I wave my hand to catch Carson’s attention, point to the portrait, then to the wall. She nods. It’s easier to get the hanging wire into the hooks than out of them. I straighten the faux-Dorotea while Carson folds up the mover’s blanket with the tools inside it. I just hope the canvas doesn’t fall out of the frame while we’re gone.
The footsteps are getting closer. One guy; probably the regular patrol. A white glow reflects off the ceiling about halfway between us and the exit. It’s moving toward us.
Carson yanks my arm and tosses her head back the way we came.
We scurry through the serpentine toward the exhibit’s halfway point, where the stairwell is. We can’t run—too much noise—and the only light we can risk is Carson’s red-gelled flashlight. I have Dorotea in the cloth envelope. Every time I bump the canvas with my knee, I think, sorry, sorry.
The light blob’s maybe two turns behind us when we break out into the midpoint lobby. Carson quick-steps toward the corridor with the restrooms, freight elevator and stairwell. I can just barely catch up. I whisper “Wait!” as she starts to open the stairwell door.
“What?”
“We can’t leave. I only got half the nails in.”
“So what?”
“So the minute they take it down, they’ll know what we did.”
Even in the red lightwash, I can see Carson grimace. She pivots, whips her lockpick set out of her back pocket, then fiddles with the women’s-room lock. The guard’s footsteps are getting louder.
She pushes open the door, shoves me inside, then eases the door closed behind us. She hustles me past the double sinks to the two stalls. “Get in. Feet off the floor.”
I’ve been in a women’s restroom before (long story), but not to hide in. I close the door but don’t latch it, climb up on the toilet seat, squat, and settle Dorotea on the toilet-paper roll next to me. The blanket muffles the tools clanking next door as Carson does the same thing. Then we wait in the dark for the guard to catch us.
As we wait, I have time to obsess over Dorotea’s gallery. Did we leave anything behind? Did we mark a wall? It would’ve been easy to do, working fast in the semi-dark. Did the guard find a tool we forgot? Did any loose nails fall out of the frame? What if one of Carson’s black eggs pops off a camera?
A hinge squeaks. A flashlight beam dances around the floor, across the stall doors. I made the mistake of holding my breath once I got on the toilet, and now I really need air. Now’s not the right time. Which is louder, gasping, or passing out and falling off?
More footsteps. The light sweeps under my stall door.
Thomas Crown never had to hide in the women’s toilet. Please please don’t open it…
The guard’s not that thorough. The light streaks under Carson’s stall door. The footsteps walk out. The door closes. A key turns in the lock.
At least I can breathe again.
I don’t move until Carson snaps on her red light. If my knees had their way, I wouldn’t move then, but they don’t get a vote. I get to the door in time to see Carson flip a thumbturn, one of those little levers that throw a deadbolt. She flicks the red spot to Dorotea. “Leave that here.”
Every synapse in my brain screams no! It’s an act of will to lean the painting against the wall. Carson pushes me out, locks the door behind us, then grabs my sleeve and drags me back to Dorotea’s gallery. Spread out the blanket, move the tools, take down the painting.
The lights blink on. Already?
“Fuck.” Carson’s head snaps up like a bird dog hearing a pheasant take off.
“That was fast.”
“We got our hour.” She growls. “They’ll know we’re here in a minute.”
“Why then?” I’m busy looking for an MIA nail. Did the guard find it?
“They’ll check a camera they think’s down, find my cover.” She cranes over her shoulder. “What?”
“Found it.” I hold up the nail. It was below the empty spot where Dorotea was.
“Move your ass. If the PD isn’t here, it’s coming.”
I seat the stray nail and start knocking it in. “Is it two yet?”
She checks her watch. “Yeah. Hurry up.”
I can hear the OT clock ticking as I finish off each nail. When the last one’s done, Carson grabs the hammer out of my hand and buries it in my backpack with the rest of the tools. It doesn’t take long to get the portrait back on the wall—we’ve got lots of practice now—but every minute goes by in a second and I’m seeing reruns of my visions of guards swarming us.
Carson folds the blanket, mashes it into her backpack, then zips it closed. “Time to go.”
We rescue Dorotea from the bathroom. Carson cracks the stairwell door and presses her ear to the opening. After a moment, she eases the door closed, then shoves me back the way we came. “Move!”
“Why? What—”
“They’re coming!”
“They” slam through the stairwell door when we’re three turns away. Bootsteps, clinking metal, the swoosh of rubbing nylon. They’re way too close.
We slalom through the second half of the exhibit, running as fast as we can without making noise. It sounds like an anchor falling when the tools in my backpack clank. As the guys behind us get closer, the noise they’re making covers up our noise. Do they know we’re just ahead of them?
We hit the end of the building and the stairwell door. The cops or guards or whatever are maybe thirty feet back and gaining on us. The red sticker above the panic bar says “Alarmed Exit.” Carson pushes through anyway.
No alarm.
I hustle up the stairs behind her—how does up get us out of here?—and hit the fourth-floor landing just as our cop friends crash through the door below us. We freeze.
Heavy breathing. Two pairs of boots thunder down the stairs. The door slams.
