Infinite swirls and slabs of white, shards of headache-inducing gold, echoes of feet in hard shoes. Ben kept his head down and tried to move painlessly through it all, every part of him exhausted, the Guggenheim’s weird endless circular ramp seeming like a torture device designed for someone who’d had a rough day. Andy had been gone before the crew arrived back at the station after the school fire and wasn’t answering texts. Ben had steadfastly avoided Matt by taking over some of the cleaning duties in the station kitchen with the night crew, who were doing a big chili cook-up before coming on duty. Dishes, suds, blackened pots. No one hung around him. They scraped and dumped their plates guiltily and left. It suited him just fine.
Now he was wearing a monkey suit and calculating how many swirls of the gallery he needed to do to get to the figure of Matt, who was standing in front of some sculpture mounted on the wall. Hairy black intestines, bulges and pockets of spray-painted burlap and chicken wire. Sea creature or human colon? The sculpture reminded Ben of burned air-conditioning exhaust hoses, their blackened coils and frayed edges. The Evil Slinkie, they called it, a trap built to ensnare probies. Matt looked from the sculpture to Ben and pointed at him not with the Finger of Death this time but a tiny glass of champagne.
“What? You don’t own a tie?”
“No. But nobody’s going to notice. I’m in and out.”
“The champagne is free.”
“I don’t even know what this shindig is raising money for.” Ben glanced at the crowd gathered at the bottom of the massive spiral. Suits and sparkly dresses. “I dumped a twenty in a bucket on the way in. I could be contributing to the Dogfighters of America. You come to these things?”
“I get invited. All the chiefs do. Donna makes me come if she gets to the mailbox before me.”
“You like it?”
“Sure. We come, I drink too much and refuse to make small talk, we fight all the way home. It’s a real treat.” Ben could feel Matt watching him, eyes boring a hole in his temple. “You’re gonna get over the Andy thing. Fast.”
“‘That’s an order,’ huh?”
“You proved to me today that you’re a dangerous combination, you two,” Matt said. “Just like I predicted. One scream from her and you dropped everything. Abandoned your post. In the army, they’d shoot you for that.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You’re not gonna hit Engo.”
“Oh yes, I am.”
“He was acting on my direction. The test was my idea.”
“He really banged her up. Her shoulder—”
“She’ll be fine. He’s done that stupid pressure-point thing to Jake.” Matt rolled his eyes. “Remember? At that funeral. Jake was lifting sandbags two days later. I needed Andy to be really screaming.”
“You’re sick.” Ben’s ears were on fire. He could feel the fury in his throat. “I should have dropped the two of you, right after.”
“You’re funny, you know that? You should do stand-up.”
“I could do it right fucking now.” Ben’s words were icy. Something hot flickered in Matt’s eyes. “Fuck up this whole thing for you with the lawyer, with the baseball cards.”
“Try it.” Matt smiled. They watched each other, that awful smile playing on Matt’s lips, Ben thinking about how that would play out. Publicly, with Command learning a firefighter had dropped his 9/11-first-responder chief in a public art gallery. Or tried to, and got his skull fractured for his efforts. And privately, with Matt never having had a swing taken at him in his life without paying it back tenfold. “That’s what I thought.”
“Fuck you,” Ben sneered.
“What’s to say it wouldn’t have gone the other way, Ben, if I kept her on the crew?” Matt leaned in. “You guys break up six months down the road. Maybe she cheats on you. One day a staircase falls on her and she lets off her PASS, you hear it and think, Fuck you, bitch. You deserve to have your ass hairs singed off.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Ben grabbed a champagne off the tray of a waiter walking by because there seemed to be nothing else on offer. “Where’s the lawyer? Mr. Ick or whatever the fuck.”
“Ichh.”
“I want to do this and get out of here.”
“Should be here any minute.”
They walked on a little, Matt leading. Stopped by a white canvas with small yellow squares painted all over it. Ben could see some of the pencil marks under the yellow squares.
“You have any idea how easy it would be to forge that?” Matt pointed to the painting.
“No.”
“What about what it’s worth?”
“No, Matt. I don’t know that either. I don’t sit around googling what modern art pieces are worth so I can feel like a piece of garbage. Why do I want to know that I earn peanuts endangering my life every day to save innocent civilians, while guys who went to art school make millions of dollars painting little yellow squares?”
Matt smiled at him. Matt loved rants.
