The reception in the “Stealing Beauty” gallery would be okay if I wasn’t wound up tighter than a tick on crack. There’s lots of free Champagne, for one thing. I get one last shot at my favorite pieces in the exhibit as I trail along behind Julie, who’s in full Gillian-schmoozing mode. She’s still giving me the cold shoulder. She’s really good at it.
But Carson’s way late. She hasn’t answered my texts. Did the shadows get her? If they did, what would they do with her? Should I be out looking for her, or call Olivia to find her?
She’s smart, I tell myself. She’s tough. She can take care of herself.
Right?
Or is she still pissed enough at me to hang me out to dry? Would she do that? I hope not. Hope’s not really a plan, though.
If she doesn’t show up soon, this project is over.
A photographer’s drifting through the crowd, snapping the happy party animals. Security cameras are one thing—I’ve never seen a still from one that wasn’t a piece of shit—but a focused, well-lit, full-face color portrait is a whole other animal. Julie may survive ending up on the museum’s website, but I totally can’t afford the publicity. It turns into a dance, with me pivoting away from the front of his lens and Julie mastering the just-in-time head-turn.
Tovorovsky’s here, too, hovering around Dorotea in the back half of the exhibit. He’s had enough time to research Gillian by now. Maybe he already knows who she really is. I can’t risk letting them meet again. I see him just in time to steer Julie the other way and I spend the next hour keeping her in the exhibit’s front half, waiting for an explosion.
Time goes geologic on us. I swear the clock runs backwards a couple times. Every security camera I walk under looks like it’s glowing… and watching me.
When I’m right on the edge of grabbing a full bottle of booze and chugging it, Carson shows up. Her fitted black cocktail dress isn’t nearly as extreme as the clingy blue jersey one in Milan, but it’s eye-catching anyway: knee-length, sleeveless (her arms are as chiseled as her calves), slit neckline. She’s a very healthy woman.
And she’s so calm and normal (that is, Carson-normal) that my insides unkink enough to let me breathe a little. I never figured Carson would have a calming effect on me, but right here, right now, she does.
Four hours ‘til showtime.
We send Julie back to the hotel at nine and slip down the midpoint stairwell. Carson’s heels sound like little gunshots as we charge through the basement. It’s all pipes and conduit, bare fluorescent strip lights, work benches, machinery, concrete everywhere. We end up at a locked metal door painted a medium gray. She growls “Get in” once she picks the lock.
It’s a closet. Am I going to end up in a closet on every assignment?
The back and right walls are lined with metal utility shelves piled with cans of paint and assorted junk. Six feet wide at most and shrinking every second I look at it. I force down an extra-deep breath and edge in. Before I can even get oriented, the door clunks shut. It’s like the inside of a mineshaft.
Carson’s phone flashlight app pops on. Now the place looks like the inside of a horror movie, all contrasty bluish-white glare and weird pitch-black shadows. All the color’s blown out of the room. She shoulders past me and drags a dark backpack off the bottom back shelf. “Sit.”
I take off my suit coat and settle on the concrete floor. I can’t relax, though; from the inside, the closet looks about half as big as it did from the outside, and it’s still shrinking. I try to watch Carson instead of the walls closing in. She squats, zips open the backpack, then drags out rolled-up dark clothes and a pair of dark gym shoes.
Then everything turns black again.
For a few moments, all I can hear is my own breathing and a vague rustling where Carson should be. “What are you doing?”
“Changing. Not doing this in a dress.”
I hear a zipper, then more rustling. The thought of Carson stripping down to her underwear right next to me distracts me for about two seconds. Then I’m back to obsessing about being buried alive. Phobias suck.
Carson’s in her ninja costume when she turns on the light again. I pull off my tie, fold it in half and roll it into a coil while she puts away her dress and heels. I’d like to change, too, but my backpack’s in the Volvo station wagon Carson got for us. “How’d you get that in here? The Polish flower girl again?”
“Uh-huh. Came in with the caterers.” She sits with her back against the blank wall, then shuts off her phone.
Dark. Again. I fumble my tie into my coat’s breast pocket, lean back against the wall, and try to think about things that make me happy. Julie? That ends up being all about her being mad at me now. Gianna? Well, I’ve mentioned what that’s like. Beer and puppies get me only so far. I swear I can hear the walls grinding closer. I could turn on my phone, but that’ll just show me how small this place really is. When it’s dark, I only imagine how small it is.
I whisper, “Carson?”
“What?” She sounds irritated.
“You should know… Julie told me something Friday night.” I repeat what Julie said about the wills and her owning Dorotea. Maybe I drag it out because I don’t think about the damn closet while I’m talking.
Carson’s quiet for too long, the kind of quiet that I think happens in the eye of a hurricane. Finally she grumbles, “Fuck.”
“Is this bad?”
“What do you think?” She makes a noise like breaking a rock in her throat. “Should’ve seen it. Nobody works that hard for something they’re not gonna get.”
“What do we do?”
“What we don’t do is fuck the client.” I can hear her stew for a while. “Bowen gets his picture. Princess can sort it out—”
“But it’s hers—”
“Not our circus, not our monkey.” That crackles as it flies past me.
Of course, Ida picks this moment to barge in and say, you should have tried. “If Bowen finds out it’s Julie’s, she’ll never get near it again. That’s not fair. Her grandmother left it to her mother, who left it to her. If we take it away from her, we’re…” …screwing her like I did Ida is what I don’t say, but what’s in my head.
Carson sighs. “Look. I get it. She should have it. It sucks.” Her voice is quieter, with fewer sharp edges. “We don’t do ‘fair.’ We get the client what he wants. We get a paycheck big enough to drink our conscience away. That’s why I hate knowing who the client is.” Pause. “Took me time to get used to it, too. If that helps.”
