Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“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.

There are no golden bezants over the door, no neon signs in the window, and no furtive customers lurking out front, but Portrait Capital-Marius Lucovic, founder-is nonetheless a pawn shop, albeit an upmarket one. It doesn’t trade in forlorn wedding rings, Grandma’s sad china, or handguns of dubious provenance, but the basic deal offered at Portrait-valuables handed over as collateral against a loan-is the same as what’s on the table down by the bus station, and the customers are similarly desperate. There are differences, of course: the pawnbrokers at Portrait Capital may be seen by appointment only; they deal exclusively in works of art, authenticated antiques, and pieces of serious jewelry; and the smallest loan that Portrait will consider is for a quarter of a million dollars. Lucovic started the company just after the crash, and business has always been brisk.

Which would, at first glance, seem to explain the motion detectors, pressure sensors, and video cameras, but not quite. While it’s true that Portrait Capital often has valuable items on its premises, they’re never there for longer than a few hours at a time, and never overnight. Any collateral brought to the office is sent out again by armored courier at the end of the day, to a high-security, climate-controlled warehouse near Ellington Airport. So all the hardware Lucovic installed at the Prairie Galleria is not to defend his high-priced pawn. No, it’s to protect the inventory of an entirely different Lucovic enterprise-fencing diamonds.