to suspect it wasn't for the better.

After a quick trip to the bathroom to stick a Band-Aid on his forehead and wash his hands, Mike marched over to the kitchen and came back with a jump rope, an almost empty roll of duct tape, and the winter scarves they had dropped on the living room floor.

"Are you kidding me? That's all we have? Jump rope, pantyhose and our scarves?" Maddie asked.

"Unfortunately,
someone
, who shall remain nameless," Mike said, giving her a pointed look, "Cleaned out my junk drawer while she was watching a Hoarders marathon over Christmas."

Maddie narrowed her eyes at him.

He handed her what he had found and smiled encouragingly. "You'll be fine. You know how to do macrame. Just macrame him to the bedposts," Mike said.

"What about the cops?" Maddie asked. "When are they getting here?"

Mike sighed. "They're not. All circuits are still busy. I couldn't get through to anyone."

Maddie cursed in Greek. Then, as she added her bra collection to the pile of makeshift tie material, Mike turned his attention back to the bag. He had to get all of this on tape, quick. There was no way Maddie would be willing to untie the burglar and retie him, just so he could film it. Where the hell were his cameras?

Mike upended the bag and dumped the contents on the floor. On top of the mound of loot was a plastic and stainless steel cheese slicer with a broken wire. "Would you look at this?" He asked, holding the slicer up.

Maddie looked. "Isn't that our wedding gift from my Aunt Melina?"

"He's swiping crap that we would have paid him to take and then he falls asleep on the job. You know what that makes him?"

"Inept?"

"A shmendrik. And a shmuck. A hopelessly inept shmuck."

"Doesn't that mean penis?" Maddie asked.

"That's a schmeckle."

"You know you're not Jewish, right?"

"I don't need to be Jewish to have an appreciation of Yiddish." Mike sniffed.

"You know what he is to me?" Maddie asked, yanking a knot tighter as she pulled one of his wrists to the bed pole.

"What?"

"A criminal." She grunted.

Just then, Apollo -- possibly overcome with feelings of doggy guilt for leaving his owners alone with the bad guy -- slowly slunk back in, saw the progress Maddie had made tying up the snoozing burglar, and barked at him. Then he sat down and looked up at Mike and Maddie for approval, wagging his stumpy little tail.

"Big, scary Doberman." Maddie said. "Nice try, but you're too late." Maddie knotted one of Mike's ties on top of her pantyhose restraints. "Why don't you have more ties?" she asked. "Guys always wear ties."

"Ties are the yoke of evil corporate oppression," said Mike. "They're like a cross between a neck girdle and a noose. Why would I want a whole collection of them?"

Maddie sighed.

Apollo whimpered and lay down.

"Would you look at this? I think this is an old black and white TV set," Mike said, lifting a tiny portable set from the bag. "I didn't think they made those anymore." Underneath the TV was a DVD. He picked it up. "
Yoga for the Sedentary Retiree
. These definitely aren't ours."

"They are now," Maddie said, tossing the DVD in a drawer and putting the TV on top of the dresser.

"I hate to say this, but you can be vindictive." Mike said.

Maddie frowned at him.

"Sorry, honey, but you know it's true." Mike said.

Before she could respond, the burglar gave out a huge, oxygen-deprived snore, startling Maddie, who screamed and fell into Mike.

By some instinct, he was already on the move, pushing her back up on her feet before she toppled all the way over and crushed the loot on the floor. Or him, for that matter. He was no match for the heft she was carrying. Not that he ever said anything about it. The last thing he wanted was to tell a recently pregnant woman that he thought her pregnancy weight was turning to fat. It wasn't a good place to be. Especially when she was carrying enough to hurt him.

And really, you'd think after expelling nine pounds of baby and however many pounds of placenta, she would have just magically woken up back at her normal weight afterwards. But Maddie weighed exactly the same coming home from the hospital as she had before she went into labor. Fat or thin though, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on.

He grunted as he pushed her upright. "Sorry," he said, giving her his most charming smile, making sure he hit the full-on dimple mode.

