"I've been sure for nine days. I just needed the bank to agree with me."
He wrote out the receipt by hand on the carbon pad, the way he wrote every receipt. One wristwatch, steel, hand-made, W. Szabo 1979, guilloché dial, movement no. 1. Sold to N. Brandt. Paid in full, $4,800. He tore off the top copy and gave it to her and slid the yellow copy onto the spike by the register. Then he wound the watch, thirty turns of the crown, slow and even, listening with his whole hand. He set it to the regulator on the back wall, which had been right since the Carter administration, and he held out his palm.
"Give me your wrist."
"It's for my dad."
"Your dad isn't here. A watch should be warm before it goes into a box. Give me your wrist."
She held out her left arm. He buckled the strap, a plain brown calf he'd cut and stitched himself, on the last hole. It hung a little loose on her. It looked right anyway. Things you make with your hands always look right on someone who wants them.
"There," Walt said, and found to his surprise that his voice was not entirely steady. "There. Now it's alive again."
She was looking at it on her wrist, turning it toward the window so the waves moved. "Mr. Szabo, I—"
The bell over the door rang its cracked note.
* * *
The officer was in his forties, broad through the shoulders, with a neat brown mustache and the tired, pressed look of a man who had already handled two fender-benders and a shoplifter before lunch. His nameplate said DOMBROWSKI. He had a sheet of paper in one hand, folded lengthwise, and he looked once around the shop, at the clocks, at the counter, at the young woman with her arm still held out, and then his eyes went to the empty square of velvet in the window, and something in his face hardened.
"Afternoon," he said. "Which one of you's the owner?"
"I am," Walt said. "Walter Szabo. Can I help you, Officer?"
Dombrowski unfolded the paper. Walt could see from across the counter that it was a printout with a photograph on it, slightly grainy, color gone a little green the way cheap printers turn everything green.
"I'm following up on a burglary report," the officer said. "Residence in Roland Park, couple weeks back. Complainant says he lost several items of jewelry and a wristwatch. Family piece, steel, custom engraved dial, real distinctive. He's been canvassing jewelry shops and pawnshops himself, and he called us and said he saw it in your front window." He turned the printout around and laid it flat on the counter. "That look familiar to you, sir?"