Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [99]
Corrigan looked up in surprise. "What was … ?"
"Huh?" Eileen looked vaguely around the office.
"I don't know." He frowned, trying to remember, but it had been too vague. As if clouds had parted to reveal the sun for a few moments, then closed again. But there were no clouds. It was a bright, cloudless summer day.
It was a nice house, well laid out, with bedrooms sprawling out like an arm, away from the huge central living room. Alim Nassor had always wanted a fireplace. He could imagine parties here, brothers and sisters splashing in the swimming pool, roar of conversation, smell of pot thick enough to get you high all by itself, a van delivering a great cartwheel of a pizza … Someday he would own such a house. He was robbing this one.
Harold and Hannibal were scooping silverware into a sheet. Gay was searching for the safe, in his own peculiar fashion: Stand in the middle of a room, look slowly around … then look behind paintings, or pull up rug … move to another room, stand in the middle and look around, and open closets … until he found the safe sunk in concrete beneath the rug in a hall closet. He pulled the drill out of his case and said, "Plug this in."
Alim did it. Even he followed orders when the need came. "If we don't find nothing this time, no more safes," he ordered.
Gay nodded. They'd opened four safes in four houses and found nothing. It looked like everyone in Bel Air had stashed their jewels in banks or taken them along.
Alim returned to the living room to look through the gauze curtains. It was a bright, cloudless summer day, and dead quiet, with nobody in sight. Half the families had fled to the hills, and the rest of the men were doing whatever they did to have houses like this, and anyone who stayed home must be inside watching TV to see if they'd made a mistake. It was people like this who were afraid of the comet. People like Alim, or Alim's mother with her job scrubbing floors and her ruined knees, or even the storekeeper he'd shot—people with something real to be afraid of didn't worry about no damn light in the sky.
So: The street was empty. No sweat, and the pickings were good. Fuck the jewels. There was silver, paintings, TV sets from tiny to tremendous, two or three or four to a house. Under the tarps in the truck bed they had a home computer and a big telescope—strange things, hard to fence—and a dozen typewriters. Generally they'd pick up some guns, too, but not this trip. The guns had gone with the running honkies.
"Shit! Hey, brothers—"
Alim went, fast. He and Hannibal almost jammed in the doorway. Gay had the safe open and was hauling out plastic sandwich bags. It was stuff that couldn't be stashed in no bank vault. Three bags of good golden weed; oh, Mr. White, do your neighbors know about this? Smaller amounts of heavier stuff: coke, and dark hashish, and a small bottle of what might be hash oil, but you'd be crazy to try it without seeing a label. Gay and Harold and Hannibal whooped and hollered. Gay fished around and found papers; he started to roll a joint.
"Fuck that!" Alim slapped at Gay's hands, scattering paper and weed. "You crazy? In the middle of a job and four houses to go? Give me that! All of it! You want a party, fine, we'll have a fine party when we're home free!"
They didn't like it, but they passed the bags to Alim and he stashed them in the pockets of his baggy combat jacket. He slapped their butts and they went, carrying heavy bedsheet sacks.
He hadn't gotten it all. It didn't matter. At least they wouldn't be blowing the tops of their heads off till this was over.
Alim picked up a radio and a Toast-it-Oven and followed them out. He blinked in the daylight. Gay was in the back, adjusting tarpaulins. Harold started the motor. Good. Alim stopped with the truck door open to look down the driveway.
He saw a tall tree on the lawn casting two sharp shadows.
And that smaller tree: two shadows. He looked down and saw his own two shadows, one moving. Alim looked up and saw it, a second sun dropping down the sky, dropping below the hill. He blinked; he