Thick as Thieves (2 page)

“Place needs something,” Valerie says. “The music sucks.” She’s smiling and her cheeks are flushed.

“He don’t want them noticing us, right,
jefe
?”

Carr leans back and looks up through the rafters and the open roof—at the hovering mosquitoes, the flickering bats, the washed-out stars above. A warm breeze works its fingers beneath his shirt. He’s had three beers, and there’s a pleasant foaminess somewhere around his forebrain. He knows where Mike is going and he’s too tired to follow. He keeps quiet but it doesn’t help.

“Like they took us for locals before she crossed the floor?” Bobby says.

Mike gives Bobby a low five. “We blend in,
cabrón;
we natives.” Latin Mike looks at Carr and frowns. “They get a bad vibe from us,
jefe.
”

Carr drains his beer glass. “Vibes are one thing; Vee makes us memorable.”

“Memorable for sure,” Bobby says, and winks at Valerie, who winks back.

Mike snorts. “Face it,
pendejo
, we fit better in Caracas or Recife than we do up here.”

Dennis wipes sweat from his face and joins in. “Down there we’re just
norteamericanos
—oil workers, contractors, whatever—nobody gives a damn. Just a few more Yankees passing through.”

“Speak for yourself,
yanqui
,” Mike says. “But the point is, what the fuck we doing up here? Too much homeland security horseshit—what we need the headaches for? It’s not like we have problems finding work.”

Carr sighs. “Not this kind of work.”

Mike downs half his beer and points a finger at Carr. He’s smiling, but with him that’s a tactic. “This kind of work is too fucking complicated—too many moving parts.”

“You used to worry about the same shit five years ago, if I remember right, but things turned out okay.”

“Damn straight I was worried. We had a good thing going, fishing where the fish were stupid—why mess with what works? But Deke was a man with a plan, and there was no arguing with him. Plus, I had faith in the guy.”

“And you don’t in me.”

“No offense,
cabrón
, but you’re not Deke.”

Carr leans forward. “Sure, Mike, no offense.”

“For chrissakes!” Valerie says, and slams her own glass on the tabletop. “Why don’t you two get a room if you’re going at this bullshit again. This was supposed to be a party.” Bobby smirks and Dennis giggles with relief. Under the table Valerie’s hand finds Carr’s thigh. He doesn’t jump, but it’s a near thing. Her palm is hot through the fabric of his jeans. Carr nods slowly and reaches for a pitcher. He proffers it across the table.

“Let me top that off,” he says, and Mike holds out his glass.

Valerie is right, Carr knows: they’ve gone around like this a dozen times or more, and there’ll be time enough to go around again. But not now. Now, the night before they work again, it’s time to drink. It’s a lesson he had from Declan, who was ever alert to the peril of idle hands.

“Busy is best for these nippers,” he’d told Carr. “Otherwise it’s all worry and gossip and chewin’ the arses off one another. Keep ’em busy, and when they’ve done their chores, get ’em pissed.” More than tradition, these outings are an antidote to the jitters and jumps and sheer stir-craziness that come to a boil on the eve of every job. But like so much else he’s learned from Declan, Carr knows he doesn’t do it quite as well. Pirate king, father confessor, jolly Jack Falstaff—Carr is none of these, though he has developed other talents: watchfulness, patience, an attention to detail—the talents of a planner, a technician. Not exactly inspirational, he knows. Not like Declan. Still, one does what one can.

Carr works a smile onto his face and fills glasses until the pitcher is empty. Valerie’s hand is gone now, and the music is louder, if unimproved. Valerie is dancing with Mike to something twangy, and Dennis watches them, tapping the tabletop in time to nothing Carr can hear. Bobby is eyeing the local talent. The peaceable kingdom. Carr finishes his beer. He leans back and looks at the wrung-out sky and thinks of limes.

Declan was cutting them the first time they met—a bet with a barman at a marble and frosted glass palace in Las Lomas. Teddy Voigt, Carr’s immediate boss at Integral Risk Associates, and the closest thing he’d had to a friend there, had arranged the get-together, not forty-eight hours after Carr had been fired and just forty-eight hours before Carr had to vacate his company-owned apartment—the graceful exit being one of the things Carr had relinquished when he’d hit his most profitable client in the face.

