April, Holmes, and Fitch watched McGee shuffle away, back in the direction from which she’d come. When the wheels of the shopping cart were barely perceptible squeals, they examined one another’s faces. April was the only one who managed a smile, and even for her it didn’t come easily.
Holmes unclenched his fists, untied and retied his shoes. How had he let McGee talk him into this again?
Fitch slid the phone from his pocket and waited for the text.
In the lobby, Myles crouched behind an enormous stone pot, out of which rose a tall, narrow tree with a shiny trunk and small, five-pointed leaves that looked like the hands of a child. Across the broad expanse of marble, this was the only cover.
Down the corridor behind him, a door slammed, followed by the jangling of keys. The guard coming back inside. Myles raised his eyes to the edge of the pot and watched the white guard enter the booth, joining the other one, the black one. Just as McGee had said he would, just as she’d planned.
No one would ever know, Myles decided. He could tell them anything. He could say the guards had separated, that they saw him and chased him out. Whatever. It occurred to him, as he watched the booth, feeling something in his bowels loosen, that he’d never actually thought he’d have to go through with this, that it would come this far. The one time he’d secretly hoped for failure, things had gone almost impossibly perfect.
“Are you ready?” Holmes said. “Any second now …”
Fitch checked his phone. He said, “It’s not too late to change our minds.”
But everyone knew it was.
Myles seemed to cross the lobby in a single step, sliding to a stop against the booth as if it were a base he’d just stolen. The guards must have heard or seen him coming. But before they could do anything, Myles had pressed Holmes’s nail gun to the door and pulled several times at the trigger. The nails went in deeply, effortlessly. Teeth clenched, he kept squeezing. Whoosh and pop, whoosh and pop. With each squeeze, the plan slipped further back in his memory. He found the sound of nails biting into the wood door unexpectedly pleasing, and he would’ve liked to keep firing them, happily ignoring what was supposed to come next. He might have gone on forever, had he not run out of nails.
From his backpack he removed the hammer, and with two quick blows he punched a hole in the wall of the booth. In spite of his hurry, he found time to note how uncannily accurate McGee’s instructions had been. Phone and data lines nakedly exposed. He just hoped she was right that the men had to leave their cell phones in their lockers.
With two quick snips, the ends of the wires separated like the sections of a drawbridge. My God, he thought, sitting on the floor with his knees to his chest, my God.
The text flashed onto the screen of Fitch’s phone. Beyond the wall, somewhere behind them, a barge was making its sluggish way up the river.
April parted her lips, mouthing goodbye to Inez, at home in bed.
Fitch, the one staying behind, thought April’s goodbye was for him. But he couldn’t seem to find the strength to return it.
Holmes was the first to stand, picking up one of the duffel bags, handing the other to April. “Well …,” he said.
Fitch smiled, offering what he hoped looked like encouragement. Or maybe optimism. Or anything, really. Just so long as April and Holmes couldn’t see his relief — relief that he didn’t have to go with them.
Somewhere in the bottom of the shopping cart, her phone played a marimba. McGee brought the rattling wheels to a stop. The text had taken longer than she’d expected to arrive, and she’d begun to revisit her second guesses about depending so much on Myles. And what about Darius? Had she been wrong to trust him, to believe him when he said he wouldn’t get in her way?
McGee had already circled around to the front of the building. The surface of the plaza was pale in the moonlight and looked almost like sand. Into the cart she tossed the wig and the outer layer of clothing, the filthiest. The stench had already spread to the bottom layers, but as she ran back around to the rear of the building, bag in one hand, phone in the other, she could smell nothing but the humid night-going-on-morning air.
* * *
They lined up on the same side of the stone pot, only just barely enough room for their eight combined hands. Together they managed to push the tree across the lobby, up against the door of the guard booth.
When they were done, Myles leaned against the pot, breathing irregularly, mopping his forehead with his sleeve. He hadn’t thought it would be so easy to get swept up in the excitement.
McGee reached out and squeezed Myles’s hand.
April checked the time.
Holmes opened the black case and ran his finger over the picks and the single gap, the one missing piece.
On the other side of the window, the white guard had drawn his gun, but he seemed to be having a hard time deciding whether to point it at Myles or Holmes.
“Don’t you fucking move,” he said, muffled by the bulletproof glass.
Darius stood still and silent beside him.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” McGee said.
Carl cocked his pistol, and even McGee couldn’t resist the instinct to duck.
“I’d like to see you try,” Carl said.
“This isn’t Die Hard!” Holmes shouted from his crouch. “You can put that away.”
“I’ll put you away.”
“Good lord,” Holmes said with a roll of his eyes.
“It’s fine,” McGee said. “Everything’s going to be fine.” But what to make of Darius’s expression, eyes flicking furtively in her direction? As if he had something to tell her.
McGee knew she’d taken a chance coming clean to him that night on the loading dock. But without his help, none of this would have been possible. He’d been the one to tell her what to do. It had become his plan as much as hers. But she’d made him promise not to tell his friend. And in return she hadn’t told Myles or anyone else about him. It was simpler that way. But what would she have said if she could? How could she begin to explain him? Darius’s loyalties were hard to untangle. In the time she’d known him, his commitment to clean windows and cobwebs seemed to run deeper than his convictions about the city. And his teenage girlfriend trumped them both. Though she couldn’t help noticing he’d stopped talking about Violet once he realized McGee understood English.
“It’s over,” he’d said the last time she’d asked about his affair, her final night of cleaning. “I told her no more. I told her I’m a new man now.”
A new man — it seemed to have become his trademark line.
The first time they’d met to discuss the logistics for tonight, she’d asked him, point-blank, why he was helping her, siding against an employer he seemed to adore. “That was the old me,” he’d said. “That was before. I’m a new man now.”
Later she’d asked if Sylvia knew anything about his plans with Michael Boni. Darius had said, “She can see something’s different — that I’m a new man.”
As if through repetition it might come true. And each time he thumped his chest where this new man apparently resided.
But tonight in the lobby of HSI, looking through the glass into Darius’s eyes, McGee sensed he was trying to say something different now, his head moving subtly side to side, as if he were telling her no.
McGee said, “Does everyone know what to do?”
§
Fitch had met her at a party. Her name was Abby and she was seventeen and alluringly unattractive. There was her long, dark, unclean hair, the bags under her smoky eyes, the pale skin, her emaciated body. She’d been in rehab several times. Alcohol and harder drugs, too. She explained it all to him indifferently, as if it were someone else she was talking about. And she told him about her friends — Angel and Bertrand who’d OD’d, Hua who’d gone straight, and Moss who’d killed himself with a shard of glass. She knew a cast of characters longer than movie credits.