Maddie gave him the stink eye, but let it go. "I'm surprised he didn't steal my Uncle Evangeli's APAP machine instead of our cheese slicer," she said, returning to her task.

"It's on the top shelf, all the way in the back. He probably didn't see it. He's kind of on the short side." Mike said.

The APAP machine was like a CPAP, but it was automated to keep a constant pressure in the flow of air coming in through the facemask. After Maddie's Uncle Evangeli lost two hundred pounds, he didn't need it anymore, but he was too scared to let go of it, "just in case."

So, when he moved into a tiny trailer home and had to get rid of all of his stuff, he gave it to Maddie, saying she used to snore as a child. And then he made her promise not to get rid of it. So Mike put it in the hall closet and they pretty much forgot about it.

Since Maddie was still in the process of tying the guy up and it was clear that nothing was going to wake the burglar, Mike went back to digging through the loot.

"A-ha! I found it!" There it was. His precious, shiny, new handycam and tripod.

He carefully set them up so that the camera was pointing at the burglar. Then he turned the camera on, hit record, and scooted around in front of the lens.

"When we came home tonight, this is what we found, stretched out across our bed. Not as welcome as a naked Playboy bunny -- "

"Hey!" Maddie interjected from the bed, as she tied the burglar's ankle to a bedpost.

"Sorry, honey." Mike said, then continued his camera narration. "But a surprise, nonetheless. I present to you... Snooz-O, the sleeping bandit."

Mike did a Vanna White arm move and then stepped out of the camera frame, revealing the burglar, as Maddie continued tying knots, spread-eagling the guy on their four-poster bed.

Off-camera, Mike tossed in a smattering of applause. Then he suddenly got a pornographic image of Maddie spread-eagled on the bed. He shook his head to clear it. As much as he would have been all over having sex with Maddie the minute she finished tying the guy up, he didn't think she'd be up for it with a burglar in the house.

Mike stepped back in front of the camera. "Join us, on this New Year's Eve odyssey as we present to you... The Plight of the Bumbling Burglar."

He turned back to Maddie. "What do you think? Instead of Flight of the Bumblebee, it's Plight of the Bumbling Burglar. Catchy, huh?"

She shrugged. "It's New Year's. If we can't get through to the cops soon, he's going to be the thief who stole midnight."

Mike gasped and clutched at his heart. "That's it! I love it. I love you. You're brilliant."

He swept Maddie in his arms and planted a kiss on her. He was ready to take it further, until she wriggled away and pointed at the burglar.

"So? He's asleep." Mike said. "And I can edit us out of the tape, if that's what you're worried about."

But she definitely wasn't in the mood.

So Mike went back to taping, while Maddie tested out the knots, to make sure they wouldn't slip.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Mike walked out into the living room, Maddie was sitting next to the phone, dialing 9-1-1, with a small, cast-iron frying pan on the floor next to her.

"What's that for?" he asked.

"In case he wakes up," she answered. Then she gave the phone an odd look.

She hung up, then picked the phone up again and listened.

Then she hung up again.

Then she picked the phone back up and listened.

Then she looked at Mike. "Why isn't there a dial tone? It was working earlier. Do you think it broke when I dropped the receiver? When you called the cops, did you use this one? Or the one in the kitchen?"

"Kitchen," Mike said in a small voice and swallowed. He was starting to get a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Maddie must have sensed it, because she narrowed her eyes and gave him a suspicious look. "What's going on? You paid the bill, didn't you?"

Mike gave her one of his full Monty smiles, but it didn't play.

"Mike, it's a simple
yes
or
no
question. Did you pay the bill?"

Finally, Mike sighed. "It didn't make sense to pay two phone bills. Our cell phones work fine."

"So you didn't pay it?!" she screamed.

"No, I paid it. I just... I told them to cancel our account," Mike winced. "I didn't realize they were going to be doing it tonight," he said. "I mean, really. Who works on New Year's Eve?"

