Of course something must have been happening somewhere in the city, but outside of Tony’s, at least for now, it was quiet. Perhaps the distant rumble of a self-serve gas station in flames, its mini-mart long since looted, responding firemen, if any, coming under sporadic fire, kid stuff, perhaps these sounds would reach the ears of someone standing outside of Tony’s at that moment. But at that moment no one was.

Dry-storage was a place in which each of the men had spent some time alone, some more than others. The busboy and maybe Jill would have spent time alone there too, but one hardly thought about that as it would have constituted more of a professional obligation than the more spiritual endeavors of the others. Rudd was the last man to be down here alone or so he thought, and what he saw was enough for him to make sure no one ever came down here alone again. But then why would they.

There was a little light down here, but there was also quite a lot to see. Rudd took two flashlights from the first shelf to his left, where they’d always been kept, even before they were needed. He turned to hand one to Fenton only to find him waiting at the foot of the stairs a few steps back.

“What?” Rudd demanded.

“I’m afraid to look. I can smell it from out here; I can’t believe we don’t smell it upstairs.”

“Jesus, Fenton, you are a lightweight. You may recall that our senses may not be operating at peak efficiency. When’s the last time you smelled a vodka martini without holding it under your nose? Where you been for the last two weeks?”

“Sixteen days, and pretty close to you is where I’ve been.”

Rudd clicked on his flashlight and turned it on Fenton’s face. Fenton glared back, his eyes, Rudd noticed for the first time, as bloodshot as everybody else’s.

He turned around the flashlight into his own bloodshot eyes, like a kid playing monster under the sheets. “I know. I’ll never forget that. The rest of us, well, we were pretty much stuck with this. But you could’ve gone another route. We all appreciate how you stood by us.”

“Standing. I’m standing by you. And it’s mostly you, Rudd. Those other guys aren’t anything to me. I’d never even met Miles and Osmond until that first day.”

Rudd retraced the few steps to where Fenton stood, handed him the lit flashlight while turning on the one in his other hand. “Give me some moral support here,” he said, leading with an arm around Fenton’s shoulders, and the two men cast their beams into the once dry storage.

The floor was mostly damp, the bulk of the fluid long gone down the drain that lay in a depressed area in the center of the room. That was perhaps the biggest tragedy, that no one had thought to block that drain, and for an insane moment Rudd wondered if there wouldn’t be a way to still chase the liquor lost down it, a siphon, the first few inches. Crazy. Some small accumulation remained in the form of stray ounces left in the irregular shapes inevitable among so much broken glass. But really, the room was a total loss, almost as if it had been deliberately wrecked bottle by bottle. Yet no one from the outside could have been in here, and no one from the inside could have done this. That was a literal fact: no one inside could have done this. Rudd was certain of that, and Rudd was a realist; they all were, men like them everywhere.

No, dry-storage was ruined by the shock absorbed during the previous night’s bombings. They all suspected it would be bad, but the shock of the bombings-almost military in their intensity yet obviously nothing more than a highly crafted street offensive-shook the building and likely many buildings for close to a half hour.