Spectacles

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John Dortmunder, a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness, didn’t like it when all those fluorescent lights flared into view above his head. Like an excessively starry sky, a thousand thousand fluorescent lights in great rows under the metal roof of this huge barnlike store building came flickering and buzzing on, throwing a great glare over all the goods below, and over Dortmunder, too, and yet he knew this vast Speedshop discount store in this vast blacktop shopping mall in deepest New Jersey, very near Mordor, did not open at 10 past two in the morning. That’s why he was here.

Speedshop was a great sprawling mass-production retailer stocked mostly with things that weren’t worth more than a quarter and didn’t cost more than $4, but it had a few pricier sections as well. There was a pharmacy and a liquor department and a video shop and an appliance showroom. Most important, from Dortmunder s point of view, there was a camera department, carrying everything from your basic low-price Ph D (Push here, dummy) to advanced computer driven machines that choose their own angles.

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