Crooked Little Vein (17 page)

I
moved around the carport, taking cover where I could, as Trix and Brom walked directly to the elevators—two of them, side by side, with an alcove beside the far one—talking loudly, as I’d asked. The uniformed security agent wasn’t young, but looked beefy. He was deferential to Brom and Trix, which was good. There are two kinds of security—the kind who thinks he works for the security firm, and the kind who thinks he works for the firm’s clients. The first kind are tough and alert, because they work for the reputation of the firm. The second kind concentrates on appearance to keep the client pleased. This guy was definitely the second kind, which meant I had a chance.

I listened to his voice as he spoke to Brom and Trix, marking him and his plus-one off on his clipboard. Phlegmy, slow. He thumbed the radio on his shoulder, letting security upstairs know the pair were coming up. He walked them to the elevator, saw them into it, and turned around.

As the doors were closing, Brom and Trix must’ve seen me jab my thumb and forefinger into the security guy’s throat from behind, and then drive the butt of the gun into the back of his head. He almost shrugged off the first blow, gagging as I killed his voice. The fourth took him down.

I almost popped a rib dragging the bastard around the corner into the toilets. I gagged him with a wad of toilet paper and his own tie and cuffed him around the toilet before locking the stall from the inside. Coughing some spit down into my throat, I reached around and thumbed his radio.

“Need the john. Ate something bad. Clipboard’s by the elevators—come down and cover me for ten minutes. Gonna sign off, this hurts like hell.” I switched the radio off before anyone could answer, and climbed out of the top of the stall with the clipboard.

Outside, I propped the clipboard on the corner, so whoever came down had to turn their back on the elevator and walk away from it to retrieve it. I dashed to the alcove and waited.

Two minutes crept by. Just as I was sure I’d fucked it up, the elevator pinged, and a skinny security man came down. He looked around for the clipboard. Spotted it. Walked toward it. I very silently moved to the elevator. He bent down to pick the clipboard up. I reached a hand inside and above the elevator door. Found what I hoped for, and smacked it to the right with my finger. Slid in and punched the door-close button, pressed against the left side of the elevator.

Above the door was a security camera that trained down on the inside of the elevator car. Smacking it to the right meant that it could only see the right half of the car. I stayed on the left, where the control panel was, and punched in 32.

There was blood on the butt of the Ruger. I rubbed it off on my pants leg. And then looked down. Suddenly I’d become cavalier about blood. I did not enjoy this about myself. Taking a deep breath, I tried to remember who I was before this whole thing started. I came back to myself, a little bit.

The elevator pinged at 32. I stepped out carefully into darkness. The rest of the building was, of course, empty.

Brom’s map was in my head. I was below everything he’d detailed for me, and I looked up, measuring the relative position of everything above me.

It was a new building. And Brom’s powers of description had given me the idea. New office buildings tend to prize flexibility. So what they do is build the framework and hang the walls from the framework, using adhesive wainscot to fix them to the floor. It allows the owners to change the structure of their office design. There have been stories of people in high-risk jobs coming to work in the morning to discover that their little office is entirely missing—workmen have come in the night to take out the walls and change the workplace design.

Plasterboard and plastic. Paneled ceilings. Stuff that breaks and cuts.

I broke a couple of locks and moved around until I found some desks and chairs. The clock was running in my head. My unconscious guy with the phantom shits would be given ten minutes, if I was lucky. And if the bastard didn’t wake up first. I didn’t have a lot of time, and past history made it disgustingly clear that I had no luck at all. Working as quietly as I could without wasting time, I stacked chairs up on a desk for a makeshift ladder, and got under the ceiling. It was a gridwork of metal strips with plastic panels. The panels were just laid on. I pushed one up. There was a space, maybe a couple of feet, between this ceiling and the underside of the next floor up. Trunks of wires ran here and there. The dust would’ve choked a regiment. I prayed to anything that might be paying attention that the metal frame held my weight, and lifted myself up.