It doesn’t. Talking about it probably isn’t going to change Carson’s mind, though, so I let it drop… for now. So now it’s both dark and silent. When we’re talking, I can ignore what the walls are doing, but when it’s quiet, it feels like I’m alone, which freaks me out more.
Suck it in. It’s fine, you’re fine. Carson’s here. The walls aren’t moving. You’re fine.
Bullshit, I’m fine. The closet’s the size of a shoebox.
Suck it in… suck it in…
“What’s wrong?” Carson’s voice startles me, not because it’s loud—it’s only a couple notches above a whisper—but because it’s so sudden.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Bullshit. Sounds like you’re running a marathon.”
If I tell her, I’ll never hear the end of it. “It’s nothing.”
She makes an exasperated noise. “You sick? Look, you barf, you’re licking it up.”
Before I can scratch up an answer, I hear footsteps outside. Rubber soles, heavy steps. They turn a corner—I can hear the pivot—get closer, stop right outside. I hear the snick of Carson’s metal baton telescoping. My heartbeat fills my ears.
The doorknob rattles. I levitate. Then I remember: it’s locked.
The feet walk away.
It takes a while to scrape myself off the ceiling. Even Carson needs to take a few deep breaths. I don’t relax until I hear her baton click back into its shell, and then I don’t really relax, I just go back to listening to my heart try to claw its way out of my chest.
There’s rustling, then something touches my forehead. I barely stifle a scream while I bounce off the floor.
“Ease off!” Carson sputters. “For chrissake. What’s wrong?”
That was her. Her hand on my forehead. “I don’t do so well in small places.”
She sighs. “Claustrophobia?”
“Um… yeah.”
“Since you were inside?”
“Yeah. I mean, I was always a little claustrophobic, but it’s a lot worse now.”
“I’ll bet.” Her voice is softening. That helps all by itself. “Want the light on?”
“No. That makes it worse. Sorry.”
Carson sighs again. “Everyone’s scared of something. C’mon, sit.”
I ease back down on the floor and try to find a position that doesn’t shut off too much circulation. There’s scratching, then I feel a hard bicep press against my softer one. Her hip bumps mine. “This better?”
She’s warm and solid and safe. My stress level starts nosediving in seconds. “Yeah. Lots. Thanks. So, what are you scared of?”
No answer, of course. She settles in. “What helps?”
“For this? Talk. It distracts me. Look, I’m sorry, I—”
“No worries. You talked to me, out at the lab. My turn now.”
I remember that—her out in the bushes after midnight, watching the Mainwaring’s lab, me in the car a block away. What goes around…
“What you wanna talk about?” Carson asks.
This whispering in the dark takes me way back to when I was little and I shared a bedroom with Dianne, my big sister. I could talk to her about anything and she’d never make fun of me or use it against me or tell on me. We moved to a bigger house when I was eight and I got my own room, but we’d still sit in the dark and talk. Dianne’s still the only person I trust completely. There: something that makes me happy.
“Anything. Whatever.” That doesn’t get her going. “Are your folks still around?”
Pause. “Yeah. In Edmonton. Yours?”
“Yeah. They’re divorced now. I never thought they’d do that.”
“Wish mine would.”
“Why?” No answer. “What happened with Aurora?” Still no answer. “You know, if we’re going to talk, you have to say something.”
“Yeah. Nothing personal, okay?”
We sit there for I don’t know how long. I can hear her breathe, feel every time she moves. When I turn my head, I can pick up what’s left of her soap or shampoo, something that smells like sage. This is way more intimate than I ever imagined getting with Carson. Not that it’s bad or anything, just… unexpected.
“What’s the plan? You never told me.”
She shifts and rotates her shoulders. “Get to the power panels at one. Throw all the breakers. Put blown fuses in the main shutoff. Lock the panels with new padlocks. They gotta cut the locks and fix the disconnect before they can power up again. Call the Princess, get the fake and your tools out of the car. Go up the stairwell to the third floor. You swap the picture. Go out the back. Princess picks us up and we’re gone.”
I roll that over in my head. “It sounds so simple the way you tell it.”
“One problem.”
“Only one?”
“One big one. They’ll know we’re here.”
She’s right—that’s a big one.
“I’ll block out the cameras on the way. We get forty, maybe fifty minutes of dark and no alarms. An hour if we’re damn lucky.” If I listen hard, I can hear I hope. “Power comes on, they see what I did to the cameras, they call PD. Then we got guards and cops inside looking for us.”
There’s nothing about anything she said that makes me feel good. It’s hours away and my stomach’s already knotting up. “Why wait until one? We have to be out by two.”
“Because we have to be out by two. Other guys should be here by then. Maybe PD catches them, not us. Thinks they did all this.”
Figuring the odds gives me a headache. “If this works, we’re buying lotto tickets.”
“Princess better come through, or we’re fucked.” She had to say that, didn’t she? “Get some Zs. We got three hours.”
Sleep? Is she kidding? “You have an alarm?”
“Set my phone. Go to sleep.”
Maybe ten minutes later, Carson’s deep, even breathing tells me she’s out. I’m still wired like I’ve had ten Red Bulls. My brain’s full of all the ways this can go sideways. When that doesn’t keep me busy enough, all my spidey senses are out waiting for the walls to start closing in again, or the guards to bust in here with dogs the size of rhinos.
I need to go to sleep so I don’t drive myself nuts. I doubt it’ll work, but I close my eyes, lean my head back against the wall, and try to match my breathing to Carson’s. In. Out. Innn. Ouuut. Innnnn…
Next thing I know, Carson’s shaking me. Her phone light’s on; she’s wearing her black hood. “It’s time.”