Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (36 page)

He walked behind the counter, and now Alexi was leaning over, reaching down to a large horizontal freezer/fridge under the register. “Here, for you,” he said, sliding the door open. “I keep these for myself, for the dead times when I know there will be no one coming through the door for hours at a time.” He reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of beer. He was in the act of handing it over to Kevin when he frowned. He pulled the bottle back. “It’s warm,” he said. He put the bottle on the counter, reached back down, and slid the door open again. He ducked his head inside the opening as though he were bobbing for a carton of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. When he came back up his face was tight with frustration. “They
just
fixed this one,” he said, putting a hand over his eyes. “I use it to store overflow.
So
expensive, these people. And they fix
nothing
.”

Kevin was silent for a minute, thinking.

“Hold on a second,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Alexi looked questioningly at him, but Kevin was already out the door. He jogged back to his building, rode up the elevator, and as soon as he was in his apartment he went straight to the bookcase.

I saw it here
, he thought.
I know I did. But I haven’t read it yet, I can tell.

After another moment he found what he was looking for, high up in the second-to-last shelf in the corner. He took it out and then walked back to the apartment entryway, where he sat down in the one wooden chair by the front table. He didn’t want to pick up any more books without meaning to.

Just this one is all I need.

He opened the front cover and started to read, not letting himself be distracted by the unfamiliar terminology. It didn’t matter how weird it seemed; surely Portuguese had been weird at first, too.

The room went gray.

Then, at once, back to color.

He checked the book on his lap, which was now opened to the last page: “Suggestions for further reading.”

No, I think that’ll do.

He put the book on the front hall table. Then he rode the elevator back down, left the building, and jogged back to Lexington. When he came into the store he was glad to see Alexi still standing there, still looking down at the broken freezer/fridge as if it had offended him.

“I wasn’t gone for too long, was I?”

Alexi looked up. He seemed puzzled by the question.

“Good,” Kevin said. He walked behind the counter and pointed. “Mind if I take a peek?”

Alexi gave him a doubtful look. “You can repair freezers?”

“I read a book on it,” Kevin said.

And yes, I can. Definitely. This just happens to be my first time, that’s all.

Alexi didn’t look convinced. “What book?”

“Hmm?” Kevin was already crouching down, trying to get a better view of the pipes on the freezer’s rear side. “Oh. It’s the GE Master Repair Manual for Major Appliances. I think. Do you mind if I slide this out a little bit? It’s cramped down here.”

“Why would anyone read such a book? Why would
you
?”

Kevin stopped trying to pull the freezer back. It was a good question, but dwelling on it fell into the same category as dwelling on why he would read a book on Portuguese. “I go through a lot of books,” he said dismissively.

Alexi was still resisting. “I need to call these guys,” he said. “They’re professionals, you can’t – ”

“Alexi,” Kevin said, cutting him off. He didn’t bother coming up from under the counter. He was already on his back, unscrewing a nut with his fingers. “I can fix this thing. I can fix it
easily
. It’ll take me ten minutes. Maybe less, if you can find me a wrench and a screwdriver. And it’ll stay fixed.”

Alexi sighed. “How much is this going to cost me?”

The phrase “go fuck yourself” did not appear in the textbook Kevin had used for learning Portuguese, but he managed to string together words that seemed to suit the purpose. “I’m just fixing a friend’s freezer,” he added. “Is that okay? You weren’t going to charge me for the beer, were you? Find me a screwdriver, my fingers aren’t made of steel.”

Alexi gave up. He stood and walked to the back of the store, and then Kevin heard the sound of a door opening
in the storage area
. Then a drawer sliding open. Then a very loud clattering as something fell.

Alexi swore.

Kevin added the phrase to his mental library, testing the sounds quietly on his tongue. The accent was difficult, that was for sure.

In a minute the storekeeper was back, and he handed down a screwdriver. And a wrench. Kevin thanked him and returned to his work. He paused, consulting a compressor diagram in his head.

No, that’s backward.
This one is the other way.
And now this pipe leads to this one and –

Kevin heard the sound of the store’s front door opening, and
now
quick steps on the hard plastic floor.

