Free Hart & Boot & Other Stories by Tim Pratt Page A

red toolbox and looked into it for a while, wondering what he’d need, finally deciding to take the whole thing.
    Billy put the toolbox in his bookbag, wincing at the clank it made as tools bumped around inside, then he slipped out of the house, carefully locking the door behind him. He unchained his bike and rolled it into the street, glad that the playing cards he’d had clothes-pinned to the spokes had fallen off last week. The distinctive “click-click-click” would have probably awakened his Mom. He pedaled away through the empty streets toward the Safeway.
    The area behind the grocery store, including the glass casket, was pretty well lit by a bluish light on a pole, but the shadows up against the building were scary. What if there was a homeless guy there, or a drug dealer? Or Mr. Mancuso? Billy just had to hope it was safe. He parked his bike beside a pile of pallets and went to the casket.
    The girl inside was screaming, her mouth open wide, her head thrashing back and forth, but Billy couldn’t hear anything. She pounded on the top of the casket with her pudgy fists, and lifted her knees convulsively, but the coffin didn’t budge a bit, didn’t rock or shift on its flimsy plywood pedestal. Billy stared at her, momentarily stunned, then he pounded on the side of the casket with his own fists, and frantically checked it for seams or hinges. The girl kept screaming—she didn’t seem to notice him at all. Maybe the coffin was made of one-way glass, so Billy could see inside, but she couldn’t see out. Billy tried to shove the coffin over, thinking that if it fell off the sawhorses the coffin would break open, and spill the girl out.
    The coffin wouldn’t budge. Trying to shove the casket over was like trying to push his house down. The girl inside subsided, her punches against the coffin lid slowing down, finally stopping. She crossed her hands over her chest. Her whole body shook, the way his mom’s did when she was crying hard but silently. Then the girl’s eyes closed, and she lay still.
    Billy didn’t know what to make of this, but he had to let her out—she wasn’t a tropical fish, that much was clear, she wanted out. He opened his bag, took out the red toolbox, opened it, and removed a claw hammer. He held it a little uncertainly. If he smashed the side of the casket, the whole top part might fall on top of the girl. But if he broke the top, bits of glass would shower down on her. Well, he couldn’t do anything else—he had to break it somewhere. He lifted the hammer over the center of the casket lid, and brought it down as hard as he could.
    The hammer bounced.
    Billy stepped back, frowning. It had seemed so easy when he’d imagined it. Why didn’t it work? He went back to the toolbox, rummaging through it. A protractor. A socket wrench. Needlenose pliers. A chalk line reel—his dad used to joke that it was used for drawing the lines on elf baseball fields, but Billy didn’t know what it was really for. A paint-stained calculator. His fingers closed on a Phillips screwdriver—what his dad called a “starhead” screwdriver—and he smiled. His dad had taught him how to chop wood, and shown him how wedges worked. Sometimes you couldn’t get a log to split just by driving the ax in. So you set a wedge, and hit the wedge with a hammer, and that split the log. A glass casket wasn’t the same as a log, and a screwdriver was no wedge, but it might be close enough.
    Billy set the point of the screwdriver on the beveled edge of the casket, reasoning that the glass would be thinner at that point, and easier to break. He held the screwdriver in place, lifted the hammer, and hit the end of the screwdriver handle.
    The glass splintered, fine lines spreading out from the point of impact. Billy hooted with pleasure. The girl stirred a little, her white hands moving, fluttering like moths. Billy moved the screwdriver farther down the seam and repeated the process. He hummed to himself as he worked his