“Inside there,” Lindahl said, “is the corridor, with the safe room on the left. The armored car backs down, they open the door, and they load on the boxes. Food deliveries go down there, too, and all kinds of supplies. But we have to get in a different way now, so you can turn the car off and we’ll go in that door over there.”
The door was near the front corner of the clubhouse, solid wood with
Parker said, “I’d expect more security.”
“Well, it’s a small track out in the country,” Lindahl said as he led the way down the dim-lit narrow corridor past closed doors. “It has two twenty-four-day meets, spring and fall, and it’s shut down the rest of the time. They’ve been wanting to sign on to a tote-board system so they could be open for betting at other tracks the rest of the year, but so far it hasn’t worked out. I think the population around here is too small. So the track never makes a whole lot of money, and there’s never once been a break-in in all these years. A couple times crazies tried to get at the horses, but nothing else. We go through here, it bypasses the main corridor.”
Lindahl opened a door on the left, and they entered a broad low-ceilinged room with eight desks neatly spaced on a black linoleum floor. A fluorescent halo around a large wall clock gave illumination. Most of the desks were covered with papers and other items, including a leftover bacon and omelet breakfast on a green plastic plate.
“This is where the accounts are kept,” Lindahl said, and pointed. “My office used to be— Damn!”
He had bumped into the wrong desk, causing the breakfast to flip over and hit the floor facedown. Lindahl stooped to pick up the plate, but the omelet stuck to the black linoleum, which was now a black ocean, and that omelet the sandy desert island, with the solitary strip of bacon sticking up from it, slightly slumped but brave, the perfect representation of the stranded sailor, alone and waiting for his cartoon caption. On the floor, it looked like what the Greeks call
“I ought to clean that up,” Lindahl said, frowning down doubtfully at the new island.
“A mouse did it,” Parker told him. “Drop the plate on it and let’s go.”
“Fine.”
Lindahl led the way across the room and out another door to another corridor that looked identical to the first. They went leftward, Lindahl still leading the way, Parker making sure to remember the route.
Lindahl stopped where the corridor made a right turn into a wider hallway. Pausing, he leaned to glance around the corner, then said, “Take a look. See the camera?”
Parker leaned forward. Some distance down the hall, on the opposite side, was a closed door with a small pebble-glass window and a pushbar. Mounted on the wall above the door was a light, aimed downward, flooding the immediate area and giving some illumination down as far as the end here. Above the light, just under the dropped ceiling, a camera was mounted on a small metal arm. The camera was at this moment pointed toward the other end of the hall but was moving, turning leftward toward the wall. As Parker watched, it stopped, hesitated, and began to turn back in the other direction.
Parker leaned back. “Tell me about it.”
“It does a one-minute sweep, back and forth. Once it comes back in this direction and starts the other way, it looks down here for just a few seconds. After that, we have forty seconds to walk down the hall and through the door. That’s the stairwell; no cameras. We go down in the basement. Here it comes.”
Lindahl waited, seeming to count seconds in his head, then looked around the corner and said, “Good.”
They strode down the hall, the camera continuing to turn away from them. Lindahl pushed open the door, and Parker followed him through, to a stairwell of concrete flights of steps leading up and down. A small light mounted on the wall above the door illuminated this section of stairs.
They went downstairs one flight to the bottom of the stairwell, where an identical door had an identical light over it. Lindahl said, “This is a little tricky, because if I open the door when the camera’s faced straight across the hall, the guards might see the light change on their screen, so hold on.”
He bent down to the small window, cheek against the glass and head angled back as he squinted up and out. “I can just see it when— Oh, good. Right now.”
He opened the door and immediately walked briskly to the right. Parker followed. The end of the hall down here was very close, closer than upstairs, with a metal fire door in it. As he walked, Lindahl chose another key from his ring, quickly unlocked the end door, and stepped through. Following him, Parker looked back and saw the camera still turning away.
Once this door was closed, the space they were in was completely without light. “I don’t want to turn the light on in here,” Lindahl said, “because the camera might see it, around the door edges, I don’t know for sure. Hold on.”
Parker waited, leaning against the closed door. He heard Lindahl shuffle away, then sounds of a key in a lock and a door opening, and then lights went on, ceiling fluorescents, in a room on the right.
Lightspill showed him the space he was in. Empty, and longer than wide, it had a concrete floor, concrete-block walls, and a windowless metal garage door at the far end, certainly the same one he’d seen from outside.
A forklift truck stood in the near right corner. When Parker moved to the room Lindahl had illuminated, the doorway was a little taller and wider than average, to accommodate the forklift. Lindahl was now fastening the gray metal fireproof door to a hook in the concrete floor, to keep it open.
This would be the safe room, a windowless square low-ceilinged space in concrete block painted a flat gray. To the left, half a dozen smallish oblong metal boxes stood on a mover’s pallet. Each box was marked with the logo
Lindahl said, “You see the setup.”
“Yes.”
“The track owns the boxes, so the empties always come back here. Every once in a while, one gets dented or the hinges warp, and they throw it out. They’re careful, they put them inside black plastic bags in the Dumpster.”