I spidered myself over the plastic panels, keeping hands, knees, and feet on the metal struts. Everything creaked and groaned a little, but held. Good. I moved along the space like the world’s most retarded crab, trying to keep the map straight in my head. Eventually, I picked my spot, and turned myself around so my back was supported by the metal. From my jacket, I took the sharpest knife I could find in Brom’s kitchen. It had taken a good thirty minutes, late in the afternoon, picking through all his shiny, pricey kitchen equipment, most of which had never been used. He only bought the best stuff, beautiful selections of samurai-quality handmade carbon-blade cutting tools. I’d taken this one to a fine edge on a ceramic whetstone he’d left out on display without ever touching, and tested it on various of his possessions. There was even a half-inch gully in his marble countertop.

I put it into the underside of the floor. It did not exactly cut like butter. I wriggled under the pommel of the blade and put both hands into it, pushing upward, terrified the extra force would put me back through the ceiling and on to the floor.

The blade punched through. I started sawing, as fast as I dared. This stunt was both clever and staggeringly stupid. There were fair odds that someone was up there watching the end of the knife bobbing up and down like the fin of a drunken shark.

Within a couple of minutes—and, at that point, it was two minutes too long—I’d sawed a flap in the upstairs floor. Scoring a diagonal between the end of both cuts, I squirmed back to the corner and pushed. It was stiff. Without the scoreline, it would have groaned. But it folded along the score, and cracked. Audibly cracked. I grabbed the edge of the floor, cutting my palm, and pulled myself up in panic.

No one there. Music leaked in from beyond the closed east door of Islip’s outer office. The west door led to his inner office. The music must’ve masked the sound of the flooring cracking. I almost cried at the thought that I’d finally had a bit of luck.

Pulling myself out of the crawlspace felt like dragging myself free of quicksand. I went straight to the west door and checked it for alarms. It was clean. I pulled out the other things I’d lifted from Brom’s house and quickly jimmied the old-fashioned lock on the door. It clicked open.

Islip’s office looked like an old English drawing room, with silky wallpaper, ornate gilt-framed oil paintings of military men on horseback, and antique high-backed armchairs. On the wall behind the desk was a big oil portrait of a pirate with a beard you could lose a dog in pouring boiling oil on what I presumed were seagoing taxmen. I lifted it off the wall to reveal the safe.

And, of course, it was the picture that was alarmed.

I
invented five new swearwords in six seconds.

Dashing to the door, I jabbed the jimmy into the lock, immobilizing it. A chair went under the door handle. I ran back to the safe. It was electronic. Brom had told me it was an old-style dial-tumbler design. I went down and peered at the numeric keypad at an angle. The most-used keys pick up more dirt than the others. But this damn thing was new. In my pocket, I had some talc lifted from Brom’s kitchen that I’d wrapped in a square of kitchen paper. I unwrapped it and blew a little over the keypad, and then blew lightly at the keypad itself. One, five, six, and eight looked like they’d attracted more powder than the others, which meant they were slightly stickier, which meant they’d been used more. I hoped.

Someone banged on the door.

I started tapping in variations on 1568. It took me five or six goes before I noticed the little LED display on the face of the safe.

ALARM-LOCK
.

The damn thing immobilized when the alarm went off.

With the alarm still beeping away, the element of surprise had kind of faded away a while back.

So I took out the Ruger and shot the safe.

The
pow
was deafening in the enclosed space. The windows wobbled in their frames. The safe spat out a shower of sparks, the LED going dead. I’d put the big bullet right where I assumed the locking mechanism to be, and the door resentfully eased open by about an inch. I put Brom’s kitchen knife in the gap and started levering with all the strength I had left.

There was a crunching, the blade snapped off, and the door came away. I pulled the door back as far as I could, and looked inside, heart in my mouth.

The book was in there.

It had to be the book. It was ancient. Big, with gray leather covers, mold greening the corners.

The banging on the door turned to thumping. Someone was throwing their body against it.

I took the book out gingerly, and laid it on the desk. The second it touched the surface, my head started swimming, like I’d taken a heavy toke off a strong joint. I shook it off and opened the book. The front cover touched the desk surface and it happened again. I felt my eyes widen and my head kind of lurch to attention, going light.

I took out my phone, found the number I wanted, and hit redial.

