Thick as Thieves

3

The Prairie Galleria, a ten-story structure on Prairie Street, not far from Minute Maid Park, once housed, among other tenants, the Houston offices of a national bank, the Houston outpost of an international consulting firm, and half a dozen energy trading houses. Those businesses are gone now, bought out, broken up, or plain dead, but their bad luck is still etched on the building’s blue glass skin, which is stained and cracked in some spots, and missing altogether in others-patched with plywood sheets like rippled, gray scabs.

The current occupants are making the best of the current economy. They’re an eclectic bunch, including accountants, lawyers of various stripes-bankruptcy, tax, and divorce the best-represented specialties-a bail bondsman, two dealers in used office equipment, and several real estate liquidators. With the exception of the bail bondsman, none of these firms conduct regular business on Saturdays, so the lobby is quiet when Carr approaches the reception counter at 8:37 a.m.-just two uniformed guards who, Carr knows, work only weekend shifts. The cooling system is cycling low, and the air is thick and smells of someone’s breakfast. Carr keeps close to the right-hand wall, out of view of the single security camera. His deck shoes squeak on the marble floor and a line of sweat worms down his ribs. Inhale, exhale, not too fast.

Carr hitches up the strap on the nylon briefcase slung over his shoulder and pushes the horn-rimmed sunglasses up on his nose. He makes a show of searching the pockets of his sagging blue blazer. The guards have never seen him before, but whatever curiosity they experience is overmatched by heat and apathy, and they barely raise their heads. Carr shifts the Styrofoam coffee cup to his left hand and searches more pockets. The performance settles him down and he nods at the guards and puts a eureka look on his face. He fishes the ID card from his pocket and slides it through the reader on the turnstile that stands between him and the elevator bank. The light on the reader blinks from amber to green and the barrier swings away and Carr walks through. He stops on the other side.

“My guys haven’t been in yet, have they?” he asks.

The guards look at each other and back at Carr. “What guys?” the bald one asks.

“IT guys, coming with new computers.”

“Nobody’s been in.”

Carr looks at his watch. “Should be soon. You’ll send ’em up?”

The bald guard nods, taps a finger on a keyboard, and squints at the text on the screen. “Yep. That’s Molloy, on six?”

“That’s me,” Carr says, and steps into a waiting elevator. He keeps his head down, away from the camera in the corner, and presses the button for six.

The sixth floor is warmer than the lobby, and quieter, and all Carr can hear after the doors close behind him is the elevator sliding down and the faint push of air from a ceiling vent. Once upon a time, Carr knows, the whole floor belonged to a law firm. It was where they kept their library and conference rooms and archived records, until the markets went south and everything else followed. Then the law firm shut down, the building changed hands, and the new landlords invested in new doors, new wiring, and lots of wallboard, and turned all that teak paneling and Berber carpet into five separate office suites.

Carr looks at the nameplates. To his right, two lawyers and a forensic accountant; straight ahead, behind heavy glass doors and a roll-down metal gate, in the largest suite on the floor, a company called Portrait Capital; and to his left, in the smallest office, Jerry Molloy, tax attorney in semiretirement, currently concluding a one-week visit to his Hill Country home. Carr removes his sunglasses, pulls latex gloves from his briefcase, and turns left.

Molloy’s lock is a joke-old and tired-and it surrenders after a few bumps with the power rake. The alarm is even worse-no motion detector, and just a single magnetic contact on the door frame. But Carr doesn’t have to fiddle it; he has the code, copied from the slip of paper Valerie discovered taped beneath Molloy’s desk blotter two weeks before. Molloy had gone out to lunch-without setting his alarm-and Valerie was ostensibly visiting a divorce lawyer one floor up. It had taken her all of six minutes to find it. A dispirited chirping comes from the smudged plastic box on the wall. Carr taps the keypad and the box goes silent. He locks the office door, wipes a sleeve across his forehead, and looks around.

There isn’t much to see. The space is partitioned into two rooms: the one Carr is standing in, with a small window, a small filing cabinet, a small desk for Molloy’s part-time secretary, and carpeting the color of car exhaust; and Molloy’s office, which is a larger version of the same. Both smell vaguely of old cigar smoke, and neither holds anything of interest to Carr. He takes off his blazer, folds it on Molloy’s desk, and rolls up his sleeves. Then he crosses to the far wall and opens a door.

Behind it is a small utility closet, where electrical and telecom lines branch out from the conduits that carry them between floors to provide local service. There are junction boxes on the wall: gray for telecom, beige for electrical, flimsy white plastic for the security system. They’re mounted next to the vertical PVC conduits, and bundles of cable snake into and out of them. Carr pulls a penlight and a much handled sheaf of papers from his briefcase and flips pages to the plan of Molloy’s office.

The plans tell him that this closet is a recent addition, built when the original office space was subdivided. It shares a wall with another, larger utility closet in the suite next door-a hastily erected wall of gypsum board hung on metal studs. Carr raps on the board and it makes a hollow sound. He pulls a tape measure and a pencil from his bag, checks the plan, and marks a rectangle, two feet wide by three feet high, on the closet wall. Then he takes a headset out.

“You there, Vee?” he says.

“Where else?” she answers. “Everything okay?”

“Fine. Send them in.”

