Chapter Four on the Floor

Friday, June Tenth, 1:30 a.m.

One of the challenges Alex had with his job as a repo man was getting past feeling like he was stealing something.  After all, he job was to recover things for their rightful owners.  None the less, sneaking around and grabbing things when no one was looking felt very much like it had to be illegal.

Which was part of the thrill, of course.  Feeling like he was getting away with something gave him a huge adrenaline rush, every single time.

And getting chased by folks who had just gotten something repossessed from them was usually a thrill too.

At the moment, Alex was walking up the driveway leading to Trader Zim’s.  He wasn’t sure if Zim actually lived in the shop or not.  If so, driving right up to the shop might tip Zim off.  And at any rate, speeding away from there at two in the morning in a bright red Mustang might be a bit less than discrete.  Instead, he’d borrowed a non-descript car from Darcy Custom Brokers, and left the Mustang there.

He’d parked the loaner car a few blocks away, and walked from there.

There weren’t any lights along his path, and the shadows of the odd yard decorations along the driveway seemed alien and ominous in the moonlight.

There didn’t appear to be any lights on inside the house that was home to Trader Zim’s shop.  That was a relief.

Alex could feel his heart pounding, and the crunching sound of every step he took seemed deafeningly loud.

When he got up to the entrance to the shop, he saw the sign on the door, which said, “Obviously Closed.  Come back later.”

“I’d rather not come back a fourth time, thanks,” Alex muttered to himself, and suppressed a giggle.

He hadn’t noticed any signs warning him of a security system, but he figured it would be best to get in and out of there as quickly as possible all the same.  But first, he was going to have to get in.

Without much hope that it would open, Alex grabbed the door knob and tried it.  His heart skipped a beat as the knob turned easily.  However, when he tried to push the door open it wouldn’t budge more than a fraction of an inch.  Deadbolt.

Alex sighed, and wondered if there was another easy way in.  He looked at the sides of the building to see if there were any windows that looked like he might be able to open them without having to actually break anything.  None of them seemed likely, however, so he walked around the back of the house, hoping there might be another door.

He just about jumped out of his skin when a cat hissed at him, and then ran past to take shelter under a pile of old tires.

“Easy, kitty, easy,” Alex said.

There was, in fact, a back entrance to the shop.  Alex approached it, heart still pounding from the scare the cat had given him.  He wondered what might be on the other side of the door if he was able to get it open.  Would a pile of jagged rusty metal collapse on to him?

Really, though, the only way to find out was to try it.  Alex grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open easily.  He was pleased to discover that the door had not, in fact, been a structural support for Trader Zim’s collection of antique anvils and wrecking balls.  Before thinking about it too much, Alex quickly stepped inside, and closed the door again behind him.

He stopped for a second, hoping his eyes would adjust to the dark.  There was, so far as he could tell, no light in that room, and after a moment he found himself hoping that he hadn’t just broken in to Trader Zim’s storage closet. 

Alex really didn’t want to turn on a flashlight and potentially give himself away, but there didn’t seem to be much hope that his eyes were going to adjust to the dark, and he knew the shop was so cluttered that he’d need to be able to see in order to get out of there without causing himself any major injuries.

He had a small flashlight in his pocket, which he took out then, and switched on.  It cast a small circle of light on the wall directly ahead of him.  He was glad he had stopped where he did.  If he’d gone much further, he would have actually tripped over an anvil and could have fallen on to a pile of rusty metal.

Scanning the room with the flashlight, Alex spotted a door that appeared to open into a hallway.  He walked that way, and before long found himself in a room he, roughly, recognized.  Hanging on the wall, there was a wooden model of an old tall ship that was possibly the ugliest thing he’d seen in the shop.  He’d noticed the first time he’d been in and it was, in fact, probably one of the only things in Trader Zim’s that he would be able to recognize.

Alex was torn between his desire to hurry through the shop, grab the statue, and get the hell out of there, and his desire to not injure himself or make his presence known by causing a big racket.  He still had no idea if Trader Zim himself was in there with him or not, so he decided that discretion would be the better part of valor.

