Now what?
His next money-saving idea concerned his teenaged nephew’s full-faced werewolf mask acquired for Halloween. One of them rubber things you pulled down over your head and peered out of the eye slits to see where you were going.
It seemed the mask had been conveniently stashed here in the bedroom closet of Yarnell’s apartment. The nephew’s idea being that his parents wouldn’t wonder where their wayward son had suddenly obtained enough money, on the small allowance they gave him, for him to be able to buy what they considered as totally unnecessary when a cheaper mask would do. After all, as the parents had lectured their son, Halloween was only one night out of a whole year, so why waste your money when people would freely give you candy anyway? Thus when his distraught nephew showed up at the apartment requesting a personal favor, Yarnell remembered his own hard life as a kid and agreed to hide the purloined thing for a few days until needed.
Yarnell now dug the floppy rubber face out from the shoe boxes on the closet floor and tried it on. He adjusted the eyeholes and looked in the mirror. Oh yeah, this was obviously a mask for the occasion. He wouldn’t need to carry his usual gun on the job because this monstrosity would scare the bejesus out of anyone. And, for that very same reason, he rationalized that his nephew shouldn’t be wearing the thing out trick-or-treating on the neighborhood streets anyway. Just a glimpse of this gruesome face was enough to give some old lady a heart seizure right there in her own doorway while handing out candy. Yes sir, he told himself, by taking possession of the mask, he was saving some old lady’s life and keeping his nephew from acquiring a charge of woman slaughter on his juvenile rap sheet. Yarnell jammed the mask into his burglar bag.
If his young nephew wished to argue the point later, Yarnell could always explain that possession was nine-tenths of the law. Besides, his nephew’s head was probably small enough to get the pantyhose concept to work if he really needed to disguise his face in order to rake in copious quantities of candy.
The burglary was now a go.
Late the next evening, Yarnell found himself stepping off the bottom rung of a storm sewer ladder onto dry cement beneath the alley that was located behind the designated jewelry store. He immediately froze.
Beaumont, coming second down the same ladder, missed his next rung down and stepped on Yarnell’s shoulder.
“Ow.”
“Well, get out of the way. I nearly dropped my bag of tools on your head.”
“It’s dark down here.”
“Then turn on the miner’s lamp I gave you in the van.”
Yarnell reached up to the vicinity of his forehead and flipped a switch. A small beam of pale yellow light projected onto the nearest cement wall. He immediately felt a little more relaxed about his surroundings, but then his right ear tuned in. “Wait a minute, I thought I heard something.”
Beaumont climbed down the rest of the ladder until his rubber-soled boots touched the cement floor. The white beam from his lamp flickered on and stretched into the darkness of the cylindrical-shaped tunnel. “Probably just a rat or two.”
“Rats?”
Yarnell scrunched back against the wall to make room for Beaumont to pass him in the narrow enclosure.
“C’mon, this way,” said Beaumont, inclining his head forward. Three steps in, he stopped and turned around. “Better hand me the tape measure.”
Yarnell felt around in his pockets. “You didn’t give it to me. It must still be up in the van. Want me to go get it?” He found his feet independently inching toward the ladder.
Beaumont hesitated and glanced at his wristwatch.
“Never mind, I’ll just step it off. Two of my paces comes out to be about five feet in length.”
He turned back into the tunnel.
“Five, ten, fifteen, twenty...”
At the count of ninety-five, Beaumont stopped, took a can of red spray paint out of his nylon burglar bag, and sprayed a large “X” on the left hand wall.
“Start here.”
Yarnell dropped his own burglar bag onto the rounded floor and took the proffered pickax. His backswing immediately hit the opposite cement wall. His forward swing, having lost all momentum, barely chipped the large red “X.”
“This isn’t gonna work.”
Hand on chin, Beaumont studied the width of the tunnel.
“You may be right. Let’s try our backup set of tools.”
With a large battery operated drill, several charged-up batteries for the drill, and a long cement bit, Beaumont sank four holes through the rounded wall, then handed Yarnell a small sledgehammer and stone chisel.
“Okay, your turn, connect the dots and we’ll get this project rolling.”
With sweat soon dripping off his nose and forehead, Yarnell chiseled his way in relatively straight lines between three of the drilled holes. “It’s a good thing this is old cement and crumbles easy or we’d be here all night.” He handed the hammer and chisel back to Beaumont. “I’m tired, you’ll have to finish.”
As Beaumont banged away with the sledgehammer, Yarnell plopped down on his burglar bag for a rest. He alternated between checking out Beaumont’s progress with the cement and trying to keep a watch on both ends of the tunnel, at least as far as he could see. Lately, he’d noticed that his light beam didn’t penetrate the darkness as far as it used to. The batteries must be going. Leave it to Beaumont to forget to put fresh batteries in his, Yarnell’s, lamp for a new job.
One last time, Yarnell swung his head away from the ladder they’d used to come down into the sewer and turned his gaze back toward the far end of the tunnel. Hold it. Now there seemed to be four red shiny dots at the edge of the darkness, or more correctly two pairs of red glow-in-the-dark orbs. Strange, he hadn’t noticed them before.
Then two of the dots moved.
Yarnell leaped off his burglar bag and pointed.
“Beaumont, we’ve got company.”
Beaumont swung his miner’s lamp toward the red orbs. His stronger beam of white light showed two large rats hunkered down on the tunnel floor.
“I told you there were rats down here.”
“Gimme that hammer,” muttered Yarnell. He also grabbed for the chisel in Beaumont’s other hand. “This is like being in a grave, and them guys look hungry.”
With renewed fervor, Yarnell quickly removed enough cement to make a hole for a large man to crawl through. Beaumont then handed him a shovel to remove dirt. Six feet in and still laboring under the urgency of leaving the sewer behind him, Yarnell hit a brick wall.
“That’s gotta be the jewelry store’s basement,” exclaimed Beaumont. He then passed the sledgehammer and chisel in to Yarnell. “Hurry up, we’re behind schedule and I want to get out of here before the sun comes up.”
Yarnell was set to complain about doing most of the hard work so far, but the sound of a rat squeaking out in the tunnel changed his mind. Three blows from the sledgehammer and the old mortar between the bricks disintegrated into dust. Yarnell pushed his way through into the basement. Loose bricks tumbled out of the wall opening and clattered to the floor around him.
“Are we in?”
“I’m in.”
“What’s it look like?”
Yarnell rotated his head, playing the weak yellow light from his miner’s lamp over the walls. He seemed to be in the back corner of a room.
“Looks like a basement.”
“I mean, what do you see?”
Yarnell stood up and dusted himself off.