‘Every time I look in the mirror,’ I said.
The cast of the weapon itself was a little shorter than ours,
too. But other than that, it looked very much the same. Same
chalky section, pitted here and there with microscopic imperfections
in the plaster, but basically straight and smooth and
brutal.
‘Can I see the actual crowbar?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ Clark said. He leaned down and opened a drawer in his
desk. Left it open like a display and moved his chair to get out
of my way. I leaned forward and looked down and saw the same
curved black thing I had seen the previous morning. Same
shape, same contours, same colour, same size, same claws,
same octagonal section. Same gloss, same precision. It was
exactly identical in every way to the one we had left behind in
Fort Bird’s mortuary office.
We drove ten miles to Sperryville. I looked through Clark’s list
to find the hardware store’s address. It was right there on the
fifth line, because it was close to Green Valley. But there was no
check mark against its phone number. There was a pencilled
note instead: No answer. I guessed the owner had been busy
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with a glazier and an insurance company. I guessed Clark’s
guys would have gotten around to making a second call
eventually, but they had been overtaken by the NCIC search.
Sperryville wasn’t a big place, so we just cruised around
looking for the address. We found a bunch of stores on a short
strip and after driving it three times we found the right street
name on a green sign. It pointed us down what was basically a
narrow dead-end alley. We passed between the sides of two
clapboard structures and then the alley widened into a small
yard and we saw the hardware store facing us at the far end. It
was like a small one-storey barn, painted up to look more urban
than rural. It was a real morn-and-pop place. It had a family
name painted on an old sign. No indication that it was part of a
franchise. It was just an American small business, standing
alone, weathering the booms and busts from one generation to
the next.
But it was an excellent place for a dead-of-night burglary.
Quiet, isolated, invisible to passers-by on the main street, no
living accommodation on the second floor. In the front wall it
had a display window on the left set next to an entrance door on
the right, separated only by the width of the door frame. There
was a moon-shaped hole in the window glass, temporarily
backed by a sheet of unfinished plywood. The plywood had
been neatly trimmed to the right size. I figured the hole
had been punched through by the sole of a shoe. It was close to
the door. I figured a tall guy could put his left arm through the
hole up to the shoulder and get his hand around to the door
latch easily enough. But he would have had to reach all the way
in first and then bend his elbow slowly and deliberately, to
avoid snagging his clothes. I pictured him with his left cheek
against the cold glass, in the dark, breathing hard, groping
blindly.
We parked right in front of the store. Got out and spent a
minute looking in the window. It was full of items on display.
But whoever had put them there wasn’t about to move on to
Saks Fifth Avenue anytime soon. Not for their famous holiday
windows. Because there was no art involved. No design. No
temptation. Everything was just lined up neatly on hand-built
shelves. Everything had a price tag. The window was saying:
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This is what we’ve got. If you want it, come in and get it. But it all
looked like quality stuff. There were some strange items. I had
no idea what some of them were for. I didn’t know much about
tools. I had never really used any, except knives. But it was
clear to me that this store chose what it carried pretty carefully.
We went in. There was a mechanical bell on the door that