“The lighter gets hot,” he whispered.
Nate said, “That’s fine. Give it a rest, Robbie. Let’s move this way. Stay together.” Like three men tied together, they moved forward in awkward, dragging steps, with Nate in the lead. At one point he bumped one of the H-frame storage racks and corrected course. They seemed to walk ten or twenty feet, then Joe sensed a wall ahead of them. Nate did, too, and paused.
“Robbie, can you light it again?” Robbie did, trying to keep his thumb back on the red clicker. Sure enough, they had reached a wall. The light wasn’t much, but Robbie managed to turn the level up all the way with the little metal wheel on the side—a favorite pastime of the two boys when lighters were left unattended—and the flame rose, dead steady in the still air.
“What do we do?” Robbie asked, his eyes huge in the dirty glow. All three could hear the man with the gun, cursing and making his way toward the storeroom door. He was almost certainly the owner, which meant that he probably knew the storeroom as well as any room in his own home.
“Move that way, toward the back,” Nate said. “I think I see a back door. If so, go through it. I’ll be right there.” They hesitated for a split second. “Go!”
As they moved down the narrow space between the H-frame and the wall, Nate disappeared back into the darkness and made a racket. Joe wouldn’t know this until later, but Nate was grabbing whatever he could find in the dark—boxes, piles of clothing, pieces of wood—and tossing them toward the storeroom door. There was an old metal desk that he managed to push in front of it. He was still snatching items and throwing them toward the doorway as Joe and Robbie reached a steel door to the outside. Then there was a heavy thudding sound at the storeroom door.
“YOO MUTHAFUCKAS!”
Another thud, then a series of crashes and curses as the man with the gun tried to pound his way in. Nate stumbled through the mess while Robbie held the outside door open for him. Nate slammed it shut and leaned against it, his chest heaving.
The night air was hot and still, but a welcome change from the stagnant interior. Above them was only the inky blackness of the sky—no sodium glow, no lights from windows. All three looked around as Robbie again clicked the lighter. They were in a small courtyard bounded by brick buildings on every side. Joe had expected that there would be an alley running right behind the building, maybe a parked car or a couple of trash cans. That’s not how midtown Manhattan was laid out, though. There was just brick and concrete around them.
“We’re trapped!” Robbie said in little more than a whimper. Nate’s eyes darted around the cramped space of the courtyard, blinking as they adjusted. To Joe, his movements seemed oddly purposeful, almost as if he had been in a situation like this before. Joe quivered. Robbie was right; it did seem like a simple, awful trap—like a pit from a Bible story where Christians were thrown to lions. Nate was reaching for a cinder block, a few of which lay strewn about the otherwise empty space.
“There’s a stairwell over there,” Nate said, hefting the cinder block with one hand and pointing to one side of the courtyard with the other. Both Joe and Robbie followed his eyes. Robbie was closest to it. “Robbie, can you see down there?” Robbie walked over to the steps.
“It’s dark,” he said, peering down.
“Take a look, please,” Nate said. “Use the lighter; just be careful. There might be a way out down there.” With that, he dragged a cinder block and placed it in front of the exterior door to the shop. Inside, the owner was still thrashing around and cursing. At the top of the stairs a few feet away from them, Robbie clicked the lighter on and stepped down into the dark. Joe saw him disappear, and then Nate whistled over to him, indicating that he should grab a cinder block. They were heavy, but Joe could heft one. He set it against the steel door as Nate had, and Nate stacked it. Then Robbie’s voice floated up from the stairwell, weak and weirdly contorted, like through a tunnel.
“Hey. Hey, what . . .”
Then a bunch of things happened at once. First, Nate was lifting a cinder block to stack it on top of another one. Then the steel door burst open like a battering ram had been used against it. Both Nate and the stacked cinder blocks went tumbling away from the door. At the same time, a flashlight beam shot outward from the doorway, spreading a garish stripe of white light.
“YOU MUTHAFUCKAS!”
Joe pictured one of the army guys on a Hogan’s Heroes rerun, the light sweeping over the camp fence but missing him. Instead, it fixed on Nate, who had landed on his butt and was shielding his eyes from it with one hand. Joe heard the clack-clack sound again, satisfying and solid. His heart froze. The stocky man with the pastel shirt stepped through the door. The flashlight was crammed between his left arm and his side. The rest of the arm steadied the shotgun. A finger on his right hand cradled the trigger. He stepped forward and fired, tripping on a piece of cinder block as the gun discharged.