The hopper was empty. It sat there tilted back, clean, a dull steel tray with a scratch across the middle. The bag had gone off the back of it, then. It had gone down. But it had not gone far.
He took his phone out of his back pocket and thumbed on the flashlight and leaned in and shone it over the back edge of the hopper, into the slot where the bag had disappeared.
The slot was about two inches wide. Below it the chute fell away into darkness, a steel throat descending into the wall. But it did not descend far. Perhaps eight inches down, maybe ten, the light hit something that shone back at him, a flat bright sheen of brushed steel lying across the chute where nothing should have been, and resting on it, on that shining shelf, were two deposit bags. His own, on top, clear plastic, the white strip, the corner of his slip showing. And under his, half-hidden, a blue one. A zippered vinyl bank bag, royal blue, the old-fashioned kind with a little brass lock on the zipper pull, and on its side, in white paint-pen letters, partly covered by his own bag, he could make out COPPERL.
For a second he simply did not understand what he was looking at. His mind went to the kitchen, the way it did when it needed something to hold onto. The shining thing was a shelf, and he knew that shelf, he knew it with his hands before he knew it with his head, the slightly rounded corner, the brushed finish, the stamped lip. He had pulled ten thousand of them out of steam tables and lowboys and walk-ins. But he did not have time to think about what it was or why it was there. He thought only: that is Dorrit's money, and it did not go into the vault, and anybody with a key can open this door and reach in and take it.
He did not think about the blue bag. He thought only about his own. He put his phone in his teeth, flashlight shining down, and he slid his right hand over the back edge of the hopper and down into the slot, and it was a tight fit, the steel edges pressing his forearm on both sides, and he felt with his fingertips for the plastic, and found it, and pinched it, and began to draw it up.
The light hit him from behind.
It was not a flashlight. It was much bigger than a flashlight, a white flood of light that came from the street and swept over the brick and stopped on him and pinned him there against the wall, so bright that his own shadow jumped onto the stainless steel in front of him, black and enormous, a man with his arm in the wall. He heard an engine. He heard tires on the gravel at the edge of the bank lot. And then, very loud, a voice amplified through a speaker, flattened and huge:
"Police. Do not move. Let me see your hands."
He froze. His arm was still in the slot. The phone was still in his teeth.
"Hands," the voice said again, no longer through the speaker now, a real voice, a man's voice, coming toward him across the asphalt. "Both hands. Out of the wall. Slowly. Let me see them."
Lorenz drew his arm out of the slot. He did it slowly. The deposit bag came with it, pinched in his fingers, because his fingers did not know how to let it go. The plastic scraped on the steel edge of the hopper with a sound that seemed very loud. He took the phone out of his mouth with his left hand. He turned around, very slowly, both hands raised to the height of his shoulders, the phone's flashlight still burning in his left hand and pointing at the sky, the deposit bag dangling from his right like something he had caught.