The first door belonged to a woman who had locked herself out while the pasta water was boiling. Ray could hear the pot lid rattling through the kitchen window. He picked the deadbolt in forty seconds. She tipped him twelve dollars and a bowl of rigatoni, which he ate sitting on her porch steps while the February wind tried to freeze the sauce.
The second door was a storage unit off Route 9. The owner had died in October and his daughter had driven up from Virginia with a key that didn't fit. Ray tried the key, confirmed it was for a different lock entirely, and drilled the cylinder out. The daughter stood behind him saying "I haven't seen any of this since I was twelve." The unit was full of fishing rods. Dozens of them. A man's whole idea of a good Saturday, standing upright in the dark for four months.
The third door was his own. He'd left the key in his other jacket, the one hanging on the hook behind the door he couldn't open. He stood on his own steps in 24-degree air and laughed at himself for exactly as long as it took to get cold, then broke in through the bathroom window the way he'd told a hundred customers to fix.