And then April would never lie to her again.
Too brief, Holmes thought, too brief. Fifteen minutes hadn’t been enough time to check everything he needed to check. His tools. What a disaster it would be to get inside and realize he hadn’t brought the right tools. It was too dark now and too late. His eyes remained fixed on the building, but his mind built an image of the inside of the black case where he kept his picks. He could picture them, their curves and edges, but he couldn’t be sure each one was in its place.
Wedged between the others, Fitch leaned his head back against the wall. Trying to clear his mind, to quiet the thumping, he found his thoughts drifting to a girl. There were so many girls he’d forgotten, and he would’ve been happy, as he stared at the open door of the loading dock, to think of any of them, with the single exception of the one girl who came to mind. Even in his memory her face wasn’t pretty. She’d been seventeen, two years older than him, and when she walked, her hips had swayed like a woman’s. But what he remembered most acutely, besides her body, was that she’d made him feel like a coward. And now, with the HSI Building looming above him, Fitch was beginning to feel that way again.
As the three of them waited, a solitary figure turned the corner at the back of the building, approaching the loading dock. They leaned forward.
April, smiling, whispered, “McGee.”
Fitch closed his eyes.
Holmes squeezed his case of picks and licked the sweat from his upper lip.
Everything was going according to plan. The three of them had scaled the wall and dropped down at the end of the alley unseen. McGee was right on schedule, and her disguise — or at least what April could see of it from fifty yards — gave her reason to smile. McGee’s clothes were tattered, a wig of dirty blond dreadlocks swinging from her head. Hunched and shuffling behind a shopping cart, she moved so slowly that, to the guards inside watching her through the cameras, she must have seemed like a slug captured by time-lapse photography.
But would they really buy it? Fitch wondered. Wouldn’t the camera pick up the shopping cart’s modifications? What if the wig slipped? What if they recognized her? And then McGee suddenly stopped, and Fitch’s stomach clenched. What if she lost her nerve?
McGee bent over to pick something up — maybe a coin — and put it in her pocket. She resumed shuffling. Fitch could hear her cursing at the wobbly wheels of the cart, which seemed to be following a course of their own. What if the cart overturned and Myles fell out, tumbling from the hole they’d cut in the side? McGee paused beside the loading dock. Despite his conviction that the plan would go horribly wrong, even Fitch had to admit he never would have noticed Myles slipping out the side of the shopping cart, had he not known what was coming.
Slide, pull, glide. Slide, pull, glide. Three fluid movements: slide out of the cart, pull himself up onto the dock, glide into a corner of the receiving bay. Myles could remember only the anticipation. His body had performed without his mind, had carried him into the shadows, leaving no memory of the steps as he’d actually taken them. Only the anticipation: slide, pull, glide. Then wait.
When April opened her eyes, it was over.
For Fitch, it seemed minutes had passed between breaths.
As he watched Myles tuck himself inside the receiving bay, it came back to Holmes in a flash, the pick he’d forgotten: the snake tip. Of course. He’d taken it out of the case to clean and wipe down with silicone. In his mind he could see the empty slot where he’d forgotten to put it back.
The crashing of the shopping cart into the side of the Dumpster was not unlike a gong, and it seemed to Fitch an appropriate commencement for such a doomed undertaking.
Unable to look away, April winced as McGee clambered up the side of the Dumpster and rolled, feet first, inside and out of sight. McGee reappeared again a moment later, a lumpy trash bag raised above her head. With a tremendous grunt, she shot-putted the bag into the alley, where it slumped awkwardly, end over end, before softening to a stop. The heavier bags she had to push up and over the side, like a beetle rolling a ball of dung.
April rose up slightly, balancing on the balls of her feet. She might have gotten up entirely and crossed the parking lot to help her struggling friend had Holmes not held her back. But then McGee must have found some lighter bags, because suddenly the trash went sailing farther out into the parking lot, expanding the radius of the mess.
With each broken bottle, each rattling can, Fitch slunk deeper into the shadows along the wall. The noise seemed to go on forever. Over time McGee’s yells grew softer, and bags flew out of the Dumpster with less frequency.
Fitch began to wonder if the guards weren’t watching, or if they recognized such an obvious setup. He put his lips to April’s ear. “Maybe we should call it off.”
The sound was so faint to April that it was as if the air itself were speaking. Fitch’s bottom lip brushed against her lobe. She shivered, shook her head, pointed. One of the guards — the white one — stood in the doorway of the loading dock. Where the guard trained his flashlight into the mouth of the Dumpster, Fitch and Holmes and April could only just barely see the top of McGee’s head.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing!” the guard yelled.
April had to force herself to remember the guard was speaking to McGee, that this was all part of the plan.
The booming voice of the security guard was Myles’s cue. Looking through a gap in the stack of pallets, he saw the man at the end of the dock, facing the other way. The path was clear to the next door, the one that would get him inside the building. To reach the door was easy, a simple matter of putting one foot in front of the other. But Myles’s feet were still. All the guard had to do was turn around, catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of an eye, hear the squeak of Myles’s sneakers on the smooth concrete floor. That door was the point at which his first real crime would begin. Trespassing, breaking-and-entering. What was to stop him from getting shot? A black man in a dark corner. It was ridiculous.
But after everything he and McGee had been through together, how could he say no, no matter how badly he wanted to? The two of them didn’t often talk of love. Their relationship rose above such banalities. So instead here he was again tonight, using the most complicated means to say the simplest of things.
The corridor on the other side of the door was so bright that at first Myles saw only spots of light. Momentarily blinded, his other senses awoke. Over the charging of his heart, he caught the pin-drop silence. He smelled an absence. Where were the bleaches, the concentrations of fake lemon and pine? McGee had said the custodians cleaned the lobby and the ground-floor corridors first, but the dull floor at his feet showed a day’s wear.
“I swear to God.” Darius’s partner hovered at the end of the loading dock, one shirttail untucked from his pants, surveying the mess McGee had made. “You ever come back,” Carl said, “I’ll shoot you till I run out of bullets.”
He cut at her with the beam of his flashlight as McGee rattled the shopping cart away. She’d never felt so filthy. The hunch she’d affected to make herself look older pressed her nose toward her reeking clothes. And she was tired. Tired of getting yelled at. She was ready to do some yelling of her own.