Spectacles

Donald E. Westlake Spectacles

John Dortmunder, a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness, didn’t like it when all those fluorescent lights flared into view above his head. Like an excessively starry sky, a thousand thousand fluorescent lights in great rows under the metal roof of this huge barnlike store building came flickering and buzzing on, throwing a great glare over all the goods below, and over Dortmunder, too, and yet he knew this vast Speedshop discount store in this vast blacktop shopping mall in deepest New Jersey, very near Mordor, did not open at 10 past two in the morning. That’s why he was here.

Speedshop was a great sprawling mass-production retailer stocked mostly with things that weren’t worth more than a quarter and didn’t cost more than $4, but it had a few pricier sections as well. There was a pharmacy and a liquor department and a video shop and an appliance showroom. Most important, from Dortmunder s point of view, there was a camera department, carrying everything from your basic low-price Ph D (Push here, dummy) to advanced computer driven machines that choose their own angles.

In two Speedshop tote bags, canvas, white, emblazoned in red with the Speedshop slogan (SAVE FAST AT SPEEDSHOP!), Dortmunder could fit $10,000 worth of such high-end cameras, for which he would receive, no questions asked (because the answers are already known), from a fellow in New York named Arnie Albright, $1000 in cash. Ten minutes inside the store, no more, after he’d bypassed the loading dock alarm systems, and he’d be back in the Honda Platoon he’d borrowed 40 minutes ago from an apartment complex farther up the highway, and well on his way home to the peace and quiet and safety of New York City.

But, no. As totes lull of cameras dangled from his bony hands and he loped down the silent and semidark aisles — little night-lights here and there guided him along his way — he was suddenly bathed in this ice-water deluge of harsh fluorescent glare.

OK. There must have been something, some motion sensor or extra alarm he hadn’t noticed, that had informed on him, and this big store would be filling up right this second with many police officers, plus probably private Speedshop security people, all of them armed and all of them looking, though they didn’t know it yet, for John Dortmunder Didn’t know it yet, but soon would.

What to do? First, drop these bags of cameras behind a kids’ sneaker display rack. Second, panic.

Well, what else? He’d come in from the loading docks at the back, which they surely knew, so they would come in from the back as well, but they would also come in from the front. And they would leave guards at every entrance, while the rest of them fanned out to search inexorably forward, like Boy Scouts in pursuit of a lost hiker. Any second now, groups of them would appear at the ends of aisles, visible far away. And he would be just as visible.

Hide? Where? Now here. The shelves were packed full and high. If this were a traditional department store, he could at least try to pretend to be a mannequin in the men’s clothing section, but these discount places were too cheap to have entire mannequins. They had mannequins that consisted of just enough body to drape the displayed clothing on. Pretending to be a headless and armless mannequin was a little beyond Dortmunder’s histrionic capabilities.

He looked around, hoping at least to see something soft to bang his head against while panicking, and noticed that he w as just one aisle over from the little line of specialty shops, the pharmacy and the hair salon and the video renter and the optometrist.

The optometrist.

Could this possibly be a plan that had suddenly blossomed like a cold sore in Dortmunder’s brain? Probably not, but it would have to do. As the individual all those legislators had most specifically in mind when they enacted their three-strikes-and-you’re-out life-imprisonment laws, Dortmunder felt that any plan, however loosely basted together, had to be better than surrender. His wallet tonight contained several dubious IDs, including somebody’s credit card, so for almost the first time in his life he made use of a credit card in a discount store, swiping it down the line between door and jamb leading to the optometrist’s office.

It wasn’t until after the door snicked shut again behind him that he realized there were no knobs or latches on its inside. This door could only be opened or closed or locked or unlocked from the outside.

Trapped! he thought, but then he thought, Wait a second. This just adds whaddyacallit. Verisimilitude. Unless that’s the color.