Carson picks the lock on the door in front of us. I whisper, “Any cameras up here?”
“No. Come on.”
We’re in the admin offices, back by the restrooms. I have to trust that Carson knows how to get us out of this. It doesn’t make me feel any better, but at least I don’t have to come up with any bright ideas of my own. Not that I have any.
We hustle south down an aisle flanked by cubicles, with Carson’s red light leading the way. At the end of the aisle we reach a white-painted metal fire door. At eye level there’s a yellow triangle sticker with a lightning bolt—either Harry Potter’s in there, or high voltage is—with an “Authorised Persons Only” sticker next to it. Carson picks the lock.
It’s pretty crowded in there: three big A/C units, vented through the west wall by big aluminum ducts, and all the usual fire-suppression gear and water piping. I don’t pay a lot of attention, though, because I’ve locked on something I didn’t expect: a bookmatched set of fire doors in the east wall. The only thing that way is… the roof?
Carson says “Come on,” the first time either of us have talked out loud since we walked out of that closet about a year ago. She charges the doors, drops her pack, pulls out a long wire with a flat copper tongue at each end, then starts fiddling with the alarm contacts at the top of the left door, the one with the lever set and deadbolt. After a few moments, she carefully opens the door. No alarms, no flashing lights.
She tosses her backpack through the maybe two-foot gap, then slides out sideways. “Give me the picture.” I pass Dorotea to her. “Backpack.” I give her that, too. “Careful.”
Broken wire = alarm = cops. I’m very careful.
It’s drizzling out here on the roof. It won’t hurt Dorotea much unless we let her soak in it, which I have no intention of doing. The skyline’s pretty dead—marker lights and the orange glow from the mercury-vapor streetlights, but not much from windows.
I follow Carson south to a ten-foot dropoff onto another roof level. Carson shrugs off her backpack, sits on the ledge, then slides off and lands in a crouch. I drop her pack to her when she holds up her arms, then mine, then Dorotea, fighting a breeze that wants to turn her into a UFO. I jump and end up on my ass in a puddle, with my knees ringing like bells.
It looks like someone’s having a party to the west. Flashing lights, echoes of shouting.
We creep to the west edge and peek over the pipe railing into the courtyard behind the Mainwaring. There’s five cop cars down there, each with its strobing blue light bar going full blast. Two guys are face-down on the asphalt with their hands behind their backs. As we watch, a cop in a rain slicker hauls up one and hustles him into the back of a patrol car.
“Smoking Man’s people?” I say, not really a question.
“Not us. All that counts.”
Off on the east side of whatever building we’re on, four more cop cars are giving Commercial Street a disco vibe. The whole Portsmouth PD must be here. Clearly, we’re not going out that way. “Now what?”
Carson backs away from the edge. “Downstairs.”
Huh? I follow her to what looks like a two-hole outhouse with a fire door on the south side. She picks the lock and throws the door open.
I ask, “No alarm? No cameras?”
“Nope. Get in.”
“How do you know?”
She waits until she’s inside before she gives me The Look.
The stairway is low-ceilinged, steep, and narrow, with two sharp bends. I have to hold Dorotea upright and edge her around to get through. We come out in what looks like storage for a clothing store—rolling pipe racks with hanging bundles of clothes in white plastic dust covers, stacked cartons from China, Bangladesh and Turkey, a couple dismembered male mannequins, a beat-up filing cabinet, some “autumn sale” posters piled on a work table. Enough street light’s coming through the front windows that we can move around without hurting ourselves. Through the back windows we get the cop lightshow from the courtyard.
“Now what?” It seems like I’ve asked that a lot tonight.
Carson eases her backpack onto the table, sighs, and rolls out her shoulders. “Wait.”
“For?”
She boosts herself up onto the table’s edge. “PD got two suspects, maybe more. They’ll search the whole place. Find what I did to the cameras.”
“Those eggs—they’re opaque?”
“Uh-huh. Fits over the standard camera dome. Museum staff will look around, see nothing’s missing. Most of the PD’ll be gone before dawn. Just criminalists and detectives left.”
“And then?”
“Out the front door, maybe the back, whichever’s quieter. Store opens at 9:30.”
She sounds pretty sure about all this. I hope it works the way she says. “What about Julie? Isn’t she waiting?”
“Told her to go back to the hotel. Gave her a burner, said I’d text her.”
Huh. I find an office chair with a busted arm, slip off my backpack and sit. Sheer luxury. “What about the dudes the cops caught?”
“They’ll say they never got into the museum. Maybe they didn’t. Detectives’ll think there was someone else, maybe an insider, setting up the place for them. Spend a lot of time looking for a ghost.” She shrugs. “Glad it’s not my case.”
I pull my phone for the first time since Julie left the party. It takes a while to get a connection after I take it off airplane mode. “Ever miss it? Being a cop?”
A pause. “All the time.” She says this softly, almost to herself.
I have six text messages. Six? They’re all from a local number. I figure spam until I see the first one. “Carson? You told Julie to go to the hotel?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Shit. Shit shit shit. “She texted. It says, ‘Police talked to me. They have Gillian’s name.’”