The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [7]
“You think?” Ellis asked, his eyes stinging with sweat.
Mel turned around, grabbed Ellis’s right hand, and twisted it up painfully until Ellis was squinting into the glare of his own flashlight.
“What is it with you?” Mel demanded.
“Nothing. It just sounded like you weren’t too sure.”
“What the hell do you think? It’s been years since I stashed this shit. Nobody missed it then and nobody’s missed it since, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t grown feet, right? I mean, what the fuck do I know?”
Ellis carefully didn’t answer.
“You got a problem?” Mel persisted.
“No, no. It’s cool. It was no big deal. I just . . . I guess the guard threw me off, is all.”
Mel shook his head. “Damn. What a chickenshit.” He took the light from Ellis’s hand and headed off to a far corner of the immense attic, picking his way among piles of cardboard boxes, stacked crates, and assorted dust-covered debris. To give Mel some credit, there were signs of recent activity—holes drilled in the floor next to boxes of coiled computer cable and a scattering of tools.
Ellis wiped his face with his sleeve and followed as best he could, picking his way after the flashlight’s erratic halo, hoping he wouldn’t stumble over something or bang his head against the low, sloping roof trusses that periodically leaped from the gloom like swinging baseball bats. As was so common in the midst of one of Mel’s adventures, Ellis began wondering how and why he got into these messes.
Which was no mystery. It was Nancy. Had been ever since she’d joined them.
Suddenly, the light vanished altogether behind a half wall of junk. Ellis stopped to hear the sounds of something like a heavy tarp being pulled away and Mel softly exclaiming, “I’ll be damned.”
“You got it?” Ellis asked, unable to hide his surprise. Despite his anxiety, he couldn’t deny a growing curiosity about seeing whatever grail it was that had lured them this far.
“No shit, I got it. Right where I left it. These guys’re a joke, for Christ’s sake—fuckin’ military. I can see why they mess up all the time—can’t find their butts with both hands.”
Slowly, gingerly, virtually blind, Ellis eased himself around until he saw the light again, this time dancing across the surface of a dark wooden box shaped like a miniature coffin, complete with rope handles at each end.
“What is it?”
The pale orb of Mel’s face swung toward him, making Ellis instantly rue his own question. “You are such a dope. Can’t you read?”
He flashed the light across the box once more. Ellis saw a bunch of words and numbers stenciled on its surface, “M–16” most noticeable among them.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Guns?”
Mel laughed shortly. “Grab one end.”
Ellis hesitated. “Why not just take ’em out?”
“Gee,” Mel reacted caustically. “What a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that? Hand me the crowbar and we’ll get right to it.”
There was a telling pause as Ellis filled in the blanks—that there was no crowbar for good reason, that had they brought one, the noise of using it might’ve woken up the neighbors, to say nothing of alerting any watchman. Without comment, he took hold of a rope handle, weighed down once again by the proof of his own plodding thought process.
Mel couldn’t not drive it home. “That’s it, Einstein. Do what you do best. Lift.”
Clumsily, adjusting to the unbalanced load, they hung the box between them and began making their way as quietly as possible through the tangle they’d just traveled. For all the disagreements they shared, they worked well together, as they’d been doing for years, allowing for each other’s timing and gait like a couple of old dancers.
At the attic door, Mel, in the lead, paused and listened for the watchman through a two-inch crack.
“Hear anything?” Ellis whispered.
Mel looked over his shoulder. “Yeah—you.”
Ellis sighed. They went back more than ten years, from when he’d met Mel in an Albany drunk tank. There was nothing likeable about the man. He was a dismissive, belittling bully who routinely blamed his errors on others while taking