Smash & Grab (20 page)

The hallway is really small. Anyone could come this way at any moment and I would never have enough time to duck back under the bed. I need to open the window and release the bars over it quickly. Spotting the release handle is easy, but getting it to work is not. I tug and tug, my heart in my throat, my whole body humming with panic. When it finally lets go, I nearly cry out with relief. I keep turning around to check the doorway, sure that Christian will be standing there, but he isn't. In the kitchen there is music playing, laughter, and loud, excited talk.

I slide the windowpane up and climb outside. I can't replace the bars, but I close the window. With luck, he won't notice right away. There are people in the front yard, and they nearly see me before I'm able to crouch behind the trees beside the window. Men clinking bottles of beer together in a toast. I take one last look, and then I turn and quickly scale the chain link fence, drop to the other side, and run for the van.

I don't breathe until I'm safely inside.

“Well?” Leo asks.

“I deleted the pictures on his phone. But I couldn't find anything else,” I say.

“The pictures were the main thing. The rest we can get. When you see him Saturday and he knows you have those pictures of him in the van, I'm pretty sure he'll spill the heist details,” Quinn says, smiling, obviously relieved to have me back safe.

“Yeah, sure,” I say, but after what I just saw, I'm not totally convinced I'll be able to blackmail him back.

LL National looks different
at night. Mysterious, even though I know it's just a building. Four sides with lots of glass and row upon row of cubicles inside.

We're in the back, on the top level of the parking garage. The whole crew, Oliver leading the way, a lunatic grin on his face, happier than I've ever seen him. Two opportunities in less than a month to mess with his dad's work sites. He's in heaven.

I, on the other hand, am having trouble keeping it together. Breaking into Christian's house this afternoon really messed with me. I don't know what I was expecting it to be like, exactly, but what I found was a total surprise. He's this regular guy with a family who love him and a dad who seems to be just as messed up as mine. And seeing it all, I can't believe he's a coldhearted criminal. It doesn't add up. But then, I believed my dad was a good guy, too, and it turned out that everything I believed to be true was a lie. I'm not sure I know how to tell anymore. What's real and what's not.

“You ready for this?” Oliver asks as we make our way toward the giant trash bin positioned beside the building. The Left Coast Construction logo is everywhere. Even the long white trash chute hanging from the eleventh floor is covered in the logo.

“I got it all prepared this afternoon. We're set to go. Used my dad's security pass. Even wore his glasses. I don't know whether to be proud of myself or skeeved out because I looked enough like him that no one asked to see my ID.” His grin slips a little when he mentions his dad, and I wonder if things at home have gotten rough again. Usually when they do, he comes to our house and bunks in Quinn's room, but lately our place isn't much better.

He hoists himself up into the trash container, a giant rusted-metal rectangle almost full with layers of old insulation, warped pieces of metal, crumpled-up McDonald's bags. He lifts the end of the trash chute and points it at us. Lolling out of it like a tongue is a thick, knotted rope. “This is gonna be fun,” he says, his dark black hair bobbing as he balances on top of the trash.

“You want us to climb?” Whitney stares at the rope and then puts her hands on her hips. “All the way up there?”

Oliver nods.

“But that'll take us forever. And I'll get calluses,” she complains.

“No. Not forever. I timed it. The first person takes the longest. Thirty minutes. But then once I get the winch working up top, it'll be like three minutes apiece, and if two of you go up at the same time, it won't even be ten minutes total for the five of you. Just grip tight, okay, because falling back down that many floors would be a bad idea.” He ducks under the trash chute, lets it swallow him up. “I'll go first. See you losers at the top.”

We watch the chute vibrate and wiggle as he works his way up. It looks alive, like a giant tapeworm or something, burrowing into the trash bin.

We sit in the shadows by one of the cranes and wait.

Almost precisely thirty minutes goes by, and then Quinn's phone starts vibrating.

“Who's next?” Oliver's voice floats out of the phone, making him seem farther away than just eleven floors.

I opt to go second to last. Quinn chooses last. Whitney and Elena are first and second. Leo shrugs his way into third. We line up like we're at the playground waiting to go down the slide—or, in this case, up. There's a swishing, nylon-rubbing-nylon sort of sound, and a knotted rope drops out of the bottom of the chute, and then a second, unknotted one. Whitney corrals them to her chest.

“He says you should attach yourselves to the first rope and use the other one to help climb so the winch doesn't get overloaded,” Quinn tells her and Elena, holding the chute above her head for just a moment so he can kiss her. She touches his cheek with her fingers, then waits as Elena secures a belt-type thing around her waist and clips it to the knotted rope, just above one of the knots, before she does the same. Quinn lets the chute drop over both of their heads, and I can hear them start to move upward, the winch attached to the knotted rope doing most of the work, so the chute barely ripples this time.

“You think we'll really find anything up there?” Quinn asks once Leo starts up and it's just me and him on the ground.

“We need to,” I say.

“But will it really make much difference? In the end, I mean. Dad'll still go to jail. Even if Harrison was in on it. There's no denying he's guilty, Lex. You get that, right?”

I don't want to believe it, but after eavesdropping on a few of the late-night phone conversations my mom's had with my aunt, the evidence is overwhelming.

“I want him caught, Quinn. If our family goes down, shouldn't his? Shouldn't every single person involved hurt the same way we are?” We're losing everything. My dad can't come home because we couldn't make bail. We've had to liquidate what we could to help pay for Dad's defense and for our expenses, but we're losing our house and maybe our motorcycles. Definitely Dad's Mercedes. Mom had to let our housekeeper, Anh, go—the one person in the family besides Quinn who really looks out for me. Now she's with another family, and I'll probably never see her again. Then there's our college savings accounts. I thought that money would carry us for a while, but the truth is, it probably won't last the summer. I gave up the one thing I really cared about, and it won't save us. Mom is selling all her jewelry and staring at the classifieds every morning, brooding over them. I can't think about it for long without wanting to cry.

