his late wife’s brother. It was secure work with medical insurance and union pay, but Miles Bivott had no taste for honest labour. He quit after seven weeks, reverting to old habits and less honest ways of earning a crust.
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas and a moderate snowfall had turned to grey slush on New York’s pavements. Patches of ice lay beneath and you’d wind up bruised if you put your shoe in the wrong place, but these were the least of PT’s problems.
It was three a.m. and PT needed a drill bit, specifically one six inches long and three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter. The thirteen year old walked close to the buildings, doing his best to be invisible. He was wrapped warm in black boots and sheepskin-lined gloves. A knitted hat came down over his ears and tied around his chin, and a scarf covered everything that was left, apart from a tiny slit through which you could see the bridge of a nose and dark brown eyes.
He looked both ways before cutting across the deserted alleyway. His only company was a flurry of snowflakes and empty metal cans thrown down by the garbage men a couple of hours earlier. Up ahead was a door and the sign above it said A&H Hardware. Being three a.m. it was closed, along with every other hardware store in Manhattan.
PT took a torch out of his heavy coat and the light showed everything he’d hoped not to find: grilles over the windows, a deadlock and two bars across the door and a burglar alarm box on the wall above it. The padlocks holding the window grilles in place were the only chink in the armour: they were the kind of locks that looked fancy, but which had nothing more than a simple lever inside.
The owner of a hardware store should have known better. After a rummage in his trousers for a metal ring fitted with various files and picks, taking the padlocks off was only a matter of insert, jiggle and twist. The window grille lifted off with a shudder and PT almost lost his footing on the ice as he lowered its weight down to the pavement.
PT knew various ways to fool alarms, but you needed to scout the location in advance and he had to be in and out fast, which left smash-and-grab as his only option. He picked up one of the empty trash cans and took a run at the glass.
Shards tumbled out of the pane above PT’s head. He’d half hoped that the alarm would be deactivated or a phoney, but it broke into song as the metal can hit the floor inside the store. If there was a cop car nearby they’d have PT nailed in seconds and he rated his chances of capture at a hundred per cent if he hung around any more than four minutes.
It was an upscale area a quarter mile from Wall Street and the financial district, so the displays mounted along the wall on sheets of drilled hardboard were fancier than you’d expect: swanky bath taps, enamel light switches and brass door plates. After flicking on the lights PT stepped behind the counter and got a nose full of hardware: sawdust, key cutting and paint.
Racks of metal shelves stretched up to the ceiling, crammed with packets and tiny boxes: screws, brackets, light bulbs, a hundred different kinds of batteries and expensive top-shelf items, fronded with years of dust. The only way to know where everything was would be to work here for a couple of decades.
‘Come on you devils,’ PT said desperately as he looked around for the drills. ‘Where the hell are you?’
He grew more desperate as he walked between the shelves. A horrible feeling, like kittens turning somersaults in his tummy and no saliva in his mouth. Something sounded like a police siren, but the alarm was so loud he thought his mind must be playing tricks.
His elbow caught on a box of wood screws. They rolled off in a thousand directions as he moved on to a stepladder and scanned the aisles from up high.
‘Jackpot!’
Right up the front where he should have already looked, PT eyed a couple of hand drills hooked on to the shelf uprights and drill bits behind. He was there in a millisecond. Small drill bits were in drawers, the longer ones came in brown card boxes, wrapped in tissue paper – but hundreds of boxes were stacked up,