"Sounds like construction equipment," I said.
"Deconstruction equipment," she said. "There better be something in that safe. This stuff isn't cheap." She was very sharp, each word clearly defined, coming out rapid fire. She was eager, hot, ready-to-go, bright-eyed and.
"Ah, man. You got your nose in it, didn't you?"
"Just a little bit. And a little bit for tomorrow. Today."
"Goddamn it." I turned away.
"Hey."
All right; I let it go, like I always did. LuEllen did a little cocaine from time to timeand, from time to time, more than a little. I hated the shit. I might smoke some weed after a long day on the water. I might even do a tab of amphetamine if there were enough reason. But cocaine, heroin, crystal meth. that crap will kill you. And if the dope doesn't, the dealers will.
We stayed in bed well past noon. LuEllen had been bouncing around all night, the residuals from the cocaine. Later in the day, she'd be sleepy. At two in the afternoon, I was up, feeling groggy, looked out the window. Another great blue-sky day. I cleaned up, and as I got out of the shower, LuEllen was finally crawling out of bed.
"You okay?" I asked.
"No." Still coming down.
"Go stand in the shower."
"Yeah."
When she got out, still a little groggy, I put her in the car, along with the equipment, and we went out for food. She began to revive, and we drove to Corbeil's place and sat across the street watching the reception area. The reception area, as shown on LuEllen's movies, had a single guard monitor.
"Look at this," she said. "You see where the guy is standing?" We were two hundred yards away, but I could see him through the glass of the reception center.
"Yeah?"
"The monitor is just to his left. Now watch." She took a cell phone from her pocket and dialed a number. The guard straightened, took a couple of steps to his right, picked up the phone.
LuEllen said into the phone, "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?" And clicked off.
The guy behind the glass shook his head, put the phone down, and went back to where he'd been standing before. He might've been reading something.
"So."
"So when he's answering the phone, he can't see the monitor," she said. "If the monitor is rotating between sites, there's a good chance that we wouldn't be on it, anyway."
"Take us ten seconds to walk inside and get to the freight elevator," I said.
"Mmm."
"But we won't know whether they've seen us or not."
"That's the fun part," she said. "The waiting."
When we left Corbeil's, we drove up to the Radisson, and LuEllen and Green spent time hitting golf balls on the driving range, while I went over the drawings again. Lane, looking over my shoulder, chewing on a raw carrot, suggested that one particular group of rooms in the Corbeil apartment could be for a live-in maid. It was labeled "guest suite," but it could have been either. We debated it for a while, and I finally pulled up the wiring diagrams. We decided that the questionable area had no wiring for a stove or for an electric clothes dryer, so it was probably a guest room.
"We'll have to call," I said. "Every fifteen minutes."
We started calling right after dark. The phone would ring four times and we'd get Corbeil's answering service. I was getting cranked on adrenaline, and LuEllen took a walk around the closed-down driving range and did a little cocaine. At ten o'clock, we left, LuEllen and me in one car, Green and Lane in the other.
I dropped LuEllen on the corner where we crossed the fence, and she was gone in an instant. I took the car around the block, parked, and crossed the fence myself five minutes later. LuEllen was waiting. We'd wrapped all of her tools in towels, and we were decently quiet as we moved slowly through the trees toward Corbeil's apartment. Halfway there, we stopped for a radio check with Green:
"Got us?"
"Gotcha."
We started moving again. There's a technique to the movementhunters call it "still hunting," and it takes some discipline. LuEllen and I learned it, separately, as a method of staying out of jail. You take three slow steps and stop, and listen. Then five more, and stop. You cover ground more quickly than you'd think, and quietly, and almost always hear other people before they hear you.
We took fifteen minutes crossing to Corbeil's, and it was all worth it, for our own self-confidence. If we were caught with LuEllen's black bag, there'd be no point in explanations.
At the edge of the golf course, we stopped under cover of a low twisted pine, and listened. In twenty minutes, we heard nothing, nor did we see anything move. Corbeil's apartment was dark, except for the IR glow through the night glasses.
"Gonna do it," I said.
"Got the reel."
She had an old Penn level-wind reel filled with fishing line. We'd attached a piece of a black 3.5-inch computer floppy disk to the end of the line, as though we were going to cast it.
What I was going to do was easy enough, but I would be out in the open: a risk. After checking around one last time, I stepped out of the landscape planting and walked up to the garage door, towing the line behind me.
Six inches from the garage door, a small electric eye looked across at its illuminator on the other side of the driveway. I taped the floppy to the edge of the metal case around the illuminator, so it was hinged, and could fall up or down. Then I walked along the side of the building into the back, as though I were heading for the golf course. A minute later, I sprawled out next to LuEllen.
Normally, a driver would pull up to the door inside the garage, and tap his radio-operated garage-door opener to send the door up. Electric eyes both inside and outside the door would make sure that the door would not come down on top of the car, should it stop for some reason. As long as the electric eye's illuminator was blocked, the door would stay up. The normal up-and-down cycle would not give us enough time to get inside, without taking the risk of being seen by driver of the departing car. With the electric-eye blocked, however, the door would simply stay up until we cleared it.
We couldn't just cover the eye, though, because if a car came from the outside, and the eye was blocked, the door wouldn't come back downand whoever had just driven into the garage would probably notice that. So we needed the hinged cover.
All of that was easy enough: we'd both done something like it in the past. But the wait was a killer. During the week, when we were scouting the place, a car might come out or go in every fifteen minutes or so. The longest we'd had to wait was a half hour. This time, we had to wait for forty-five minutes, but we lucked out. When the door finally went up, the car was inside the garage, heading out.
I put the radio to my mouth, and said, "Up yours." Green came back: "Sounds good to me."
I pulled the straps for LuEllen's black bag over my back, and got to my knees. The brown Town Car cleared the garage and started around the approach drive, the door still up. As it began to exit, LuEllen pushed the speed-dial button on her cell phone. When the car disappeared, LuEllen whispered, "Go."
We went. As we crossed the drive, she said into the phone, "George? Is this George?" Then, "Don't tell me this is a wrong number, buster."
The guard at the reception center, on the other end, eventually hung up, but by that time we'd walked thirty feet across the garage and were sheltered behind a concrete pillar at the freight elevator. The elevator doors were shut, but opened when we pushed the call button. A roof light came on, and I reached up and covered it with the black bag until LuEllen got the doors closed.
"Hatch," she whispered.
I made a hand stirrup, as I had for Lane back in Jack's house, and LuEllen stood up in it and pushed the elevator hatch askew. LuEllen peered up the elevator shaft with the night glasses. Looking for an infrared motion detector or anything else that might trip us up.
"We're clear," she whispered, and pushed the hatch up out of the way. I boosted her through, handed her the bag, and followed behind. Using the light of two needle-flashes, we put our Jumar climbers on the cable, replaced the hatch, and started up in the dark.