Stanley hears scuffles and shouts as the hotrodder shoves Claudio against another boardwalk stroller, but he doesn’t turn around. Two quick consecutive right turns bring him to the Speedway, where he dashes in front of a slow-moving De Soto to the opposite side of the narrow street.
He’s behind the Bridgo parlor now, out of sight of the boardwalk. A few blocks ahead a whitewashed enclosed footbridge spans the road, linking the second stories of two battered hotels; it frames the flashing neon of Windward Avenue like a view through a peephole. Pedestrians run against each other in the boxed space—figures in silhouette, crossing and overlapping—but nobody turns Stanley’s way. He slows his step, waits for the De Soto and the line of cars behind it to pass, and turns left down the first sidestreet.
Horizon Court is truncated by T-junctions—the Speedway here, Pacific Avenue opposite—and like all the local streets it’s lit down the center by incandescent bulbs that droop from fat electric cables. Halfway along the block there’s a dark zone where a few days ago Stanley knocked out a streetlamp with a slingshot and an egg-shaped pebble of rose quartz; now he hurries to that spot—skips quicksilver on your ancient stones, he thinks—and slips through the shadowed doorway of a boarded-up storefront as soon as the coast is clear.
Once off the street, he wedges a two-by-six pinewood plank between the shop’s wrought-iron doorknob and its rough concrete floor. Then he strikes his father’s MIOJ pocket lighter, holding the flame to a candle stub mounted in a rinsed-out vienna sausage tin, and weak yellow light creeps into the corners of the room.
Stanley still can’t figure out what this place used to be. The dusty glass-topped counter and the wallmounts for absent display cabinets remind him of his great-uncles’ jewelry store in Williamsburg—he saw it once as a young kid, and again last year when he helped burglarize it—but he doesn’t think that’s what this was. In the backroom are two workbenches, finger-wide holes bored into their tops for bolting down heavy equipment, and strange objects keep turning up in dim corners: tiny screws, semicircles of wire, drifts of glittering white powder that Claudio says is ground glass, although Stanley can’t think of why he’d know that.
The mile of oceanfront between Rose Avenue and Washington Boulevard is full of abandoned buildings—outlawed bingo parlors, fly-by-night factories, the hulls of other defunct enterprises—but Stanley picked this particular storefront as a hideout because it’s small, inconspicuous, centrally located, and because its back window opens onto a parking lot. After two days of casing the place, two sleepless nights ducking beat cops and shivering on the beach, Stanley broke the streetlamp and jimmied the entrance, and he and Claudio set to work fortifying their new lair: cracking windowglass against their pillowed jackets, pushing a workbench against the back wall to ready an escape route, and knocking a hole through a gypsum panel to stash their scant possessions.
Now Stanley picks up the candle and kneels at the gap in the wall. His father’s Army fieldpack is there, tucked out of sight, and he unsnaps the canteen and gulps some water before tugging it out and opening it. He keeps everything he owns squared away and ready to go at all times—blanket, tinned food, change of clothes—in case he needs to dust out in a hurry; now he unloads enough to make space to hide the cash. He counts it, although he knows exactly what’s there: fifty-nine dollars. He and Claudio just tripled their stake on a two-hour grift, and nobody collared them. Not yet.
But Claudio ought to be here by now. Stanley has no watch, hasn’t been minding the time, but it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes for Claudio to shake the hotrodder and return to base. It’s possible that Stanley just didn’t hear his triple-knock signal to unblock the door. Possible, but unlikely.
He flattens the cash and the three playing cards between a couple of sardine cans—keeping a fiver and some singles in his pocket, just in case—and repacks the bag, pulling The Mirror Thief from his jacket and placing it at the top before buckling it again. For an instant he pauses, feeling the book’s shape through the worn canvas, reassured by its promise that all this will soon be very different. Then he shoves the pack behind the gypsumboard, and with a quick puff he kills the candleflame.
16