Angels of Detroit (28 page)

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.

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.

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.