An Ordinary Decent Criminal Part 28

Walsh was a senior officer and the police station had underground parking, but would he park there? I remembered the figures I'd read in the paper: there were a thousand plus cops in the city, at least three hundred stationed in this one building. How many patrol cars? Fifty, seventy-five?

They'd be underground along with the EMT vans, and the surveillance vehicles, and the motorcycles, and the supervisor SUVs, and the paddy wagons, and the identification wagons, and the mobile Breathalyzer vans, and the. And the. And the.

Not enough s.p.a.ce left for a sergeant to park, no matter how senior.

So I climbed the low concrete wall into the parking lot and started to walk up and down the ranks of cars. Everywhere there were cameras, small suckers the size of pop cans with wide-angle lenses to cover every inch of the structure. Undoubtedly tied to monitors downstairs, where the clerk gave out parking tickets and took money. I ignored the cameras, trusted my hat and high collar, and kept walking.

On the third level, parked near a walkway to the police station, was Walsh's car. Backed into a spot prominently labeled with a "Reserved" sign. Without a second glance, I walked until I reached the top of the structure, where I took the elevator down to the ground floor and out into the afternoon.

My head ached and I went in to the Chinese Cultural Centre to hide from the sun. And found myself staring into a gla.s.s case holding a terra cotta warrior from the Chin dynasty. A grim man with a spa.r.s.e beard and mustache. A serious man.

According to the plaque on the wall, the statue was part of an army buried by the first Chin emperor to protect him in the afterlife. One member of an army of thousands of men and horses, all made out of clay. All the men with different expressions. Different faces.

A black-haired woman came up beside me. She was wearing the basic black blouse and skirt of a university student and carrying a backpack over one arm.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair ..."

She looked at my incurious face and blushed.

" 'Ozymandias.' The poem. Magnificent statue, huh?"

"Gorgeous. Glorious."

The figure was dressed in clay armor and his hand was held out in front of him with the grip closed around air.

"Why isn't he carrying a weapon? He was a soldier, right?"

It was rhetorical but the girl answered anyway. "Oh. Originally they all were. The emperor had banned all weapons from the peasants so they wouldn't rise up against him. When his son took over, the peasants revolted. They had no weapons so they dug down to the clay soldiers and took their weapons. And overthrew the son."

She stared at the statue and bit her upper lip. I thought about what she'd said, about the arrogance that doomed the son. And then I left.

Outside, I ducked into an alley and changed hats and jackets before continuing. I had some useful stuff in my backpack, the Dremel with some spare heads, the binoculars, the electric toothbrush I'd modified, the cell phone, some spare hats, jackets, and sungla.s.ses. They'd have to do. Pulling on latex gloves, I put the toothbrush in my pocket and checked building fronts and angles before walking up to the front door of a small, brownstone, office building. The doors were open and I walked in and past the receptionist, who was signing for a package.

She didn't even notice me as I headed up the stairs, taking two at a time. On the third floor there were three businesses, an import/export business, a chiropractor, and an attorney. All busy. On the fourth floor there was a camp office, a travel agent, and a large bathroom at the front half of the building. Even luckier for me was the fact it had a window facing the parking structure about eighty yards away.

No one was in the bathroom so I took out the binoculars and focused them on Walsh's car. It was like I was in it and I started to hum to myself, repeating the incorrect words to an old Eagles song as I watched.

Scanning down, I looked into the tiny kiosk, where a uniformed security guard sat in front of three monitors. The picture constantly changed and every little while someone drove out and needed change or a ticket stamped and the clerk moved. Other than that, he was pretty much an inert lump.

I focused on one monitor at a time. First the one on the right. I'd watched the picture change five times when someone opened the door and I had to let the binoculars thud onto my chest while I washed my gloved hands, the quickest way I knew to hide the latex. A nervous bit of peeing later and a man in a white smock left and I went back to spying. The cell phone had a clock, which told me that it was almost three.

The monitor switched and I saw Walsh's car. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen was written "Unit 250" and something else, and then the screen switched. Starting at quarter to three, a torrent of cars filled the parking lot and the pa.s.sengers filed into the police station, the 3:00 to 11:00 shift coming to work. At five after three, a torrent of white men and women started to come out, the 7:00 to 3:00 shift leaving.

The monitor switched again and I saw Walsh's car with Walsh getting into it and the same words on the screen: "Unit 250-1509."