Carr looks out the window and watches Bobby and Latin Mike emerge from a rusting blue van parked nose out in the lot across the street. Each has a nylon bag slung on his shoulder, and each is carrying a Dell computer box. Even from six floors up Carr can see the tension in their strides. They wear jeans, dark T-shirts, and sunglasses, but neither really looks the part of IT geek. Bobby comes close-scruffy, freckled, pale, and slightly bloated, as if he lives on fast food-but Mike is a far cry. His heavy shoulders and battered, angry good looks transcend wardrobe and typecast him as a hardcase, a badass, a thief. Still, Carr knows they’ll pass muster with the listless guards in the lobby. They disappear into the Prairie Galleria, and Carr looks again at the van. He tries to make out Valerie behind the wheel but can’t.

“Anybody else come in?” he asks.

“The painters and the carpet guys,” she answers, “about five minutes ago.”

“How many today?”

“Five-same as last week.”

The ever-hopeful owners of the Galleria have been painting walls and replacing the carpets in the building’s common areas, two floors every Saturday. Carr knows the schedule, and knows they’re working downstairs today, on four and five.

“Nobody else?”

“Not yet.”

There’s a knock on the door and Carr opens it for Bobby and Mike. Bobby pulls on gloves, looks around, and shakes his head. “What a dump. I had to sit here all day, I’d shoot myself.”

“That’s why it’s good you’re not an accountant,” Mike says.

“Molloy’s a lawyer,” Carr says. He points at the closet.

Bobby crouches at the wall, looking at Carr’s marks and rechecking the plan. He taps on the wall and shakes his head some more. “Sounds like quarter-inch. Cheap bastards.”

Bobby takes a drop cloth from his bag and spreads it beneath Carr’s rectangle. Then he removes plastic goggles, a battery-powered reciprocating saw, a set of blades in a plastic box, and a rectangular strip of heavy felt. He’s humming softly as he selects a blade, locks it in place, and wraps felt around the saw’s motor. Carr doesn’t know the tune, but knows that Bobby is nervous. Carr himself is fighting the desire to pace. Bobby squeezes the trigger on the saw and smiles at the dull whirring sound.

“Like a whisper,” he says. He wipes sweat off his forehead, sets the blade along a penciled line, and cuts. He’s quick and quiet and neat, and in less than a minute he hands Carr a two-by-three-foot panel of wallboard.

“See-quarter-inch. I could’ve used my Swiss Army knife.” He takes a penlight from his bag and shines it in the hole he’s cut. He looks at the metal studs and the back of the wall in the utility closet next door. He taps the wall several times, then takes a Phillips-head screwdriver from his bag and punches a hole in the board. He turns to Latin Mike, who takes the screwdriver from Bobby and hands him the device he’s been assembling.

It’s an under-door camera, a hand-held video unit with a tiny lens mounted on the end of a thin metal snake. This model has its own light source and an infrared attachment. Bobby powers it up, feeds the snake through the hole, and starts working the controls. Mike leans over his shoulder and peers into the monitor. Carr gives them room and goes to the window.

The sky is yellow and greasy, and though it’s hours till noon, the sidewalk already shimmers with heat. Carr’s shirt is wet, stuck to his back and ribs, though only some of that is from the temperature. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the back of his neck. He looks at the van and thinks of Valerie.

Last night, afterward, they’d been welded together by sweat. The droning of the air conditioner swallowed every other sound, and Valerie’s weight on him, and the heat that seeped from her to cover him, and the scent of her skin and of her hair that fell in a honey cascade across his shoulder, swallowed every thought of movement. They were perfectly still and perfectly quiet until she spoke, softly, in his ear.

As he had many times since the first day he’d met her, Carr wondered about Valerie’s accent. Like so much else about her it was malleable, indeterminate, like smoke. There were hints of Canada in it sometimes, around the edges of her r’s, and at other times a suggestion of farther corners of the Commonwealth-South Africa, or maybe Australia. Other times her speech was flat and neutral, like a newscaster’s-straight out of Kansas. It was as supple as the rest of her-stretching, bending, shaping itself like putty to suit the job at hand. Last night, her accent was diluted British, a Surrey childhood not quite undone by decades in the States. He’d heard that one before. He’d heard the sentiment too, though not as often. Twice before, to be exact, twice in the four months they’d been sleeping together.

“We could sleep in. Get room service. Spend the day in bed.”

Speaking was an effort for Carr, his words rising up from deep water. “There’s no room service here, and we have plans for tomorrow.”

“I’m not talking about tomorrow, or about this dump. I’m talking about afterward, someplace with a real bed. Someplace we could take time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time out. Time to see what’s what-what this is all about.”

“Are you asking me to go steady?”

Valerie hadn’t laughed or snapped, but simply kissed his ear and gone quiet for a while. “You told me this was it for you,” she said eventually. “You said so more than once. So you need to plan for afterward. I’m saying that maybe our plans can line up.”

Twice before, and last night was lucky number three. Carr still didn’t know what to make of it.

Bobby calls him back. He has the saw in hand again, and Latin Mike is stowing the camera. “It’s clean in there-no motion detectors, no infrared, just four walls and a door-your basic utility closet.”

Four walls, a door, more junction boxes, and the processing unit of Portrait Capital’s security system, which is to Jerry Molloy’s alarm as a Porsche is to a vegetable peeler. And that’s fitting, as Molloy’s office holds only yellowing tax files, while Portrait Capital’s safeguards more substantial assets.