Hunched over the granite bar, Declan was a rhino at a tea party: red-faced, craggy, and ancient next to the silken youth that crowded the
club—more like one of the bodyguards loitering on the sidewalk outside. The paring knife was nearly lost in his fist, but the edge of the blade was a blur and the slices he cut were translucent green petals. Whatever the bet was, Declan won going away, and whatever the prize, Declan declined payment and instead bought the barman a shot of Patrón. Which, Carr came to realize, was essential Declan: good with bartenders, good with knives, good with tactical mercy.

Good at other things too, Carr learned as they bar-hopped across the leafy night, from Las Lomas to an English pub in Polanco to a hipster saloon in Condesa. Good at Gallic bonhomie and fatalistic, self-deprecating humor. Good at oblique but relentless interrogation. Good at large volumes of pricey tequila, chased by even larger volumes of beer. Good, despite how much he’d had to drink, at negotiating the unforgiving chaos of traffic in Mexico City.

Good too at throwing an elbow into a man’s windpipe, then breaking his wrist, for slapping a woman to the pavement. That took place in the doorway of their last stop: a workingman’s tavern in Santa María la Ribera that was little more than a dim hallway drenched in nicotine and sentimental guitars. The patrons seemed to take the violence in stride, if they noticed it at all, and the smile never left Declan’s face. He’d made his pitch to Carr at a table near the kitchen.

Carr comes back to the sound of breaking glass. Dennis and Valerie are on the dance floor but they’re not dancing. There’s a stunned look on Dennis’s face, and a local boy, a wide receiver gone to seed, is laughing and grabbing Valerie around the waist. Latin Mike and Bobby are on their feet, smiling eagerly as three doughy cowboys shoulder through the skittish crowd to help the wide receiver. Valerie looks angry, and looks at Carr, who has visions of broken bottles, flashing lights, the cowboys hauled off in ambulances, his crew simply hauled off.

“Shit,” he mutters, and hoists himself off his chair.

In the Ford, on the way back to the hotel, adrenaline has burned off the alcohol and left them with a different kind of buzz. Carr is at the wheel, always three miles over the limit, nice and steady, while Valerie works the radio. Dennis has his face in the rush of humid air from the open window in back, and Bobby and Mike are smoking and joking.

“Fucking Vee,” Bobby says, “that guy’s gonna be picking his balls outta his nose for a week.” He puts a fist forward and Valerie knocks it with her own.

“The way he mauled me, I should’ve kicked him again.”

Mike catches Carr’s eye in the mirror. “Three times was enough,
chica
,” he says. “Four would make you
memorable.
” He and Bobby laugh and Carr shakes his head and pulls into the hotel lot.

Dennis is pale and wobbly getting out of the car; he crosses the parking lot at a jog and disappears into the hotel. Valerie, Bobby, and Mike take their time. Mike lights another cigarette, props his elbows on the Ford’s roof, and looks across at Carr.

“Eight o’clock tomorrow,” Carr says. Mike and Valerie say nothing. Bobby looks at the low hotel, the rows of windows, mostly black, and the vestigial balconies. He nods absently and heads for the lobby. Carr follows, rubbing the bruises on his forearms and knuckles, not listening to Mike and Valerie, who stand by the car and speak softly.

Carr leaves his room dark and lets his eyes adjust to the yellow haze that seeps through the curtains from the sodium lamps outside. From the window he can see the parking lot and, if he cranes his neck, the car. He can make out Latin Mike’s shape, tall, with a plume of cigarette smoke above, and Valerie’s silhouette, very close by. Just how close? Carr can’t tell from his vantage, and in a while he tells himself he doesn’t care. A while after that he stops looking.

The air in his room is like an airplane’s: metallic, exhausted, and too cold. Carr switches off the AC, and a ticking silence descends. And then dissolves in the babble of a television from next door. Carr switches on the AC.

His work clothes hang in the closet, and his bag is packed but for his shaving kit and what he’s wearing. He strips off his jeans and polo shirt, folds them, packs them away, and looks around the room, rehearsing in his mind the routine for wiping it down: front to back, left to right, floor to head height. Then he brushes his teeth and gets into the shower.

When he comes out, Valerie’s key is on the desk. Her shoes are by the nightstand, her dress on the chair, and Valerie herself is in bed, under a sheet, with a hand behind her head and her blond hair fanned across the pillows. Carr can smell her perfume and her sweat, and the cigarette smoke that clings to her like cobwebs.
Just how close
?

“Is he going to behave himself?” Carr asks.

“He’ll behave tomorrow.”

“And after that?”