She gave a strangled scream and let fly a string of what Mike was pretty sure were Greek curse words, although some of them sounded Russian. "It's all automated," she explained, once she calmed down. "They don't need to turn it off manually. They can just program their computers to cut it off."

"It's not my fault!" Mike protested. "How was I supposed to know we'd need a landline? We only get spam calls, wrong numbers and political messages on the house phone."

"And my parents," Maddie said.

"They can learn to call your cell."

"We have a baby," Maddie spat. "We need as many phones as we can get. You get the landline turned back on again now!"

Mike ducked back into the bedroom, before she could throw the phone at his head, and quickly dug through the loot until he found their cell phone chargers.

"Mike! I'm not kidding!" Maddie yelled from the living room.

A few minutes later, Mike came out of the bedroom, holding the chargers up in front of him. "Problem solved. Big, strong hunter return with cell phone chargers," he said. "We'll have phones again in no time."

Maddie still didn't look happy.

He plugged in their cell phones and the happy little green charging battery came on immediately.

"See?" Mike said. "Everything's fine. The burglar's napping, we are en-phoned, and I have a feeling my little video's totally going to be a YouTube hit. Can you imagine, if it goes viral?" Mike said, trying to distract her from the phone situation. "We could get sponsors. We could spin off a web series. We'd be rich. Sophie could go to that ritzy Gold Coast preschool." Mike started doing the math in his head. "If we got ten cents a click, how many clicks would it take to pay the rent...?"

Maddie rolled her eyes.

Suddenly, a horrible thought struck him. "The release. I need a release," Mike grimaced. "Think I should wake him? Have him sign a release?"

"Personally, I'm leaning towards beating him to death," Maddie said, as she cleaned up the mess in the living room.

Mike raised his eyebrow. "I have to say, motherhood's made you very aggressive. It's kind of sexy. In a BDSM kind of way."

She snorted, but at least her anger had abated.

"Hey, do you still have your Halloween costume?" Mike asked, as he helped her clean. "We could set up a whole scenario. Pirate wench beats burglar with stolen cheese slicer. I can hear the YouTube hits racking up."

Maddie sighed. "Mike, the man's a criminal. He was stealing our stuff. He's not some actor you hired for a short. Besides, my parents are going to be here any minute, with our child. So screw your head back to normal and stop thinking of this as a movie set. How long does your phone need to charge before I can use it?"

"You can use it now," Mike said. "Just don't unplug it. Hey, I have an idea. Let's call your parents and tell them the party's been cancelled."

Maddie looked like she was thinking about it. "For what reason?"

"We've got a burglar hog-tied in our bedroom?"

"Are you kidding me? We mention anything about a criminal, my parents will abduct us in our sleep and move us to the suburbs."

"A freak earthquake hit and our place has been trashed? Oh, better yet, a pipe burst in the kitchen and the condo's flooded."

Maddie shook her head. "My mom would come over to help us clean."

"Okay. How about we've come down with a 24-hour flu bug and they can keep Sophie until we're better."

Maddie thought about it, then regretfully shook her head. "My mom gets a flu shot every year. The flu doesn't scare her. She'd be here making us Greek
avgolemono
soup."

Mike sighed. "Have I ever told you that having a tight-knit family is a pain in the keister? You don't see my family breathing down our necks like this."

Maddie shrugged. "At least we know my family cares," she said, pointedly. Then she picked up his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1.

From across the room, Mike could hear the recorded "circuits are full" message.

Maddie screamed in frustration. "It should be illegal for 9-1-1 to be busy. I bet it's the cell phone. I bet if we were on a landline, the call would go through."

"We didn't get through on the landline before," Mike pointed out.

Maddie looked like she was about to cry.

"Honey, relax. It's going to be okay. It's not like he got away with anything. He's still here, completely unconscious and trussed up like a Frederick's of Hollywood turkey. Maybe it's a good thing we can't reach the cops. They'd probably arrest
us
."

"What are we supposed to do with him, Mike?" Maddie said, pacing back and forth. "It's not like we can lock him in the dog crate and keep him as a pet."