"I know it."
"Gordie's going in there Thursday with Stu Brennock. You told me."
"I know."
"She said boys," said Stevo. "I heard her say the boys know the valve."
"I know what she said," said Lauren, and put her hand back around the key, and held it, because it was warm now, warm from Johanna's pocket and from her own hand, and it was the only warm thing in the world.
Stevo sent her home at noon. He said business was dead, which was a lie, and that he didn't want her dropping hash browns in some poor man's lap while she stood there thinking, which was the truth. He gave her his own scarf for the walk. It smelled of onions and Old Spice.
She did not go home.
She went out the back door into the alley with the key in her coat pocket and her hand closed around it, and walked down the alley to Galena Street. It was the coldest air she had ever been in. She had been born in Butte and had lived through forty below in 1968 when she was seventeen, and she had thought she knew what cold was, but this was something else, this was something with intentions. It froze the little hairs in her nose so her nostrils stuck together, and froze the water on her eyelashes. Every breath was like swallowing a nail. The snow under her boots squealed. There was no other sound at all.
The back of the Carrigan Rooms was four stories of soot-black brick with iron fire escapes zigzagging up it, and every window had been covered from inside with sheets of brown paper or cardboard, so that the building looked blind. There was a coal chute at ground level, a square iron hatch in the wall with a hinged lid, and beside it, down a short flight of concrete steps with an iron pipe railing, a door. An iron door, painted dark green a long time ago, with rivets around the edges and a big black iron lock box set into it. There was snow on the steps, but not much. There were footprints in it. Small ones, going down and coming up, over and over, packed hard.