Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

Inside the house now, the three of them stand still in the foyer, in the pale oblong of street light that falls through the transom, and Carr hears voices in the walls. A muted cough from the air ducts, a nervous murmur from the drapes, a creaking sigh from the paneling in the center hall-a muffled chorus, singing only to him. Home early. Not the maid’s night off. Tires in the driveway. Carr’s thighs are lead, and a clamp wraps around his chest. Adrenaline, he knows, but knowing doesn’t help. He reminds himself to inhale, to exhale, not too fast. Above his chanting fear he can hear Declan’s voice.

“Nothin’ like a house in the dark, lad.” The brogue that came and went, the rough laughter, the sharper edge of excitement, as if he were talking about a roller coaster. But Carr hates roller coasters, and always has. Inhale, exhale, not too fast.

The odors of the house come to him: lavender, cinnamon, lilac, vanilla, the chemical tang of a disinfectant-like a brothel above a bakery-but Piney Point Village is hardly that kind of Houston neighborhood. He takes another breath and catches a trace of cigars and of dog-an overweight, arthritic Lab that Carr knows is boarded at the vet’s all week. Bobby flicks a penlight and follows its beam to a plastic box on the wall.

“No mess,” Carr tells him.

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” Bobby says, irritation and Brooklyn plain in his raspy whisper. He sticks the penlight in his mouth, pops the cover off the box with a thin screwdriver, and pries loose a circuit board from the bracket underneath. He pulls a coil of wire from the wall behind it and picks delicately at the board, teasing up the contacts. Bobby’s moves are quick, and there’s time to spare when he reaches into his pocket, pulls out something like a matchbook, and snaps it onto one edge of the board. A green LED blinks fast on the matchbook as it talks to the processor in the basement. Don’t worry, be happy. The blinking is replaced by a steady glow, and Bobby lets the board hang by its wires down along the wall. He hooks the plastic cover on a corner of the bracket and takes the penlight from his mouth.

“Clean enough?” he asks.

Latin Mike answers. “Slick, cabron, like always.” Mike is forty, older than Carr, older than any of them, but his rounded San Diego accent makes him sound like a kid.

Carr nods. “Bobby goes downstairs; start by the door to the garage. Mike takes the master. Check your headsets first.” Carr touches his own and swings down the mic on its wire arm. “You there, Vee?”

In the darkness Valerie’s voice is close, as if her lips are at his ear. “Where else?” she says. Her tone is amber, smoky, a little weary. Carr can almost feel her breath. “All quiet out front. A guy walking a dog at the corner; a drunk in a beemer.”

“And in back?” Carr asks.

Dennis answers. “Not even a drunk back here.” His voice is young and reedy and tentative, like Dennis himself.

Carr looks at Bobby and Latin Mike. “You guys hear everything?” Bobby barely nods; Mike won’t muster even that. Carr looks down. “Clean shoes?”

Latin Mike snorts. “We virgins now, jefe?” he says, the jefe laden with sarcasm. “We never done this before?” He walks off, into the deeper darkness of the house, and Bobby follows.

Carr takes a long breath and lets it out slowly. He strains to hear them rummaging upstairs and down, but they’re silent. No, not virgins. There’s a half-moon table in the foyer, black lacquer with a vase of drooping gladiolas on top and a drawer beneath. Carr thumbs his own penlight and opens it.***

Carr has progressed to the office, a mahogany annex to the living room, with many bookshelves but few books. There’s a claw-footed desk squatting in the middle, and he’s going through the center drawer when Latin Mike’s voice crackles in his ear. “Got a box in the master, in the walk-in, behind the suits. Looks like a real piece of shit.”

A surge of anger runs through Carr’s gut. “Leave it,” he says.

“Five minutes max and I’m in this thing.”

“I said leave it. ”

“It’s low-hanging fruit, jefe. ”

“We’re not here for fruit. Now stay off the air unless you find it.”

If Mike has an answer Carr doesn’t hear it over Bobby’s laugh. “You want low fruit, bro, you should see the liquor store goin’ on down here. We lift a case of Dom, he’d never miss it.”

Carr grits his teeth. There’d been none of this bullshit with Declan. With Deke, once they were inside, it was all business. There was no idle chatter, just that gravelly brogue calling out the numbers, and the clipped, whispered acknowledgments from each of them. Carr knows that Mike and Bobby are fucking with him, trying to get a rise, but he’s not going to give them the pleasure. He takes a breath and is about to speak when Valerie cuts through Bobby’s chuckles. “You girls want to shut the fuck up while this cruiser passes by?” she whispers.

Mike and Bobby go silent and there’s a chunk of ice in Carr’s gut. He kills his penlight. Valerie’s voice is a low monotone. “Half a block down… two houses now… goddamn it, he’s slowing down. Fuck-is there a backup you guys forgot about? ’Cause he’s stopped right in front.” Her voice gets softer and the sound of rustling fabric is loud in Carr’s ear. He can picture her slouching low behind the wheel.

Bobby starts to talk but Carr cuts him off. “Quiet!” he whispers, and then to Valerie: “We burned or what, Vee?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers. “I don’t… wait-he’s rolling away. One house down… now two. He’s at the corner, taking… a left.”

Something releases in Carr’s chest. “Dennis, anything?”

“He just went past. He’s hanging a right on Smithdale.”

Carr flicks on his light again. Bobby’s voice leaps into his ear. “I didn’t forget a fuckin’ thing, Vee.”

“You forgot how to keep quiet,” Valerie says, the tension in her voice replaced by anger. “You forgot how to keep your head in the game-you and Mike both.”

“Don’t drag me into this, chica. ”

“Then shut the fuck up, the both of you, and get back to work.”

It’s ten minutes later when Bobby calls in. “I got it. On a table at the top of the basement stairs, in a bowl with loose change and gas receipts.” Thirty seconds after that, the three of them are in the foyer again.

“Everything buttoned up?” Carr asks.

“Shipshape, jefe. ”

“Bobby?”

“Gotta clean this up,” he says, pushing his chin at the box dangling down the wall. He hands Carr the card he’s holding and digs in his vest for the screwdriver.

Carr runs his light over the ID card-hard gray plastic, with a picture of an office building on one side and a red nylon lanyard clipped to one end. He turns the card over and looks at the bar codes and mag strip and photo of the bland, balding man in the center. It’s a better picture of Jerry Molloy, he thinks, than the portrait above the living room mantel.

There are candles burning in green glass spheres, and green paper lanterns hanging, and the air above the patio is tinted the color of an aquarium gone bad. It smells of citronella, and cigarettes, and a hundred clashing colognes. Valerie walks from the bar, a pitcher of Shiner Bock in each hand. She wears a short, flowered dress that clings to her as if it’s wet, and her bare arms and legs are gleaming. Her dark blond hair is pinned in a haphazard pile, and her long, limber body is like a burning fuse as she twists through the crowd.

Every eye in the place-male and female-follows her back to the table, though Carr tries to avoid watching. Looking is what she wants, he thinks, and it feels too much like strings being pulled. Still, over the top of his glass, he looks-and so do Bobby, Latin Mike, and Dennis. Because, despite how long they’ve known her, how many times they’ve seen her work a room, there is always with Valerie the promise of something they haven’t seen before.