Plaster crumbled and there were a few minor injuries, but the most terrible part for all of them was the distant sound of breaking glass.

“One of us should have come down–” tried Fenton.

But if he intended to say more Rudd cut him short. “That was my call and now it’s made!” he said; then more softly, to himself really: “I thought … I mean to say, I kept thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad. This late in the game … it seems so late, close to the end, I thought maybe better a few less bottles than one less guy.” Despondently, he slipped down along the wall until he was sitting in the dampness, which slowly steamed into the backside of his pants. “God, let it be blood,” he said, chuckling to himself sadly.

“What was that, Rudd?” asked Fenton gently.

“Oh it’s an old joke. A wino falls down in the alley with his last pint in his back pocket. ‘God, let it be blood’ is what he says when he feels his pocket get wet.”

“You did the right thing. I promise. Let’s take it from here, okay?” Fenton was scared, but Fenton was also a friend.

Rudd rose back to his full height. “I may have done the right thing,” he said, “but that’s hardly what was called for.”

As one the men shone their flashlights into dry-storage, played the beams across the fallen shelves and cracked and splattered walls so that it briefly became a game of beam chase beam and stopped just short of a giggle or a glance, and the beams were brightest at their centers. This was difficult, this inspection, but it had to be done because it had to be over so the new reality of their situation could begin writing its definition.

“You start on the left,” said Fenton, surprising Rudd, not unpleasantly in this time of weakness, by his initiative, “combing your light up and down along the walls. I’ll start on the right and we’ll pass in the middle for double coverage. Save the floor for last. Forget the ceiling,” he added awkwardly. Then after a pause: “If that sounds good to you.”

Rudd nodded. “Stop if you see anything, anything at all.”

So they began systematically, proceeding just as Fenton had suggested. The shelves in dry-storage were wooden, supported separately at three-foot intervals, short due to the liquid weight they were expected to bear. The shelves were stacked seven high floor to ceiling and held the various bottles three deep–had held–the bottles unpacked and kept in stock out of their cases due to Tony’s insistence long ago that breakage be done on a bottle-by-bottle basis (now that was funny) during the course of an evening. Hal was a minimalist and liked to keep the bar sparse, only two bottles of well liquor in place and a dedicated bar-back to make sure it stayed that way. Too bad: had the bottles been left in their corrugated cardboard cartons, the way they were in most places, some of them might have survived the drop. But none did. And they all dropped because no shelf, it quickly became apparent, had held; except for the bottom ones, and it was here that Rudd paused his flashlight and said, “Wait a minute!”

Fenton immediately whipped his own beam to the same spot. “What?” he demanded.

“In the back, here.” Rudd stepped forward to the shelf, but the crunch of glass under his foot stopped him cold. He turned back to Fenton. “I just thought of something. We may be able to salvage some of these little puddles held in the broken pieces.” Fenton nodded and Rudd proceeded more carefully.

He squatted down and reached gingerly behind the second-lowest shelf, which had fallen only in the front so that it hung at something close to a forty-five-degree angle to the wall, crushing the bottles on the front of the lowest shelf, but actually being borne up by some of the bottles at the rear of the lowest shelf. It was these bottles, a precious few of them, that remained unbroken. Rudd extracted a fifth of J&B scotch and held it forth to Fenton as gleefully as any schoolboy showing his mother a gold-starred piece of homework.

“Well done!” cried Fenton.

“You bet your ass!” added Rudd, and they were both momentarily reassured by the sight of a virgin fifth with an unbroken seal.

“Any more? How many?”

And as Rudd handed the bottle to his friend their eyes met over their prize. These were two boys discovering back issues of Playboy in a father’s closet, though these men had never been boys together.

Rudd probed further with his flashlight then his hand. He pulled out another J&B, held it out for Fenton to take. “Twooo,” he said thoughtfully, hopefully, now the accountant.