And then there's Harrison, still on top, buying fancy necklaces for his wife and walking around the financial district like he doesn't have a care in the world. It'll make me crazy if we can't figure out how to expose him for what he is.

The rope sails down again, and this time Quinn and I crawl into the chute. It's dark—not pitch, but close. I tug on the rope to let Oliver know we're ready, and then up we go. It's a weird sort of slow-motion thrill ride, the reverse of our BASE jump.

The eleventh floor is wide open. No interior walls, a scratched-up concrete floor, the ceiling a maze of wires above my head. There is plastic tarp covering the open outer walls where the glass has been removed so the crane can bring supplies straight up. It makes this sucking flapping noise as the wind hits it. A creepy, desolate sort of sound. I take a cleaning-crew cap and uniform from the pile Oliver got for us. It's a one-piece jumpsuit kind of thing, so I slip it on right over my clothes.

We'll all go up to the twenty-first floor together, but only Quinn, Leo, and I will hit Harrison's office. Elena, Whitney, and Oliver will pretend to clean the cubicles and other offices, keeping watch for the real cleaning crew.

“Okay, picture time,” Leo says, waving his hand at us to gather closer together.

“Didn't you get enough of us coming up the chute?” Quinn asks, sighing.

“Not of us all together. Come on, you'll thank me later.” Leo sets the camera on a stack of drywall, checks the timer, and runs over to join us.

“Weirdest BAM photo ever,” Oliver says, shaking his head, and by the time the flash goes off, we're all cracking up.

We take the stairwell the whole way up. Ten floors. The elevator's too risky because we can't be sure where the real cleaning crew is. My legs are burning by the time we reach the twenty-first floor. I make a mental note to up my cardio workouts. Every sound we make echoes down the stairwell. Quinn takes point, easing open the door leading out to the offices inch by inch.

“Clear,” he whispers.

We have two bright yellow cleaning carts waiting beside us on the landing. Oliver was impressively thorough in arranging it all. There are mops and brooms corralled in each, next to identical trash containers with cleaning products hooked onto the sides. We haul them out of the stairwell and start making our way through the maze of hallways and cubicles to Harrison's office. I can feel the security cameras watching even if I can't see all of them. We keep our heads down and our caps low over our faces.

“Be fast,” Elena whispers when we reach the split in the hallway. Whitney and Oliver follow her into the first set of cubicles to their right and start emptying the trash cans.

Quinn and Leo follow me to Harrison's door. It's locked.
Keys. Crap.
One detail Oliver couldn't cover. I was hoping that since the offices get cleaned every night, they'd be unlocked. Custodial probably has a set—which doesn't help us any. We can't exactly call down and ask them to bring the keys up.

“Would his assistant keep a key?” Quinn asks.

Leo gets busy dusting the office doorframe, effectively blocking Quinn and me from the security camera's view. There's only one in the hallway outside, pointed at Harrison's office and the office next to his.

I hurry over to the assistant's desk and start opening drawers. There's just paperwork, gum, a couple of Post-its with random phone numbers scrawled on them, some makeup, and female supplies in the first two drawers, but in the third there is a set of shiny silver keys strung onto a Coach key chain. I hurry to Harrison's door. The fifth key is the right one.

Leo scoots the cart closer to the door, positioning it with the mops and brooms smack in the center, taller than him so they take up the top half of the door. Then he empties the assistant's trash can and sets it on the cart so that it blocks the middle part of the open door. The cart covers the rest, and we are effectively out of sight.

We rush into Harrison's office. It's different at night. Not creepy, exactly, but the picture of Harrison that is hanging on the wall puts me on edge. It's like he's watching us.

Quinn pulls out the baby powder, makeup brush, and little condiment dish he brought. He pours some powder into the dish and then gathers the tiniest bit of powder onto the makeup brush and dabs it onto Harrison's computer keyboard. We hold our breath and watch the powder settle onto the keys. The problem is that most of the keys have been heavily used. There are fingerprints everywhere. Quinn paces the room, thinking. He consults his phone, where he's keeping a running list of all the things he knows about Harrison. He tries Harrison's birth date first, then his wedding anniversary date. No good. The birth dates of his kids. The birth dates of each of his parents. “He's too smart to use something easy,” Quinn murmurs. He stares at the computer for a long time, and I start to fidget. We need to hurry.

“The elevator just went up to nineteen,” Leo calls from the outer-office doorway. “Elena thinks we might have ten minutes before we need to go.”

“What is it?” Quinn chews on the inside of his cheek. “Hey, go look through his assistant's desk again.”

“Why?”

“He might've given her the password. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not. But I don't know what else to try.”

I rush back over to the desk and look for anything that might resemble a password. I'm about to give up when I lift up her keyboard and discover a whole list of passwords taped to the underside. Some or all of them are probably hers, but…

Quinn goes down the list, trying them. It's there—the third one down. We're in.

I help Quinn sift through emails on conferences and meetings, entire files detailing bank procedurals, but there's nothing that might help us.

“We're done here, Lex.” Quinn leans back in the chair and rubs his face with his hands. “He has some personal banking records here, sure, but with no unusual deposits, no email trails that I can see right off the bat that hint at anything. Even his work files are clean. Too clean. He's got to be hiding something, simply because everything is too tidy, know what I mean?”

I lean against the wall and start knocking my head against the plaster. There's nothing in his home office, nothing here. Where is he hiding everything?

“You're out of time and we're at a dead end here. If we had months to monitor him, maybe, but days? It's a lost cause.”