“Please,” Alexi said quickly, in English. The tone of his voice, tight and tense, made Kevin frown.

“Shut up and open it,” said a new voice, this one young and cracking. Then Kevin heard metal against metal, an urgent tapping.

T
his is
n’t
happening,
he thought.

But it was. He had never heard this sound, and yet he knew what it was.

He’s hitting the register with his gun.

“Open it!”

Then a moment of silence.

Now the gun
is
pointed at Alexi again.

Kevin took a slow, steadying breath. Not once had he ever witnessed an actual hold-up in an all-night deli; he had half-assumed Alexi was kidding earlier about the prospect of getting robbed. But he supposed there was a first time for everything. A first time for fixing freezers and a first time for Portuguese.

And a first time for this.

Had he read the right books yet?

He took another second to think.

Yes
, he thought.
I have.

That Internal Extractor Issue

Kevin stood up slowly from behind the counter. So very, very slowly. He made eye-contact with the kid as soon as possible and held it.

This was the most dangerous part of the whole thing.

He made it to a standing position without the teenager trying to shoot, and that was a
triumph
. Kevin nodded reassuringly, and he put his hands out in an everything’s-okay gesture.

The kid, a pasty-white fifteen-year-old wearing baggy shorts and a t-shirt with holes in it, took a step back. The hand holding the gun began to tremble. Everything did not seem okay to him. Everything
had
been okay a minute ago, when it had been just him and the skinny Latino guy, the guy he had seen alone in this Deli eight nights in a row, eight nights in a row with
nobody
coming into this place, and finally it had been just too tempting. He had the gun, he needed the cash, and what could go wrong? But now this other guy was here, this other guy had appeared out of
nowhere
, he had stood up from behind the counter as if he had been hiding there all night for eight straight days, hiding there just hoping for this moment, and somehow that seemed reasonable, that seemed to make sense because the guy was
huge
, big and jacked and with eyes that seemed to see everything at once, and he towered over the little Latino guy like he was his specially hired bodyguard or something. The huge guy was putting his hands out now, making this let’s-all-chill-out gesture, which the kid thought was surely the gesture a bodyguard would make right before he reached over, grabbed you by the head, and tossed you out into the street like an over-ripe melon.

“Stay the fuck
back
,” the kid yelled, shaking his gun as though he meant to throw it at them.

“Nobody’s moving,” Kevin said.

The kid kept shaking his gun, perhaps to hide the tremble in his hand.

“Where’d you get that weapon?”
Kevin asked.

“Fuck you.”

“It’s
nice
,” Kevin said, as if the teenager had told him his mother had bought it for him as a birthday present. “Browning 9X19, High-Power P35. Serious equipment. Pretty expensive, too. If you get it new, that is.”

“Shut up.”

“Right, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The old ones look nice, but they’ve got that internal extractor issue. Your model have an internal extractor?”

“What – ”

“Because the reliability of that design is questionable at best. The
external
extractor, on the other hand, really improves the whole situation. Which is why all the new ones come with that feature.”

The kid was starting to look sick to his stomach. He lowered his gun slightly. He had thought there was a 50-50 chance of getting arrested for his plan tonight; he knew that risk, he was
willing to
accept
that risk. This was far worse. The huge, bodyguard-looking guy was speaking pure gibberish, but he sounded as if he knew everything there was to know about guns. He probably owned hundreds of them, probably had one strapped to each ankle under his pants, along with the one stuck into his belt behind his back. And as soon as he got the chance, as soon as he noticed even a moment’s opportunity, he would let fly with a barrage of perfectly-aimed bullets that would not only kill
the kid
but would also carve some sort of star design into his chest. And then the huge guy would come over and stand above him while
he
bled out on the floor, and
the guy would
look down and tilt his head and say something like, “Darn it, my fourth shot was a little to the left.”

Kevin saw the look in the kid’s eye, and he didn’t give him too much time to think. “Your gun isn’t going to work,” he said to him gently. “It’s too old. It’s not reliable. You’re in trouble.”

The kid lowered his gun another inch.

“Maybe you should go home,” Kevin suggested. “Just turn around, walk away, and go home.”