“I know what it’s worth.” The chief showed Ben his phone, the Google page. “Five point three. You believe that?”
“Why do you care?”
“Why do you think, dumbass? You have the painting forged. You set up a gas leak. Cut the power, lights, everything. Waltz on in. Do the old switcheroo. Fence the real painting and bank the bucks.”
“I’m sure it’s not that simple.”
“Might be fun finding out, though.”
Ben looked at him. “This is all bullshit, isn’t it? This job being your last one. Donna being your last wife.”
“Donna is my last wife.”
“Yeah. You kinda said that three times already.”
That spark again in Matt’s eyes.
“All I’m saying is, I think you’ve got a bug for capers.” Ben shrugged. “No different from Jake. Every time he goes all in on something, he knows he’s either gonna live it large for the next three weeks or take a hit that might end up killing him. You’re both mainlining the danger and you’re not gonna quit because you just wake up one day and decide to.”
“Oh and you’re not the same?” Matt snorted. “You’re not mainlining the danger?”
Ben didn’t answer, because of course he was. Some unevolved part of his brain still got off on the unpredictability of the jobs. It was a boot-pounded track cut into his mental forest when he was a kid and he had no idea if his mother was going to come home at night cuddly and sorry and full of promises or high and frantic and paranoid that CIA agents were following her on motorcycles. Or at all, even. Matt’s brain was almost certainly crisscrossed with the same toxic rabbit runs. Chasing the self-loathing of seeing their criminal handiwork in the newspaper the day after, the internal wretchedness that followed any interaction with a cop at all, of which there was a daily supply. Engo was hooked on their extracurricular deeds because his mother was probably Aileen Wuornos and he’d had to eat seven other fetuses in the womb just to be born, like a tiger shark. They all knew why Jake kept coming back: because when Jake tasted something he liked it was all-you-can-eat for eternity. Nobody knew or cared why he was like that, because probies were only half human anyway.
A man appeared beside him, taking the Yellow Box Painting Appreciation Society membership to three. Ben looked at the lawyer, at his sun-spotted and bald scalp and his yellowed irises and his dusty suit, and snarled at Matt.
“You gotta be kidding me. This is the guy?” Ben turned back to Ichh. “Has your client got room in his hospital bed, Father Time? Because you two could save a lot of walking around for the nurses. They get sore feet, you know.”
“Yes. Well. That’s part of the reason I’m doing this, Mr. Haig.” The lawyer sipped a beer he’d scored from somewhere, licked foam off his upper lip. “If I weren’t so busy, I might very well be on my deathbed, alongside my client Mr. Freeman. I have pancreatic cancer.”
Ben looked at the painting, held his champagne. He wasn’t a cancer connoisseur but he knew Patrick Swayze had had the pancreatic kind and it hadn’t ended well. He would have said something comforting but he was too far in to back out right away so he just said to Matt, “Oh good, he knows our names.”
“He could have found out easy enough,” Matt said. “I thought about calling us Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown and Mr. Green but I’m not an asshole.”
“Matt—”
“And he knows my name already,” Matt said. “I came recommended.”
“By who?”
“Does it matter?”
Ben chewed his lip. Because yes, it did matter, but he could put the pieces together himself anyway. Matt had three ex-wives and a lot of assets to hide so that he didn’t have to disclose them during divorce settlements. Whoever had recommended Matt to Ichh probably knew there was some plan afoot, but would be kept at bay by the dirty work they’d done for Matt. Ben pinched his brow and tried not to feel afraid. The lawyer watched him, waiting to be verbally assaulted again. Somebody came onto a microphone downstairs. Muffled pleasantries and modest applause. “So what is this, huh? You lived your whole life by the book and now you want to do something dirty before you kick the bucket?” Ben asked the lawyer. “Don’t tell me. The trust fund. Harvard Law. Fancy-schmancy charity fundraising things at art galleries. You’re bored out of your mind. Have been your whole life. You’ve decided you want to feel a tingle in your prick just once before you meet your maker.”
“Not exactly.” The lawyer stared into his beer foam. “I went to Yale. And my life is, at present, full of unwanted adrenaline-pumping action.”
“It is?”
“I find myself in the midst of an all-out war with my ex-wife over our wealth and assets. She’s going to ‘take me to the cleaners,’ as the expression goes. Every time the phone rings, my heart is in my throat.”