He tip toed his way through the shop, slowly and carefully working his way back to the room where the statue was.  Every step seemed to require a careful calculation to avoid knocking over one pile of things, all while keeping his balance and not stumbling straight into a different pile of stuff.  Alex wondered if there was some kind of class he could take to help him get lighter on his feet.  It seemed like it might be a good career move to find out.

After what felt like an eternity, Alex reached the room that the statue was in.  The statue itself was still right where he had seen it last.  It had occurred to Alex that if Trader Zim actually had a reason he wasn’t willing to sell it, that he might have moved it somewhere for safe keeping.  So, finding it right where it had been earlier was a relief.

Alex carefully made his way over and through everything in the way between him and the statue.  He grabbed on to it with both hands and tried lifting it.

It was significantly heavier than he was expecting it to be, and it promptly fell out of his grasp and thumped loudly back down on the table it had been displayed on.

“Shit”, Alex whispered to himself.  His heart had leapt up into his throat and was doing its best to teach Alex what swallowing an angry frog is actually like.

Making things worse was that there was a pair of thumps in response to the one he’d just caused, from elsewhere in the building.  And then he heard footsteps.

A light came on somewhere down the hall from him, and Alex heard Trader Zim shout, “Is somebody in here?”

Alex froze, hoping that if he managed to keep from making any noise for the next several minutes that Trader Zim would decide that something had just fallen of its own accord (it had to happen all the time in there, Alex thought).

That strategy might have worked too.  Alex’s felt ice spread from the center of his chest, across his shoulders, and down his arms, as the table the statue was on groaned, creaked, made several snapping noises, and then collapsed to the floor, making an awful racket.

“Who the fuck is in here?” Zim yelled.  Alex was fairly sure the next sound he heard was the slide of a pump action shotgun being racked.  “Y’all better scram, or I’m going to give you a few new breathing holes!”

That was all the warning Alex needed.  He scooped up the statue, which suddenly seemed almost impossibly light, hugged it to himself, and made a break for it.  He ran wildly through the shop, knocking over everything in his path, which caused many other things to fall over, and so on, like noisy, rusty, smelly, old dominoes.

This is bad, this is bad, this is bad, Alex thought as he hustled, knocking over more junk, trying to get back to the main entrance and out of there before he found out if Zim meant what he’d said.

Somewhere behind him, he heard Zim holler, “You son of a bitch!  You’re making a mess of all my merchandise!”

Alex reached the door, and was glad to see that the lock was an ordinary deadbolt.  The statue was starting to get really heavy again, but Alex managed to hang on to it with one hand and work the lock and the doorknob with the other hand.  He yanked the door open, darted through, slammed it shut again behind him, and hobbled as quickly as he could manage down the driveway.

The statue felt as though it was getting heavier by the second, and Alex had a sneaking suspicion that he may have pulled a couple of muscles from yanking it up off the floor in his adrenaline fueled rush.

He could head more crashing and indiscriminate shouting coming from inside Trader Zim’s.

By the time Alex reached the street, he was hobbling along, and got a serious case of the giggles imagining how he must look, limping quickly along the road, carrying a stone tiki wearing a fez, in the wee hours of the morning.

He really hoped no police officers would happen by.  Something told him the conversation might not work out too well if he said, “Good evening officers.  Don’t mind me, just taking my tiki man for a walk.”

Just as he was starting to wonder why he’d parked so far away, Alex reached the car he’d borrowed for that night’s errand.  He had a much harder time holding the statue with only one arm this time, as he unlocked and opened the trunk. 

With a heavy sigh of relief, Alex put the statue in the trunk, and wrapped a blanket around it as well as he could manage to keep it from getting damaged while he drove.

Once he was back in the driver’s seat, he took a deep breath, and thought, Calmly.  Drive away calmly.  Nothing to see here, just a late night traveler on his way home.

Alex started the car, put it in gear, and pulled away at what felt like an excruciatingly slow speed.  He felt better once he was back on the freeway and heading back to Minneapolis. 

Now he just needed to get this statue to Mr. Darcy, and see what other projects Mr. Darcy might have in store for him.