I put the binoculars away and took a walk through the rest of the building. On the eighth floor, I found an office in the back with no lettering on the door. I knocked briskly to be heard over a cla.s.s of tap dancers one floor down but no one answered. So I pulled out the toothbrush and pressed the head to the lock and flipped the b.u.g.g.e.r on, keeping my body close by to absorb the noise.

Bzzz.

It was quieter than that.

bzzz.

I'd modified the Plaque Buster 2000 by removing the plastic bristles and gluing a tiny disc onto the front plate. Into that disc I'd inserted fifteen tiny lengths of copper wire as thin as hair, each of different length and bent at different angles. Insert said copper wires into a lock and turn on the engine, which makes the wires oscillate, vibrate, and turn. These wires in the lock are now caressing the tiny little faces that make up the working surfaces of a lock. Give it a few seconds and by sheer chaos theory, the lock is opened and the wielder of the toothbrush is allowed entry.

Of course, the lock would be very scratched up but it would take someone who knew what he or she was doing with a magnifying gla.s.s to discover that.

The room beyond was small and dreary, filled with a dusty, oversized desk, armchairs, and a wooden filing cabinet. I relocked the door from the inside and walked to a closet in the far corner. It was the work of seconds to slip inside and crouch down on the floor with my knees drawn up to my chest. The door of the closet I left open an inch, both for air and because people are less likely to check a door if it's open.

Then I settled down to wait.

41.

At 6:30 a security guard made a very noisy patrol of the building, shouting as she went, "Closing down for the night. Everyone out."

Thirty minutes after that, I stood up and did some quick calisthenics in the middle of the room to start my blood flowing. My eyes had adjusted to the half-light from the dying spring day and when I was feeling limber, I prepared to go to work. For the sake of silence, I pulled off my shoes and put them in the backpack before making my way downstairs to the lawyer's office.

There was one more thing I needed.

With a jacket around the toothbrush, it was even quieter but the lock was better and it took a good six seconds to make my way into the lawyer's office. It was even brighter in the office with light coming in the windows and from a computer screen with its screen saver on. I checked left and right for a security panel that would indicate a separate alarm system but saw nothing. Behind the receptionist's desk there was a closet, a likely location for a panel, so I slipped over and checked but there was nothing and I relaxed.

Again I locked the door and checked the suite out: reception area, two offices, one much bigger than the other. Windows with alarm wires set into the gla.s.s. Conference room with a big wooden table and comfortable chairs for six people, and a big, wall-mounted entertainment unit with sliding dark wood panels.

Inside the entertainment unit was a big TV along with a VCR, probably for viewing video wills. It took fifteen minutes to figure out the wires and separate the TV from the VCR and stuff the VCR into my pack. Followed by all the necessary cables, like video and audio.

The security guard made another noisy, clompy, sighing, sweep of the building, this time with a big flashlight throwing a lance of brilliant light ahead of her as she went. I checked the cell phone and found it was 8:05 on the dot. When the guard had headed upstairs, I looked through the rest of the office and finally found a bright orange extension cord in the closet of the bigger office, tucked away in the back.

At 8:15 the guard stomped back down the stairs to her post. I waited but I could hear nothing else so I kept working.

I wrapped a jacket around the cord and tied it around the backpack, and then snooped around and found two blank VCR tapes still wrapped in plastic in the receptionist's desk. I took one and sat down to wait. At 9:06 the guard came down the outside corridor, shining her bright light into every office and then continuing upstairs.

At 9:09 I opened the door, slipped out, locking the door behind me, and moved down the stairs, keeping near the edges where there'd be less creaking. At the top of the second-floor landing I leaned down and checked just in case she had a partner, but there was no one. At 9:10 I was outside and sprinting away from the building.

"Nice night for a walk, huh?"

There were three girls and two boys, about sixteen, standing under a street light, and the first boy was grinning as he went on. "Nothing to wear, huh."

They all laughed at that and one of the girls brushed her short hair back from her eyes. "You forgot your shoes, man."

"Oh." I sat down and put them on and one of the girls gave me a hand up.

"Thanks."

I still had the tools I'd used so I walked a distance before tossing the toothbrush with the gloves wrapped around it into the muddy a.s.siniboine River, where they vanished like they'd never been. On my way back towards a big government building and a bus route, I detoured to check out a statue blocked from view by a concrete wall and found that it was supposed to be in commemoration of Louis Riel, one of Canada's more endearing madmen-slash-politicians-slash-rebels-slash-saviors. I stared at the twisted nightmare and then patted its flank.

