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.
3
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.
Behind it is a small utility closet, where electrical and telecom lines branch out from the conduits that carry them between floors to provide local service. There are junction boxes on the wall: gray for telecom, beige for electrical, flimsy white plastic for the security system. They’re mounted next to the vertical PVC conduits, and bundles of cable snake into and out of them. Carr pulls a penlight and a much handled sheaf of papers from his briefcase and flips pages to the plan of Molloy’s office.
The plans tell him that this closet is a recent addition, built when the original office space was subdivided. It shares a wall with another, larger utility closet in the suite next door-a hastily erected wall of gypsum board hung on metal studs. Carr raps on the board and it makes a hollow sound. He pulls a tape measure and a pencil from his bag, checks the plan, and marks a rectangle, two feet wide by three feet high, on the closet wall. Then he takes a headset out.
“You there, Vee?” he says.
“Where else?” she answers. “Everything okay?”
“Fine. Send them in.”
Carr looks out the window and watches Bobby and Latin Mike emerge from a rusting blue van parked nose out in the lot across the street. Each has a nylon bag slung on his shoulder, and each is carrying a Dell computer box. Even from six floors up Carr can see the tension in their strides. They wear jeans, dark T-shirts, and sunglasses, but neither really looks the part of IT geek. Bobby comes close-scruffy, freckled, pale, and slightly bloated, as if he lives on fast food-but Mike is a far cry. His heavy shoulders and battered, angry good looks transcend wardrobe and typecast him as a hardcase, a badass, a thief. Still, Carr knows they’ll pass muster with the listless guards in the lobby. They disappear into the Prairie Galleria, and Carr looks again at the van. He tries to make out Valerie behind the wheel but can’t.
