“Look at all these guns,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
There were revolvers and automatic pistols of every size and caliber and make. Smith and Wesson, Colt, Browning, Walther, Ruger, Harrington and Richardson, Hi-Standard, Iver Johnson, you name it, you had it. There were rifles and shotguns, too—Remington, and Winchester, and Mossberg, and Marlin, and Savage, Stevens and Fox. And there were several military weapons as well, guns Michael recognized as AK-47 assault rifles and AR-15 semiautomatics. Rambo would have felt right at home at this counter. Rambo could have picked up an entire attack arsenal at this counter.
“I think we can drill out the lock with this,” Michael said.
“Is it a crime to steal stolen goods?” Connie asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Is what I thought,” she said.
He walked past her to where the filing cabinet stood against the wall. He opened the little plastic case, and was searching for a bit he hoped would tear through the metal lock on the cabinet, when Connie joined him, her hands in the pockets of the short black car coat. Michael chose his bit, fitted it into the chuck collar, tightened the collar with a chuck key, found a wall outlet near the cabinet, knelt to plug in the drill, tested it to see if he had power, and then went back to the cabinet. Connie was still standing there with her hands in her pockets. He studied the lock for a moment, and got to work.
The bit snarled into the metal.
There was a high whining sound.
Baby over there, Andrew was saying.
Where?
Over there. Crying.
Curls of metal spun out from behind the bit.
The lock disintegrated.
Michael yanked open the drawer.
They were looking in at an open shoe box containing two little plastic vials of crack.
“Must’ve used all his dope to pay for the merchandise in here,” Michael said.
“Either that, or there’s more dope someplace else.”
“Like where?”
“Like where would you keep a whole bunch of crack?”
Michael looked at the safe.
“Do you know how to do something like that?” Connie asked.
“No,” Michael said.
“I didn’t think so.”
“But I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“Would you lock a file drawer that had nothing but two vials of crack in it?”
Connie looked at him.
“Neither would I,” he said.
He knelt beside the file cabinet, lifted the shoe box, turned it upside down, and looked at it. Nothing. He ran his hands along the bottom and back of the drawer, and then moved them forward along each side of the drawer to the front of it, and then felt along the back of the front panel and—
“Here it is,” he said.
He bent over the drawer and looked into it. Scotch-taped to the back of the panel was a slip of paper. It was fastened upside down, so that the writing on it could be read easily from above.
It read:
4 L 28
3 R 73
2 L 35
Slow R Open
“You’re so smart,” Connie said. “Do you know it’s almost midnight?”
“Is it?”
“Only a minute left.”
He looked at his watch.
“Yes,” he said.
“And then Christmas will be gone. Forty seconds, actually.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what we did last night at this time?”
“I remember.”
“I think we should do it again, don’t you?” she said, and put her arms around his neck. “Make it a tradition.”
Their lips met.
And even as bells had sounded when they’d kissed last night in Crandall’s office, and even as bells had sounded when Michael left the Mazeltov All-Nite Deli, so did bells sound now. This time, however, the bells were not on a ringing telephone, and they weren’t attached to a trip mechanism on an emergency door, they were instead the bells and gongs and chimes on the multitude of stolen clocks that lined the wall opposite the windows. This was a symphony of bells. This was bells pealing out into the vastness of the warehouse, floating out over the rows and rows of stolen items, reverberating on the dust-laden air, enveloping Connie and Michael in layers and layers of shimmering sound where they stood in embrace alongside a stolen Apple II-E computer, their lips locked, bong bong went the bells, tinkle tinkle went the chimes, bing bang bong went every clock in the place, announcing the end of Christmas Day, heralding the twenty-sixth day of December, a bright new Thursday morning in a world of abundant riches, witness all the shiny new merchandise here in the late Ju Ju Rainey’s storeroom. And suddenly the bells stopped. Not all at once since the clocks weren’t in absolute synchronization, but trailing off instead, a bong clanking heavily, a chime chinging tinnily, a dissonant bing here, a reluctant tink there, and then stillness.
“It’s Boxing Day, you know,” she said.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “The day after Christmas. It’s called Boxing Day.”
“I see.”
“I know because it’s celebrated in Hong Kong, which is still a British colony.”
“Why is it called Boxing Day?”
“Because they have prizefights on that day. Throughout the entire British Empire.”
“I see,” he said.
They were still standing very close to each other. He wondered if anyone had ever made love to Connie on a counter bearing stolen Cuisinarts.
“Listen,” she said.
He remembered that she had terrific ears.
“The elevator,” she said. “Someone’s using the elevator.”
He listened.
He could hear the elevator whining up the shaft.
The baby sitting just off the trail.
Crying.
The elevator stopped.
He heard its doors opening.
Footsteps in the corridor now.
Voices just outside the metal entrance door to Ju Ju’s bargain bazaar.
When you were outnumbered, you headed for the high ground. The highest ground here was the rack holding all those expensive fur coats. He took Connie’s hand, and led her silently and swiftly across the room, moving past a table bearing a sextant, an outboard engine, an anchor, a compass, and a paddle, and then past another table upon which there were …
A key turning in the door lock.
… seven baseball bats, three gloves, a catcher’s mitt and mask, a Lacrosse stick, and a pair of running shoes …
Tumblers falling with a small, oiled click.
… and reached the end of the rack where a seal coat with a raccoon collar was hanging.
The door opened.
“Who left these lights on?” a woman said.
Michael knew that voice.
He could not see her from where he was hunched over behind what looked like a lynx jacket, but this was Alice the Pizza Maven, who was also the lady who owned the Mannlicher-Schoenauer carbine with its Kahle scope, which she’d fired from the rooftop at them earlier today—or yesterday, as it now was officially—which gun was now snug in its case in Connie’s bedroom closet, which was where Michael now wished he was. Because the next voice he heard belonged to Silvio, who had earlier thought it would be hilarious to kill Michael and leave him either in Ju Ju’s piss-stinking bed or else in a garbage can behind McDonald’s. And the voice after that was Larry’s, both men now vigorously denying that either of them had left the lights on.
“In which case,” Alice wanted to know, “how come the lights are on?”
There was a dead silence.
Michael wondered if he and Connie should have gone to hide in the bathroom.
“Check out the toilet,” Alice said. He guessed it was good they hadn’t gone to hide in the bathroom.