Valerie shrugs. “You think you can get to sleep?” she asks.

“No,” Carr says, and fastens the chain on the door.

The Prairie Galleria, a ten-story structure on Prairie Street, not far from Minute Maid Park, once housed, among other tenants, the Houston offices of a national bank, the Houston outpost of an international consulting firm, and half a dozen energy trading houses. Those businesses are gone now, bought out, broken up, or plain dead, but their bad luck is still etched on the building’s blue glass skin, which is stained and cracked in some spots, and missing altogether in others—patched with plywood sheets like rippled, gray scabs.

The current occupants are making the best of the current economy. They’re an eclectic bunch, including accountants, lawyers of various stripes—bankruptcy, tax, and divorce the best-represented specialties—a bail bondsman, two dealers in used office equipment, and several real estate liquidators. With the exception of the bail bondsman, none of these firms conduct regular business on Saturdays, so the lobby is quiet when Carr approaches the reception counter at 8:37 a.m.—just two uniformed guards who, Carr knows, work only weekend shifts. The cooling system is cycling low, and the air is thick and smells of someone’s breakfast. Carr keeps close to the right-hand wall, out of view of the single security camera. His deck shoes squeak on the marble floor and a line of sweat worms down his ribs.
Inhale, exhale, not too fast
.

Carr hitches up the strap on the nylon briefcase slung over his shoulder
and pushes the horn-rimmed sunglasses up on his nose. He makes a show of searching the pockets of his sagging blue blazer. The guards have never seen him before, but whatever curiosity they experience is overmatched by heat and apathy, and they barely raise their heads. Carr shifts the Styrofoam coffee cup to his left hand and searches more pockets. The performance settles him down and he nods at the guards and puts a eureka look on his face. He fishes the ID card from his pocket and slides it through the reader on the turnstile that stands between him and the elevator bank. The light on the reader blinks from amber to green and the barrier swings away and Carr walks through. He stops on the other side.

“My guys haven’t been in yet, have they?” he asks.

The guards look at each other and back at Carr. “What guys?” the bald one asks.

“IT guys, coming with new computers.”

“Nobody’s been in.”

Carr looks at his watch. “Should be soon. You’ll send ’em up?”

The bald guard nods, taps a finger on a keyboard, and squints at the text on the screen. “Yep. That’s Molloy, on six?”

“That’s me,” Carr says, and steps into a waiting elevator. He keeps his head down, away from the camera in the corner, and presses the button for six.

The sixth floor is warmer than the lobby, and quieter, and all Carr can hear after the doors close behind him is the elevator sliding down and the faint push of air from a ceiling vent. Once upon a time, Carr knows, the whole floor belonged to a law firm. It was where they kept their library and conference rooms and archived records, until the markets went south and everything else followed. Then the law firm shut down, the building changed hands, and the new landlords invested in new doors, new wiring, and lots of wallboard, and turned all that teak paneling and Berber carpet into five separate office suites.

Carr looks at the nameplates. To his right, two lawyers and a forensic accountant; straight ahead, behind heavy glass doors and a roll-down metal gate, in the largest suite on the floor, a company called Portrait Capital; and to his left, in the smallest office, Jerry Molloy, tax attorney in semiretirement, currently concluding a one-week visit to his Hill Country home. Carr removes his sunglasses, pulls latex gloves from his briefcase, and turns left.

Molloy’s lock is a joke—old and tired—and it surrenders after a few bumps with the power rake. The alarm is even worse—no motion detector, and just a single magnetic contact on the door frame. But Carr doesn’t have to fiddle it; he has the code, copied from the slip of paper Valerie discovered taped beneath Molloy’s desk blotter two weeks before. Molloy had gone out to lunch—without setting his alarm—and Valerie was ostensibly visiting a divorce lawyer one floor up. It had taken her all of six minutes to find it. A dispirited chirping comes from the smudged plastic box on the wall. Carr taps the keypad and the box goes silent. He locks the office door, wipes a sleeve across his forehead, and looks around.

There isn’t much to see. The space is partitioned into two rooms: the one Carr is standing in, with a small window, a small filing cabinet, a small desk for Molloy’s part-time secretary, and carpeting the color of car exhaust; and Molloy’s office, which is a larger version of the same. Both smell vaguely of old cigar smoke, and neither holds anything of interest to Carr. He takes off his blazer, folds it on Molloy’s desk, and rolls up his sleeves. Then he crosses to the far wall and opens a door.