Act of God

store. But that’s closed and locked by five.”
    “Okay. Go on.”
    “Well now, I’ve turned off the elevator, and I’m starting my rounds here—”
    “You work from the ground floor up?”
    “What’s that?”
    “Your rounds. You work from the ground floor up?”
    “Ah, that’s right.”
    “Why?”
    “Mr. Rivkind’s idea, it was. He liked me checking everything and ending up there on the fourth floor with him and Mr. Bernstein so I could walk them to their cars and Mrs. Swindell to the subway.”
    “Did you come down the stairs then?”
    “You mean on a regular night?”
    “Yes.”
    “No. I’d turn back on the elevator, and we’d all ride down together.”
    “Why was that?”
    “Well now, Mr. Bernstein, he’s not as partial to stairs as some might be.”
    “Okay. You’re on this floor that night, doing your rounds. Where are you when the alarm goes off.”
    “Colonial.”
    “Sorry?”
    “I’m in the colonial section. Over this way.”
    Quill took me to a display of living room sets that had lots of rural prints and burled wood.
    I said, “Then what?”
    “Well, I hear the alarm and I figure it’s kids, as what happened before. So I run over to the back door.”
    “Show me.”
    Quill started running. With the knee, I walked fast behind him.
    I caught up outside another set of padded caf6 doors with an illuminated FIRE EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND above them.
    He said, “I’ve often thought the sign’s a challenge to them, but I’m told it’s another of your fine country’s laws.” Quill pushed through the cafe doors, showing a steel door with a panic bar like the one on the fourth floor. To the right was a staircase leading upward.
    “These the stairs that go to the fourth floor?”
    “And each one in between, if that matters to you.”
    “All right. What did you do when you got here?”
    “What did I do? I went through the door and into the alley, to see if I could catch the lads.”
    “You thought there was more than one?”
    “That’s what Mr. Rivkind told me when he hired me. He said, ‘These kids, now, Finian, they hide in the store and then bust out, like it’s a game with them.’ ”
    “But you didn’t actually see or hear anything before the alarm itself went off.”
    “No. If I had, I would have come running sooner, wouldn’t I?”
    “Can you show me the alley?”
    “I can.”
    Quill took out some keys, nearly as many as on Bernstein’s chain, and stuck one of them into a silver and red metal box near the top of the door. “Deactivates the alarm, now.”
    “If you didn’t do that, how quickly would the alarm sound?”
    “Matter of seconds.”
    He removed the key from the box and used his hip to Press the panic bar. The door opened onto a broad alley "ith a wooden stockade fence bordering it. To my right Were two garage doors about six feet off the ground, the 1’P of the building sticking out just below the bottom of the doors.
    “Loading bays,” said Quill.
    I looked around the alley area. Potholes that held oil-slicked rainwater, some food wrappers and smashed bottles at the margins by the fence.
    “No way for anybody to come through the bay doors?”
    “Padlocked, inside and out.”
    “Nor the front entrance.”
    “Not once I’ve turned the key in her.”
    “So this is the only other way out.”
    “It is.”
    “Show me what you did that night.”
    “Well now, I came through the door—”
    “Without bothering to deactivate the alarm.”
    “No need to. She was already sounding because somebody had gone out the door.”
    I looked at him. “Then what?”
    “Then I ran down the alley.”
    “Leaving the door open?”
    “What was that?”
    “Leaving this door open behind you?”
    “Ah, no. I let her close because I had a key in my collection here to get back in.”
    “Which way did you run?”
    “To the right.”
    “Why?”
    “Why to the right, do you mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s where the driveway is for the trucks.”
    “The delivery trucks.”
    “That’s right. I figured the lads might take the low road out rather than try to hop the fence.”
    “Did you hear them?”
    “Well, I don’t figure now it was just young vandals, John.”
    “I mean that night, did you hear anybody running in front of you?”
    “Couldn’t very well with the alarm, could I? She wails like a banshee.”
    “Even once the back door closed?”
    Quill gave me a funny look. “My ear were still ringing from the noise.”
    “When you got to