Scott and Mick were in. They’d followed a sign around the back of the temple that said DELIVERIES IN REAR, and had found a vacant loading dock and an unlocked door. Now they were hiding behind a stack of crates in a cinder block room piled high with boxes and cans. Their eyes adjusted to the scant moonlight slicing in through high windows.
“Freemen eat a lot of Maraschino cherries,” whispered Scott.
“I imagine they throw most o’ them away,” Mick answered. “They’re just garnish.”
“How do you—?”
“This isn’t my first time here. The Freemen have a house drink they call a Pink Dragon.”
“Adults are so weird.”
“It’s people are weird. People are weirder’n anybody.”
They moved carefully through the room toward a dimly lit doorway draped with long slats of plastic, passing palettes of lemon juice, boxes of cocktail onions, crates of liquor with butler names like Hennessy and Hendrick. Maybe all the Freemen would be drunk, thought Scott. He hadn’t spent any time around drunk people and so assumed they’d be easier to deal with.
They reached the door and peered through the dirty plastic slats into a hallway. Halfway down there were two men in black, like the ones in the park, lacking only the motorcycle helmets. They were armed and wearing pink lenses and standing on either side of a big metal door. At the end of the hall was another door to who knows where. Mick pulled Scott back into the shadows.
“That’s a big freezer, that is,” Mick whispered. “Somethin’ important inside.”
“Oh my God. Erno and Emily. They’re going to eat them.”
“They’re not gonna—”
“They’re going to grind them up and make cereal out of them.”
Mick seemed to be considering this.
“Rumor has it they’ve been puttin’ pixie in the Puftees since the mid-eighties,” he admitted.
Scott gagged.
“Put it outta your head,” said Mick. “Whatever’s in that freezer, we wan’ it. We’ll deal with whatever it is once it’s ours. Just gotta get those wardens outta the way. Yeh see their pink goggles? They’re takin’ no chances.”
Scott swallowed and nodded. Then he had an idea.
He began, slowly and quietly, to move boxes and jars.
After some time Mick seemed to understand and joined in. He helped with the olive jars, then opened a bottle of vodka and started emptying it in a circle on the floor. Scott came over.
“What’s that for?” he whispered.
“For the ring o’ fire.”
“The … what?”
Mick stared back. “I assumed we were trappin’ ’em in a ring o’ fire. What were you plannin’?”
Scott pointed to different parts of the setup and sort of mimed what he expected to happen.
Mick looked it all over, then nodded. “’Kay, but if it goes south I’m lightin’ a ring o’ fire. Found some matches by the back door.”
Scott scanned the ceiling for sprinklers or smoke detectors and, seeing none, shrugged. “Ready?”
Mick nodded, and Scott crept up to the door to the hall again. Then he burst through the plastic slats.
“Oh no!” he cried theatrically. The guards turned and raised their rifles, and Scott felt a flutter of panic. What if they just shot him in the back before he could get through the slats again? But he turned and retreated anyway into the storeroom, hopped, stopped, and got out of the way. The first man emerged through the slats at a run, tripped over the box of vermouth they’d set on the floor, and fell face-first onto the vast bed of olive jars that lay there on their sides like rollers on an assembly line. He was swept forward across the face of this bed of jars and hit his head against the cinder block wall. Then Mick knocked a stack of liquor boxes on top of him for good measure.
But the second guard was not so reckless. He crouched at the slats and poked his head and weapon through, and aimed both squarely at Mick.
“Don’t move!” he shouted. “Do not move. Where’s that kid? Kid! Come out where I can see you or I shoot the midget.”
Scott emerged from behind some crates with his hands up.
“All right,” said the man. “Go stand by your friend.” He kept his gun leveled as he backed cautiously over the scattered jars and boxes toward his partner.
“He okay?” asked Scott.
“Shut up!” He crouched next to the prostrate body of the other guard and pushed liquor boxes aside.
“Mick?” whispered Scott.
Mick lit a match and tossed it, and then both guards were encircled by a wall of limpid flame. A wall that was not anywhere near as tall as Scott expected it to be.
Still, in the confusion, he and Mick darted in opposite directions: Scott behind a forklift, Mick through the slats and into the hallway. The guard waved his weapon around, let his moment pass, and turned to heave his partner up off the floor.
Mick darted back out from the hallway into the storeroom and passed by where Scott was hiding. “Lad! Have yeh seen a knife anywheres?”
“Hey!” shouted the guard. He dropped his partner to the floor, raised his gun, squinted over the flames. But Mick was quick, and already out of his line of sight.
“I saw a box cutter on top of the cherries,” Scott called back. “Mick! We could have done something cool with this forklift.”
“Too late for that!” said Mick as he rushed back again. He had the box cutter in his hand.
“HEY!” repeated the guard, who had hoisted the other man over his shoulder a second time. Once more he dumped his partner and raised his weapon, but Mick was already gone. “You two are so dead.” The liquor flames had widened and spread, but were by now burning pretty low. Eventually the guard realized there wasn’t really any fire left to save his partner from and dropped him again. “You’re lucky I almost never shoot kids,” he shouted in Scott’s direction, then stepped gingerly through the jars and olives and last licks of flame toward the hall.
There was an old beige phone with a long curly cord mounted on the wall next to the doorway. The guard took this off the hook and crouched down at Mick’s level, separating the plastic slats with the barrel of his rifle so he could peek down the corridor. “This is Jacobs at the freezer,” he said into the mouthpiece. Scott craned his neck over the forklift to see.
Then the slats clattered open and the man fell back, looked up, up some more, higher still at the massive, steaming-cold, slouching figure of Biggs. The big man was shivering, barely on his feet. Mick was doing his best to steady him, but thanks to the size difference, the elf looked more like a leg-humping dog than a viable means of support.
“Um,” said the guard. He rose quickly, falling back, and dropped the beige receiver in favor of lifting his rifle to the level of Biggs’s chest. Biggs stumbled forward, swung both arms upward like sledgehammers, and knocked the guard clean off his feet. The rifle went off with a powerful bang and chipped a divot of plaster off the ceiling. The guard collapsed in a heap, and then so did Biggs.
Scott ran to join them as Mick began slapping Biggs’s face, trying to revive him. Scott picked up the telephone receiver where it lay.
“Never mind,” he told it, and hung up.