Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

The hours that followed were some of the longest of her life. It wasn’t the cleaning she minded. It turned out she liked vacuuming, enveloping herself in the drone of the machine, how it cut out every other sound, the way being underwater reduced the outside world to a harmlessly diffused suggestion of light. But her mind kept returning to the lock, to what she’d done wrong. She replayed the sequence in her head, and in tandem she replayed Holmes’s lessons, looking for mistakes. But she was sure she’d done exactly the same thing tonight that she’d done with Holmes that afternoon.

She called Holmes as soon as she got home the next morning. It was five A.M., and he was sleeping. So was Myles, just a few feet away from where she stood with her phone.

“I need you to come over.”

Myles snuffled into his pillow.

“Are you kidding me?” Holmes said, the words coming out in a croak.

She told him what had happened, that she needed his help.

“I’ll be over later,” he said.

Through the phone McGee could see him closing his eyes. “No,” she said. “Now.”

Myles was sitting up on the futon, squinting. “What’s going on?” he said.

“Nothing.” She sat down at the computer. “Go back to sleep.”

* * *

“It must be a double wafer,” Holmes said. It had taken him three hours to make the twenty-minute drive. She smelled coffee on his breath, eggs and bacon. Myles had left for the store.

“What does that mean?”

“The things inside that make it lock,” he said. “They move in both directions, not just one.”

“So what do I do?”

Holmes picked up the black leather case from the steamer trunk. He pulled out what she guessed was a wrench, but different from the one she’d tried the night before, a pair of sharp tines poking out from one end. “Two-prong wrench,” he said, and then he pulled out a pick shaped like a snowman. “Double-ball pick.”

He showed her how to rake the pick along the wafers. “It’s not enough just to do the top,” he said. “You have to do both. Top and bottom.”

He sounded confident, but he’d been just as confident the day before. “You’re sure this’ll work?”

He was already walking toward the door. “I’m not sure of anything.”

McGee slumped down on the love seat. “Are there locks that can’t be picked?”

“Everything I know,” Holmes said, “I learned when I was fifteen.”

McGee ran her finger along the contours of the snowman. “What do I do if it doesn’t work?”

“I’ve given you everything I’ve got.”

McGee knew better than to trust the quiet. That night no one stopped her as she collected her cart in the basement. Not Dorothy, not Darius. No one escorted her to the elevator. And no one, not even Calice, was waiting on the third floor when she arrived there.

Maybe they’d all given up, but that didn’t mean they’d stopped watching.

Ruth Freeman’s office was only thirty paces from reception, but that night it took McGee an hour and half to get there. She was slow. She was methodical. She gave the third floor the most thorough cleaning of its existence. As she dusted, she lifted every stapler, every pen. She vacuumed not just around but even under every chair. She aspired to be the most boring thing ever seen on a security monitor. She wanted to make Darius, or whoever was watching, fall instantly asleep.

By the time McGee finally reached Ruth Freeman’s office, there was no reason for anyone to suspect anything at all. She stopped her cart, unlocked the door, grabbed her duster, and went inside, tools already sheathed in her pocket. She kneeled down in front of the desk. At first she felt as though she were trying to find an unfamiliar light switch in a pitch-black room. She ran her pick along every edge, feeling her way. Whatever was in there, it wouldn’t line up. She reached for the double-prong wrench, and then she slid in the snowman pick. It met no resistance. When she angled the tip, she could feel the wafers rising and lowering in their grooves. And then all at once, the wrench turned, and it kept turning until the lock clicked.

McGee’s breath fell short and shallow as she reached for the handle. The drawer rolled open on liquid wheels. There were folders inside. She reached in and touched them, just to make sure they were real.

Out in the corridor, she swapped her duster for the vacuum. She forced herself to move slowly, full, deliberate motions with pauses in between. On the threshold she stopped to wipe off the doorknob and run her cloth along the jamb. And then, at last, she was back inside, heading directly for Ruth Freeman’s garbage can. She removed the bag. It contained almost nothing, a few tissues and crumpled notes. Then she opened the desk drawer again. She pulled out the files and put them in the garbage bag. She carried the bag through the doorway, lowering it into the belly of her cart.

The photocopier was in a room on the same poorly lit corridor as Mrs. Freeman’s office. McGee stopped her cart just outside the door. Using another wastebasket for cover, she smuggled the files inside. With the papers snug in the automatic feeder, there was nothing left but to press the start button and hope. She closed the door, just as the first burst of green light leaked out from around the edges of the copier lid.

Back in the corridor, she turned on the vacuum. The drone drowned out the whoosh of the copier. Choking the handle with two clenched fists, she tried to keep her eyes on the carpeting, but there was an irresistible pull in those quick flashes of light in the crack under the door.

Even at her most optimistic, she’d never imagined the plan would work so well. Lately it seemed to be the nature of plans to go wrong. Or if not the nature, then at least the tendency. But maybe they’d been having so little success recently because they’d stopped taking risks. They’d fallen into routines. This was her reward for pushing, for making them go further than they’d been willing to go.

McGee drifted off. And when, minutes later, she gradually drifted back, she found herself staring, hypnotized, at the copier room door. She’d forgotten about the vacuum. She’d forgotten about her disguise. She was simply standing there dumbly, waiting for the copier to stop.

A shadow appeared along the edge of the corridor, moving.

The vacuum slipped from her grip.

As Darius came closer, his reflection skated across the surface of a framed landscape — a mountain, a valley, a distant lake. The fallen vacuum was still running, masking the thumping in her chest. Then Darius was beside her. Her hand was shaking. The vacuum vibrated, rattling against the baseboard. Darius bent over to pick it up for her, and he was about to switch off the power when she snatched the vacuum back.

Furrowing her brow, she bent into the machine, rolling it over and over again across the same few square feet, as though she and the carpet were engaged in a fierce tug-of-war. Darius leaned against the wall, watching the brushes spin.

“I don’t want — I hope I’m not making you nervous,” he said when she finally killed the switch.

McGee unplugged the cord and whipped it around the vacuum.

“I noticed—” He gestured over his shoulder. “I think you missed something in the reception. One of the windows …”

McGee hoisted the vacuum back onto its platform, then wheeled her cart down the corridor, speeding away from the photocopier room.

“But you’re doing fine, though,” Darius said, jogging to catch up. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

She stopped short, and he stepped on her heel.

“Did you do this where you’re from?”

They’d reached reception, and she headed over to the windows.

“You’re not — are you going to use that ?” Before she could spray, he’d wrenched the bottle from her hand. The first time that had happened, with Calice, McGee had only been able to watch helplessly. This time she had to uncurl her fist to keep from hitting him.