"I know just how you feel, pal."

42.

Claire woke me up by sinking her fine teeth into the side of my neck.

"Okay. I'm awake."

She bit harder.

"No, really, I mean it. I'm awake. Honest."

She growled and shook her head and Renfield came over to sit about six inches in front of my face. He tilted his head down and to the side and flared his ears, and I realized that he was probably thinking that Claire's actions meant I was no longer Alpha male. His tail wagged half-heartedly and I figured he was possibly considering eating me. Claire let me go and Renfield slowly stopped wagging.

Claire looked over at me and smiled. "We've got a lot to do."

I cuffed the dog in the head and he rolled onto his back. Claire watched as I went down on all fours and grabbed his throat with my teeth and growled into his ruff.

"What are you doing?"

I spat fur free and got to my feet. "I'm showing the dog who's boss. And then I'm going back to sleep."

She cuffed me with an open hand and growled again, which made Renfield roll over and wag his tail. I laughed and kissed her. "Okay, okay, I've been wrong before."

She let me pull on my bathrobe before I went downstairs and midway down the dog caught up. I scratched him behind one ear. "Man's best friend, my a.s.s."

Claire forced me into the kitchen and started me boiling eggs. Many eggs, lots of eggs, six dozen, to be exact. She had bought them the day before from a woman who sold them out of the back of her pickup, fresh from her farm. No tax and no packaging. To boil them all at the same time I needed every pot we owned.

"This is an unreasonable number of eggs."

She stood beside the kitchen table and peeled potatoes into a garbage bag. "It is."

The last eggs went in and I turned the burners on full.

"Why?"

"Egg salad and deviled eggs. Two dozen for the salad and the rest for hors d'oeuvres. You need to cook them for eight minutes at a full boil."

I sighed and sat down to watch the clock. At least it wasn't a difficult job. Claire came over and put a cutting board on my lap along with a bundle of green onions and a sharp knife.

"Cut them fine."

After the eggs I started to make iced tea. Five gallons of the stuff.

"This is silly."

Claire had two large bricks of b.u.t.ter she was whipping, one with garlic and one plain, that were supposed to go with the six dozen Kaiser buns I was still supposed to go get.

"No. It's a barbecue. Hot out, remember."

It was hard to forget that while I was stirring boiling water and adding cups of refined sugar and chugs of honey. According to Claire, the lemon went in later. She finished the b.u.t.ter and went out to check on the meat she had hung in the back landing.

"Perfect."

She had bought beef ribs and cheap cross-cut roasts and flank steaks and all the worst and cheapest cuts of meat, and now she intended to serve them.

"Some help here."

With my help we brought them down and laid them out on the kitchen table. She made her final scoring cuts and then started piling them on specific plates, depending on the size and the length of cooking time. As she worked, she rubbed handfuls of garlic and rosemary into the meat and then started to shovel about half of it into the oven, at which point I complained.

"That's not a barbecue."

"You poor sap. It's not the cooking method that's important, it's the sauce."

She gestured at the stove top where a pot was slowly roiling. Then she carried the rest of the meat out to our hibachi, a huge charcoal grill that had been our first purchase together. She had apparently started the fire before she'd bit me, and now plumes of smoke and steam emerged as she forked the meat on. I was curious, she had made the sauce when I wasn't there, so I finally asked, "So what's in the sauce?"

She was putting meat on the grill and whistling merrily. "Secret recipe. Are you sure you want to know?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Rotting pork and beef fat along with really rotted anchovies, although minnows will do. All that gets simmered along with garlic, bay leaves, oregano, salt and pepper. Then white and yellow onions, more garlic and chili peppers. Then you add in tomatoes, dry mustard, and some dry red wine. To get a really good flavor you use hickory wood, which was why I started cooking the sauce two days ago."

"Minnows?"

"Minnows. The shiny ones are best."

"Gag."

She looked beatific. "I told you you didn't want to know."

She shooed me out.

I brought buns back from the bakery. "Much left to do?"

"Not really. There's the cutlery to set up and the Caesar salad to be a.s.sembled."

"So can I have a shower?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Wish ya would. Shave too, if you don't mind."

There was nothing to do but wait for the guests. And then they began to arrive and I had my hands full all over again. As I took coats from guests, I wondered if I was wasting my time. And as I wondered I worked, taking coats, smiling, playing the host.