“Do you think it’s only half past seven? I mean, if we got here at half past five?”
She grabs his wrist. The second hand on his fancy watch isn’t moving.
“Oh, fuck.” She fumbles for her phone. The red low-battery icon flashes once, then the screen goes black.
“We have to go.” She scrapes the scattered papers into a chaotic pile.
“This watch is failproof. It’sself-winding.” James shakes his wrist, feet firmly planted.
She tugs his arm. “Comeon,James. It might not be nine o’clock yet. We might still make it out.”
“It’s barely a year old.”
She hauls him bodily into the access corridor. The security door slams hollowly behind them. No going back now.
“Return the damn watch. Tell”—she glances at the watch face—“Jaeger-LeWhatever that their product fucked up a heist in a dinosaur museum. I’m sure that falls under the warranty.” She hesitates at the doors to the lobby, then, seeing no wiring for an alarm system, shoves them open.
There are no shrieks from excited children. No twittering from the Late Cretaceous soundtrack. Accordioned glass doors seal the entrance to the gift shop. At the end of the velvet-roped corridor leading to the exit, security lights send triangles of yellow down through the inky darkness.
“Shit.” Ripley leans over to check the digital display behind the info desk. “Oh my God. Ten thirty,” she moans.
“Christ on a cracker,” James says. “Can we get out?”
“Not without setting off the alarm system. If there are motion detectors, we’ve already tripped them.”
“Can you text J.D.? Can he help us?”
Ripley glances up at James’s pale cheeks. There’s a silver liningto already being an outlaw of sorts. Sometimes she forgets what it’s like to have a reputation to lose.
She flashes her screen of death at him, then points across the lobby. “I think there’s a charging station outside the cafeteria.”
As soon as the phone starts up, Ripley sends J.D. an all-caps text:SO SORRY, WE FUCKED UP. LOCKED IN MUSEUM. WHAT SHOULD WE DO.
“Is he coming to let us out?”
“He has to. Either that or the Mounties are going to invite us to spend the night in a whole other locked building.”
James doesn’t laugh. Ripley doesn’t either. She hasn’t been this worried about well-earned consequences since her dad got home from poker early the same night her best friend, Ashley, had come over with half a pack of cigarettes she’d lifted from her mom’s winter coat.
After thirty minutes of James’s distraught pacing, no texts from J.D., and no squadron of cops, Ripley starts feeling a little ridiculous. She thinks longingly of the emergency protein bars she keeps in the glove box of the Charger, but they might as well be on Mars.
“Welp.” She unplugs her phone.
He whirls around. “Wait, where are you going? Shouldn’t we be together if the police come?”
“No one’s coming, James. We’re stuck here until J.D. rescues us or the museum opens tomorrow morning. There’s literally nothing we can do until then. We can’t dig, we can’t investigate, we probably can’t even sleep.” She tucks her phone in her pocket.
“But where are you going?” he repeats.
“I’m hungry, James,” she says firmly. “I’m going to find something to eat.”
24
“Tell me you aren’t going to steal food.”
Standing in the middle of the small cafeteria, James looks at Ripley like she’s a velociraptor stalking innocent children.
“It’s not stealing if you pay for it,” Ripley explains patiently. She pulls her wallet from her bag, extracts a twenty, and lays it on the register.
