Snow(28)

Todd began to crawl along on his elbows, feeling the flimsy metal beneath him buckle slightly beneath his weight. It was foolish to have two people in here; their combined weight risked collapsing the structure. Then where would they be?

They continued crawling. Todd hoped to see moonlit slits spilling into the shaft from the ventilation grate on the gun shop’s side, but he could see nothing. Temporarily arrested by panic, he paused and wondered what the hell they’d do if the ductwork wasn’t connected. His heartbeat vibrated against the aluminum.

“You okay?” Kate said, very close behind him. He felt one of her hands graze his ankle. “Is it your leg?”

“Yeah,” he lied. “Just give me a sec.”

Coward, he thought, then pushed on.

He didn’t realize he’d had his eyes pressed shut until he finally opened them and saw those moon-colored slats of light issuing through the gun shop’s ventilation grate. Relief burned through him like a fever. “Up ahead,” he muttered.

“Now we’re cooking,” Kate returned, some humor in her voice.

He reached the grate and pressed his palms against it. It was identical to the one in the Pack-N-Go. The screws would only be accessible from the other side; he’d have to bang this one out of the frame to get it off, and only hoped that it wouldn’t make too much racket.

Before he did so, he pressed his nose to the slats and peered down into the gun shop.

The place looked as quiet and undisturbed as an ancient tomb. Moonlight spilled through the front windows through the twirling snow, casting a bluish-silver haze over the whole place. At that moment, he could have been convinced that he was the only living person on the planet.

“What do you see?” Kate whispered.

“Place is empty.”

“Are you…sure?”

“As sure as I can be, sitting up here in the crow’s nest.” He turned and tried to make out her features in the darkness. “You ready?”

“Let’s go.”

He fisted his hands and proceeded to bang them against the grate. It made less noise than he had anticipated, which was good, but it also felt sturdier than he’d thought, which was not good. It took a good minute to bang the grate out of shape enough for Todd to slip the blade of the knife between the grate and the drywall, and saw away chunks of the Sheetrock. The shaft quickly filled up with floating particles of drywall.

“Try not to breathe this shit in,” he told Kate.

“Just hurry up.” Her voice was muffled, as if she were speaking through the fabric of her shirt pulled over her mouth.

Finally, another two strikes against the grate, and the panel popped off the wall and clattered down to the floor below. Neither Todd nor Kate moved right away, listening to see if the noise had alerted anyone—or anything—else. But all remained silent. Todd pushed himself forward and was soon hanging upside down from the opening in the wall. Kate gripped hold of his ankles and helped ease him forward, but her strength wasn’t enough to combat his weight; she lost her grip and he went crashing to the floor.

“Shit.” Kate’s head poked out of the shaft. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He sat up, rubbing the side of his face and jaw. He’d managed to catch himself midfall, and had landed mostly on his left shoulder.

Standing, he held up his hands to assist Kate. She took his hands and he pulled her out with little difficulty, the blade of her knife scraping along the aluminum as she went. He caught her awkwardly in his arms, almost like a groom about to carry his bride across the threshold, and their eyes lingered on one another for perhaps a second longer than necessary. Then he swung her legs down to the floor as she began slapping the drywall dust from her clothes.

“Do you know anything about guns?” he asked.

“You pull the trigger and it kills someone,” she replied. The shop was cold enough so that they could see their breath.

“That’s about the bulk of it. I say we stick to simple handguns—nothing too complex. I wouldn’t know what to do with anything too fancy.”

Kate was already digging around behind a glass counter. Setting boxes of ammo into stacks, she worked quickly and diligently.

Todd went to the display wall, which was decorated with countless rifles and semiautomatic pistols. He’d fired guns before and had even kept one in the apartment for a while, particularly after the Atlantic City incident, when he thought every creak and groan of the apartment was one of Andre Kantos’s men coming to cut his throat. But anything beyond a typical six-shot revolver was a bit out of his league.

The little he knew about guns he’d learned on his own. His father hadn’t been the type of man to take him hunting, fishing, canoeing. Todd’s old man had spent much of his time carousing and getting drunk, until one spring afternoon Todd’s mother, a typically meager and browbeaten woman with a charitable heart, was struck by an uncharacteristic streak of boldness and spoke the one word that would regain her misplaced sense of self-worth and grant his father the freedom he so obviously desired: divorce. Often, Todd wondered if his old man had been a different person, if he would have turned out to be a different person, too—if things would have been different with Brianna and if he would have been able to see Justin grow up.

You’re an adult now, came a voice in the back of his head—a voice very much like Bree’s. You can’t hand over your blame to other people anymore.