It all started at the party, and Fitch was afraid it would end there, too. But then the next night Abby showed up at the door of his parents’ house and asked him to come for a walk. He’d wondered briefly if she was high on something and had mistaken him for someone else.
They walked for miles, eventually turning onto a dark industrial highway where Fitch had never been before. Abby told him the road reminded her of the one she’d been on the time she skidded on a patch of ice in her father’s BMW and landed upside down in the ditch. The first thing she did when the car finally stopped moving, she said, was take a drag from the cigarette, still smoldering between her fingers.
Abby smoked the entire time they walked, and each time she lit up, Fitch regretted having said no the first time she offered. Now it was too late. Abby said smoking helped her avoid thinking about drinking and all the other things she wasn’t supposed to think about, which might also have been why she took the time to explain the art of making espresso, how to build a bomb with gasoline and a snakebite kit, how she’d once watched her best friend drown in the undertow on the Gulf of Mexico, how she’d once traveled to Costa Rica with a married man and his infant son (who was probably actually someone else’s son), whose baby seat, on the return trip, served as a carrier for ten pounds of cocaine, the very cocaine that got her hooked, that would have led to who-knows-what had the man not disappeared, presumed dead, after a mysterious boating accident, again, in the Gulf of Mexico. Abby told all this in a tragic, breathless voice, as if her whole life were a sigh, and Fitch was in awe, not so much because of what she was saying but because there was so much of it, like a train with no caboose in sight, and you wondered how it was possible a single engine could pull it all.
At a certain point, Abby explained where they were going, but Fitch hardly cared. They were somewhere near the river. He would’ve followed her anywhere. When she turned onto a small gravel side road, he went with her, not giving it a second thought. The side road led to a factory, a sprawling compound, all lit up against a starless black sky. The gray-shrouded buildings resembled the sheet-covered furniture haunting Fitch’s family’s lake house during the off-season. Even the lights gave off gray light, even the windows were gray, even the dead trees were blanketed with a gray, dusty film, which it turned out had something to do with the concrete the factory produced. Or so Abby claimed. Peering through one of the dirty windows, they saw the main building was as large as an indoor stadium. It was two or three in the morning, and there were people inside working.
Fitch had thought the factory was only a stop along the way. Along the way to what, he didn’t know. As Abby told him about her curiosity, talked about how much fun it would be to break in and walk around inside, Fitch studied her small breasts, trying to decide if she was wearing a bra. He continued to follow her around the perimeter of the building, not realizing she really meant to go inside until he saw the open door she’d found — a dock door like the one April and Holmes and McGee had just gone into — a chink in the factory’s armor.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“There are people—”
“Are you afraid?”
“No,” he said, “but it’s late …”
“The door’s open,” she said. “It’s okay if the door’s open.” Abby took him by the arm, and Fitch did what he hadn’t thought possible. He resisted her. He said no. She must have seen that he was afraid, genuinely afraid, because without putting up a fight, she said, “Okay. Fine, okay.”
And they walked in silence away from the doorway, away from the factory, away from the gray trees. The seat of Abby’s jeans was worn and frayed in a broad smile just beneath each buttock. Fitch thought about how soft the material would be, how soft the skin beneath. By then it must have been three or four in the morning. It was either exhaustion or he was lost in her body, but he didn’t notice when she flagged down a car on the main road. She took his arm — he tingled slightly at the touch — and directed him into the backseat.
On the ride back to Grosse Pointe, she told the bearded man who was driving how she’d once been hitchhiking out west and was picked up by a guy in a blue Ferrari. Occasionally the bearded man glanced at Fitch in the rearview mirror. Abby went on talking about the blue Ferrari, about the police and the high-speed chase across the desert. The driver’s mouth, hidden somewhere in his beard, was silent.
The chase and the story went on so long that Fitch was asleep before it ended. He was still almost entirely asleep when the man dropped them off at the entrance to Fitch’s neighborhood. And as Abby walked away in the wake of the departing car, having said goodbye and goodnight, having untruthfully said she’d see him later, Fitch wanted to be able to take it all back, to do whatever she asked, but he knew it was too late, and anyway he knew he couldn’t. And although he’d managed to change a great deal about himself since he was fifteen, he was dismayed to discover, as he watched the loading dock of the HSI Building, that he was still a coward.
§
Myles removed the elevator’s control panel. The wires, each one as meaningless to him as the next, he disconnected. He flipped every switch. But he was careful to damage nothing. What he’d done to the door of the guard booth and to the phone and data lines had been unavoidable. They weren’t reckless. They didn’t destroy for the fun of it.
Taking one last look around the lobby, it struck him that the guard booth resembled an aquarium, the two guards a pair of ridiculous fish, blinking at him dumbly. He hadn’t forgotten their colleague who’d arrested him, cuffing him roughly. He supposed he should feel pleased with himself for having gotten them back. But as he moved toward the stairs, blocking the door behind him, he couldn’t help thinking about the cops and robbers movies he’d watched as a kid, how they always ended with the bad guys trying to climb their way to freedom — up stairs, up towers, up scaffolding, fences, whatever; they never seemed to realize the higher they went, the more difficult it would be to escape.
Of course, in this case it didn’t matter. McGee’s plan left no room for escape.
The floor tile was dull, the carpets foot-printed, the bathrooms littered with paper towels. Monday night, and the custodians were gone, Dorothy too. McGee had timed things so they would be. But by all appearances, the custodians had never been here in the first place. McGee checked several floors and found every one of the custodians’ closets locked. And that wasn’t alclass="underline" Holmes had spent a full minute trying picks on the door to the main office before realizing it was already unlocked.
“Let’s get to work,” McGee said, and she sent Holmes to the main filing room to get started opening up the cabinets. He came back a moment later wanting to know which ones.
“Anything new,” she said. “Within the last year. Starting with the factory.”
“How am I supposed to know which ones are new?”
“Look at the labels, the dates.”
Holmes led her down the hall and into the room and over to the cabinets and showed her row after row of tall metal cases from which the labels had all been removed.
For a moment McGee stood there with her hand over her mouth.
“Just start opening them,” she said.