They got to the side of the building and began walking around it, looking for the fire door. There were several private security guards inside. Shane and Alexa could see them in the lobby looking out through the glass at them.
"Gimme your hand," he said.
She immediately reached out and took his, strolling lazily beside him, putting her head on his shoulder. They looked like two lovers going nowhere special, nuzzling and feeling it again: a new sense of closeness.
Shane was acutely aware of her perfume, and in that moment, while they were pretending to be lovers, he felt something strange and confusing and powerful stir inside him. The feeling was undeniably strong but totally inappropriate in the middle of a hot prowl, so he bundled it up, stowed it on a top shelf in the back of his mind, slammed the cupboard shut, and saved it for later. He turned his thoughts instead toward the fire door coming up on the left.
She took her latex-gloved hand away from his and tried the door. It was locked.
"I have keys," he said, removing his little leather pouch of picklocks.
"No way," she said, looking askance at the burglar tools.
"Stand back. I'm not as good as Ray was, but I'll have this open in a sec." He went to work on the lock while she turned and watched the terrain behind him, making sure no slow-moving Long Beach patrol car came upon them unexpectedly.
After a moment he manipulated the last pick in the lock and felt it hook down into the tumbler inside the door. He was ready to turn the knob. "Okay, all set," he said.
She turned back to him. "What about the alarm?" she asked.
"What about it?"
"Won't it go off when we open it?"
"Here's the way I have this figured," he said. "If there's an alarm on this door, then when I open it, it will damn sure go off. If there isn't one, then my thinking is, it won't."
"Asshole."
"Of course, if it rings, we need to fall back and think up a new strategy. I'm not good with alarms; I haven't had time to perfect that talent yet."
"Let's go. Do it," she said, and watched breathlessly as he put his hand on the knob.
He felt the lock turn and then pushed the door open.
Nothing!
They ducked into the dimly lit concrete stairwell and closed the exterior door.
"That's amazing," she said. "Why wouldn't they have this door rigged?"
"They did. I unplugged it yesterday afternoon when I was here. The unit box is in the sub-basement." He smiled while she glared. "Come on, lighten up. I wanted you to experience the whole thrill."
Then he turned and ran up the stairs, taking the first flight two at a time.
It took them almost five minutes to get up to the roof, then they were standing in the reflected glow of the five-foot blue letters while Shane went to work on the roof door.
"This leads right down to the lobby on the top floor," he said.
"Is this alarm unhooked, too?"
"I hope so. The panel was a little confusing down there. I had to straight-wire a lot of shit."
"So you are an expert on alarms."
"Ray always said the picks are worthless if you set off alarms."
"Some probation training you got."
He finally had the door open, and the two of them went down the one flight to the fourteenth floor. The interior door to the helicopter stairs was unlocked, and in another minute or so, they were inside the steel-and-glass offices of Spivack Development Corporation. The only thing missing was the blond ice goddess behind the reception desk.
They moved through the lobby into the back, where they found themselves in a long, narrow hallway decorated with artistic schematics of past Spivack developments. Huge hotels and major airport buildings hung in stainless-steel frames. The renderings were crisp line drawings with pastel watercolors. They passed out of the corridor into a huge drafting area. "I wonder where Tony Spivack lives," Shane said.
After a few more minutes of searching, they found his office, fronted by a vast secretarial area and a set of mahogany doors with ANTHONY J. SPIVACK engraved on an antique silver plaque.
Shane turned the doorknob and pushed it open. They entered an ornate, palatial office: red carpet, embroidered drapes, and a mixture of furniture styles; French armoires and steel-and-glass tables populated the room. Shane moved to the immense plate-glass window that overlooked the city of Long Beach. He could see the domed city hall and, way off to the west, the Queen Mary sparkling with lights. Beyond that, he knew, was the Long Beach Naval Yard, which was magnetic north because everything pointed to it.
"We've gotta go through his files, see if we can find the project drawings," he said, still looking out the window, struck by the view: the shimmering Pacific Ocean beyond a ribbon of moonlit sand.
"Shane, look at this," he heard her say.
He turned, and she was no longer in the office.
He found her standing in the adjoining conference room. There was a magnificent 1:16 architectural model on a ten-foot-long side table. It covered the entire tabletop and was ten by five feet. Shane approached the huge model and saw that it was the architectural layout for the five-hundred-acre Long Beach Naval Yard project.
The plaque read:
THE WEB
The centerpiece of the development was a football stadium with two rings of luxury suites. It was perched on the property, a big concrete oval, its escalators arching away from the perimeter like eight long spider legs. It dwarfed everything. Engraved over the stadium's modern entry was a tiny sign:
"The L. A. Spiders. A football team," Shane said. "Sandy told me Logan Hunter was trying to bring an NFL franchise to L. A."
"This is about footballshe said, appalled, sounding exactly like every housewife in America.
"It's really not about football, it's about real estate." He studied the rest of the development. The thirty or more architectural models placed on the site plan were beautifully made and exquisitely detailed. They dotted the five-hundred-acre site. There was an amusement park with roller coasters and Ferris wheels; five luxury hotels, each one next to the water; shopping malls and restaurants. Little catamarans were stuck in the "water," racing along motionlessly up on one pontoon, their tiny sails billowing orange and red against aqua-blue plaster waves.
Shane was trying to put it together. "Okay," he said slowly, using her words. "It's called police work… Connecting the dots… Ray Molar and his den blackmail the Long Beach City Council with hookers at the party house in Arrowhead. A video festival occurs that forces Carl Cummins and the embarrassed city officials of Long Beach to give the naval yard over to L. A. and Mayor Crispin in return for some bogus water rights. The mayor gifts the property to Spivack in return for Spivack's promise to develop it for the city of L. A. as a home base for a new sports franchise. Spivack funds the actual physical development in return for the property. Logan Hunter gets the NFL to award L. A. a new football franchise, and everybody, from top to bottom, gets silent ownership in the deal and walks away multimillionaires."
"And the H Street Bounty Hunters were just a fun idea that got included for ethnic diversity?" she said.
"Okay, that's a wild piece. I don't have that connection yet, but I like the rest of it."
"Could be…" She sounded less sure.
"I remember reading once that the real money play on these sports franchise deals is the land, not the team. These guys get billions of dollars' worth of land from L. A. for free in return for financing the project and building this thing. Most of the public doesn't bitch, 'cause they don't care about the land; they want the team and a class A stadium to go with it. Sure, you end up with a roomful of environmentalists and hotheads protesting, but it's on page ten of the Metro section… Nobody gives a damn about them because pro football is coming back to L. A.!"