Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

In the private offices, with no cameras, she skipped steps that seemed unimportant. But in these places there were far more steps to begin with. The executives had bookcases and shelves and tables and chairs and file cabinets, collections of glass elephants and tennis trophies, awkwardly posed family photos with the same frosty blue backdrop — as if the rich all lived somewhere up among the clouds.

And then at last, McGee stood in the doorway of Ruth Freeman’s office. The office was less spacious than the others but had the same furniture: the polished tables and chairs, the hardwood desk so large it looked like an aircraft carrier. The room, at least, was just as Fitch had described.

Ruth Freeman didn’t decorate. Little in the office suggested anything about the woman who worked there. But that in itself said a lot. The anonymity could have been a sign of bland taste. But more likely it was the hallmark of a woman who liked to keep secrets. The only object at all revealing was a small photograph in a simple cherry frame propped up in one corner of the desk. In it a man and woman posed on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Behind them the sun was setting, the sky streaked with crimson. McGee had long imagined Ruth Freeman as middle-aged and underfed, desperately trying to cling to her youth, a wearer of pantsuits with shoulder pads and too much makeup, hair chemically stiffened to the texture of funnel cake. But as Fitch had said, the woman in the photo was older than middle age, her hair gray. She’d made no attempt to color it. Her skin collected in wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her smile was friendly. But of course, the Ruth Freeman in the picture was on vacation. The Ruth Freeman who sat in this chair, at this desk, was someone else entirely.

The man standing beside her in the picture was younger, lean and handsome, dressed in khakis and a white linen shirt, the top three buttons undone. On his face McGee recognized the smile of someone at ease with himself, someone well acquainted with comfort.

As she’d expected, Ruth Freeman’s file cabinet was locked. In vain McGee searched the one unlocked desk drawer for a key. But as it was, she didn’t yet have a plan for handling the files once she found them. And not until dawn was blandly announcing itself though the tinted windows of the corridor and it was time for her to move on to the next floor, did McGee come across the room housing the photocopier. By then all she wanted to do was go home to bed.

Myles didn’t even roll over when she came in. There were no grunts when she fumbled to join him under the covers, still dressed in her horrible jeans. She was too tired to deal with zippers and bows.

Sometime later — hours later, maybe — McGee became aware of Myles’s lips on her forehead, but she had no strength to do anything in return. And then he was gone.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, her phone rang, and she let it go to voice mail. A few seconds later the ringing started all over again.

“What happened?” April asked, even before McGee had a chance to say hello. She was calling from the bookstore.

“There was this video,” McGee said with a yawn, describing the actors and their perms, and then she told April about the cleaning cart and about how Calice and then Dorothy had yelled at her, and then about the glass elephants and the trophies and about the desk and her shin, which now looked as if there were a mouse hiding under her skin.

“You mean it actually worked?” April said.

Until that moment, the thought had never crossed McGee’s mind. Despite everything Holmes and Myles and Fitch had said, their insistence that she was crazy even to consider it, the plan had actually worked.

Holmes came over with his picks later that afternoon, and he and McGee practiced on an old dented file cabinet. She’d underestimated how difficult it would be to get a feel for pins and tumblers. She’d thought it would be like learning to juggle or to perform a card trick, just a matter of getting down the motions, the sleight of hand. Every dozen or so tries, she got the lock to pop, but she never understood why. It would just happen, the sequence of steps buried somewhere inside the metal casing.

“Try again,” Holmes said each time. “Try again.”

He never lost patience, but he also never took off his coat.

“You understand it’s a felony, right?” he said. “Just getting caught with them.”

“I’m not going to get caught.”

“Just having them on you.”

“You’re worse than Myles,” she said. “When did you guys get to be such pussies?”

Holmes stood up and checked his watch. “I’ve got to go.”

After four hours, it was the first mention he had somewhere to be.

That evening, riding the bus into the downtown twilight, McGee was jittery, her feet pumping the pedal of some imaginary machine. Twice on her way from the bus stop to the building, she nearly stepped directly into oncoming traffic.

In the basement, she got her cart and went through the motions of checking her supplies. She was waiting for the elevator when she heard footsteps behind her.

“Zolska, Zolska.”

Not until the fourth or fifth time did she recognize her name.

It was one of the guards, the black one with the kind face, the mouth that even at rest seemed to settle into a smile. The same expression was there on his ID badge: Darius.

“They told me to help you upstairs,” he said. And then, “to your floor.” There was no meanness in his voice, and yet as he hooked two fingers to the front of her cart, steering it toward the elevator, she felt flattened. Together they stepped inside the car. Darius pushed the button for the twenty-fourth floor. But while his head was tipped back to watch the numbers change, McGee pressed the button for the third floor. And when the doors opened there first, she rushed out, rocketing the cart before her. She was already removing supplies when Darius realized what had happened, sticking his foot out just in time to stop the doors from closing.

McGee’s second confrontation with Calice was even more unpleasant than the first. Calice cursed. Calice waved her arms. Calice made every threat she could think of. McGee felt genuinely sorry to have caused this woman so much trouble. But there was no room for regrets when so much was at stake.

In the end, it was good that Darius had come up with her. He was the one who finally managed to coax Calice and her cart onto the elevator, reassuring her she was right. A simpler task, presumably, than arguing with a woman incapable of understanding what you were saying.

As soon as they were gone, McGee hurried to Ruth Freeman’s office, skipping all the pretenses from the night before. She knew she had only a few minutes before Darius returned to his security cameras in the lobby.

She slid the leather case from her pocket. Inside, the picks looked like dental tools, thin and delicate and all neat in a row, shining and sterile. Holmes had told her the desk would have a wafer lock, like the one in her cabinet at home. So she did what she’d spent hours practicing, inserting the tension wrench and then raking at the wafers with the ball pick. After a couple of tries, she could feel the wafers rising, one at a time, but she couldn’t get the cylinder to turn. Her fingers were getting sweaty.

Holmes had prepared her for this as well. Deep breath. Then another. Remove. Start over. In again with the wrench and the pick. Again she felt the wafers move against the springs, but no matter how much she wiggled and pressed, the wrench wouldn’t turn. She wished she could call Holmes, but it was too risky to bring her phone. The Lucite clock on Ruth Freeman’s desk told her ten minutes had already passed. She had no choice but to get on with the cleaning.