“It’s McGill,” I said. “I’m sure you know where I am. I have what you want. Send in the cavalry. And that’s
now
, not in five minutes’ time.”

“We’re outside,” rasped the voice I’d learned to hate. “Three minutes, Mr. McGill.”

Three minutes. Probably not enough time. But I had to try it.

I took out the handheld computer.

M
r.
McGill,” came the voice. From the door.

I walked to it, gun in hand. “Are we all clear?”

“Of course. Open the door.”

“Hold on,” I said. I pulled the makeshift lockpicker out of the door, very quietly slid the chair away, and walked back to the desk. “Come on in.”

The chief of staff entered with two men in black. He took two steps and stopped.

I had the Ruger pressed to the closed book.

“What exactly is transpiring here, Mr. McGill?”

“Insurance,” I said, much more calmly than I expected. “Pick up the handheld device on the desk there.”

“You can’t possibly expect to shoot me before these people unload into your body, Mr. McGill.” The two Secret Service men had both drawn on me, rock steady and aimed at my eyes.

“I’m not aiming at you, sir. Look at me. I’m aimed at the book.”

“What is this?”

“The book’s not going to be a whole hell of a lot of use to you with five large holes in it. Pick up the handheld. I want to see my money transferred into my account before I hand the book over.”

“This is stupid. I’m the White House chief of staff. I don’t lie.”

“There’s no way your boys can take me out before I fire into the book. I’ve already taken first pressure. If I cough, bullets go through this book. Destroying words. Destroying whatever crap is really in the covers. It’ll be useless to you. And after the week I’ve had, I really, really couldn’t give a shit what happens next.”

“We have your friend Trix, you know. Her lawyer friend bolted the second the alarm went off.”

“She’s not my friend. She’s someone I was sleeping with until she slept with someone else.”

He smiled his awful smile. “Yes, I’m aware of that. I did try to warn you.”

I smiled back at him. “Yes, you did. Pick up the handheld.”

“Yes,” he said. “I will. A job well done, Mr. McGill, against astonishing odds.”

He took the device, and his long fingers began playing its keyboard.

“Mike?” came a voice from outside.

“Bring her through,” the chief of staff absently muttered, working the device. Trix, with a foul look on her face, emerged from the outer offce.

“So you’re doing it,” she said to me.

“You’re damn right I am. And I don’t care if you’re disappointed.”

“Meh. It’s been a day of disappointments. It’s not like you’re surprising me with your spinelessness, Mike.”

“Yeah, well. The one thing my life has taught me is that there’s always space for surprise.”

“An excellent lesson to end the day with, Mr. McGill.” The chief smiled. He put the device on the desk and swiveled it around to show me the screen. “A completed, irrevocable transfer of funds, available immediately for your use. You have lived up to your peculiar reputation and my faith in you, Mr. McGill. Now, the book, if you please.”

Watching the Secret Service men, I slowly laid the Ruger on the book and backed away.

“You can keep the gun, too.” I smiled. “I’m done with it.”

I walked around the table and picked up the handheld. The chief walked around the other side and laid his hands on the book, reverently.

“I’m done,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, waving his hand. “You’ll never see me again, Mr. McGill. Unless you attend one of our readings, of course. It may do you good. Return you to moral balance.”

“I’m doing okay,” I said, taking Trix’s wrist. “Have fun.”

I walked her out of the office, through the outer office, and into the bullpen. The Secret Service was everywhere, encircling the great and the good of the party. In the middle of the room were three very scared Latino adolescents in white smocks. The men in black nodded us through, and I pulled Trix toward the elevators.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, as I punched the call button.

“Please, Trix. A couple more minutes and you can do what you like. Just work with me here.”

Both elevators pinged, within a few seconds of each other.

“Please,” I said to no one. “One more time. Just for us.”

The first elevator to open was empty. I shoved Trix into it. A second later, the other elevator opened. And LAPD poured out of it. An absolute flood of ugly men in blue. I leapt in next to Trix and hit the button for the underground carport.

“What the hell was that?” Trix yelped.

“I called the cops.”

“Mike!”