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man fell right out of his grip.
    Ron was breathing heavily by then, and the wind was rolling fast up the street, pushing loose snow in front of it so the lead edge of each gust looked like a wave reaching in over the cobble of a long, flat, empty beach. He still had one arm pulled back, ready to hit the man again if he even started to move. Ron looked back towards the car, and there was a happy face in the small circle that Liz had wiped clean of condensation. It was Liz’s face. She was smiling, and, Ron thought, her teeth looked sharp—sharp like a weasel or a fox. Like she could bite—like she would bite and enjoy it, too. He could see the tip of her tongue darting out at the corner of her mouth, licking her lips. Two small round circles fogged the glass in front of her nostrils and faded, then fogged again.
    There was a shovel next to the door, aluminum, painted dark red with a silver-coloured edge where the metal had worked through from scraping against the pavement. He picked the shovel up and started to hit the fallen man with it, over and over again, until the wooden handle broke and the blade of the shovel skittered off across the pavement and into the street. But Ron didn’t stop, still swinging with the shovel handle. Hitting the man again and again, the man’s skin splitting like a peach, blood breaking through. Then the shovel handle falling out of his hands as he turned and went back to the car.
    After they pulled away, Liz grabbed Ron’s right hand and pushed it between her legs, the muscles of her thighs tight. She held his hand pinned there, so that the Tercel whined high in second gear because he couldn’t shift, the back end of the car swinging wildly. If I move my hand, Ron thought, I might even be able to feel the stolen change. But he kept his hand right where it was, looking in the mirror to see if anyone else was coming out through their doors, if there was anyone running to help or to try to catch the licence plate number. Ron couldn’t remember if the light over the licence plate on the back of the Tercel was still broken. It probably was. But Ron didn’t see anyone at all.
    Behind them, the snow caught in the fallen man’s eyelashes first. It caught in his eyelashes, so gently that the flakes could have been winked away with a single flutter of his eyelids. They melted when they landed on skin. For a while.
    More snow fell, and the wind stacked the snowflakes gently against the front of the house.
    As the back end of the car swung again, Ron thought about his parents, about what they’d say when he got caught and they found out. What his mom would say. His dad.
    But his father didn’t have the right to say anything, did he?
    Tony fucking jailbird Collins wouldn’t have the right to say anything to him at all.

117
McKay Street
    TONY COLLINS
    MAY 2, 2005
    A LMOST a full year before that snowstorm, they had caught Tony with the back of his truck full of plywood. In the cab, Tony Collins kicked himself, because he knew—because he’d known all along—this was going to happen. That it was just a matter of time, a once-too-often-tried gamble, his own sort of Russian roulette.
    Ten full sheets of three-quarter-inch, good-one-side, lying flat and heavy in the back and covered up with bags of garbage, and he’d already gotten a price for them, because he was going to sell them for cash on Warbury Street to a guy who was putting up framing to fix the foundation of his house. The gatehouse was the last thing between him and the money.
    He tried to talk his way out of it at first, tried telling the guys in the gatehouse that he’d bought the plywood and just had it in the truck with him ahead of time when he’d come in for his shift, but then they shook their heads and walked around to show him where they’d marked every sheet, just a little black stripe across one corner with black Magic Marker, and then they held him at the gate,