Ben watched the little man examining his drink.
“If she were kind, she would just delay it all,” Ichh said. “Wait for nature to take its course. But she was never kind.”
“You’re a lawyer,” Ben said. “Can’t you defend yourself?”
“She’s a lawyer, too. A better one. She went to Harvard. But it’s the genetic propensity toward unkindness that makes her so successful. She won’t stop until I’m skin bare. She’ll take the pigeons nesting in my roof gutters, and all their droppings, too.”
“The guy’s got a kid outside the marriage.” Matt nudged Ben’s elbow with his own. “Wants to make sure the boy is set up after he’s in the ground and his ex has come and taken all the blue out of his toilet water.”
“From what Mr. Roderick tells me, you might be able to relate to that?” Ichh looked at Ben with those big, dry, chemo-ravaged eyes. “Having sacrificed so much for your brother?”
Ben turned to his boss. For the first time in their relationship, Matt shrank a little. “It just came out.”
“You can save all the chumminess for Matt,” Ben said to the lawyer. “You’ve got more in common with him than me. He also has exes who would love to see him mangled in a heavy-machinery accident.”
Matt choked on his champagne, recovered, and hacked out a laugh.
“Talk to me about the key,” Ben said. There was more applause downstairs. “Where is it kept?”
“My client keeps everything of real value in a safe in his home office, and to my knowledge the key to his safety-deposit box in Borr Storage is in there.” Ichh gave an uncomfortable shuffle of his feet. “Mr. Roderick floated the idea with me of taking a picture of the key, from which you could make a forgery.”
“You can do that, right?” Matt nudged Ben. “You take the photo, get the dimensions, get your guy Paxi over in Jersey to machine up a replica key in his workshop.”
“It’s not that straightforward. But okay.”
“This forgery,” Ichh went on, “would hold the place of the original key while you used it to open the safety-deposit box on the night of the … the, uh…”
“The burglary,” Ben said.
“I can’t even say the words.” Ichh sighed. “But I don’t think that will work.”
“Oh. So you’re the ideas man now, huh?” Matt nudged Ben again. “He’s the ideas man.”
“It’s just that I’ve dealt with the Freeman family for the last thirty years. I’ve seen the children grow up. They have a lifelong skepticism … uh, a mild hostility, even, toward me.”
“Why?” Ben asked.
“Well, I suppose every time their father has decided to scratch their names off the will, I’ve been his obedient servant in that quest.” Ichh shrugged.
“That’ll do it,” Ben said.
“I feel I may be able to convince the eldest son to allow me access to the safe, without his father present,” Ichh said. “It’ll take a story. Some contrivance about needing to fetch or peruse a piece of paper from the files stored there. But I just cannot see that I could convince him of two separate incidents of access. One to take a photograph of the key, one to swap that key out for a forgery.”
“Do we even need to do this?” Ben looked at Matt. “A key’s a key, isn’t it? If we make a forgery that’s that good, it’ll work in the freakin’ lock.”
“We can’t risk that,” Matt stated. “We can’t risk you being a millimeter off and the thing not working on the night. And it has to look real-deal. They’re not just simple keys like you’d unlock your house with. Some of these private secure storage fuckers are paying twenty k a year for the boxes. For that, you get pretty-looking keys. I’ve eyeballed one and they look like they have a long round stem like an antique clock-winding key and a flat head with the Borr logo embossed on it. I didn’t see what the teeth looked like.”
“Oh great,” Ben said.
“We’ll just get a different model for the forgery,” Matt said. He pointed at the lawyer. “You take the forged key in, access the safe once, and swap it out. It’ll have to be modeled off a real key from Borr Storage, just not Freeman’s exact key. Nobody’s going to look at the forgery and recognize that it’s not identical to the original one just by sight. It just needs to be a Borr Storage key, so that nobody glances into the safe and finds the key’s missing while we’re gearing up to do the job. After the robbery, you make your second excuse to get into the safe. You can wait until the old man dies and you’ve got to execute his will. That’s when you put the original key back.”
“Sure,” Ben said. “But how are we gonna get a Borr Storage key to model the forgery from? Do we know any other clients of that facility?”
“Engo can lift one from someone’s pocket or their car or whatever,” Matt said. “I’ve already got him on surveillance at the facility. I’ll tell him to watch for an opportunity.”
“He steals someone’s key, and he’ll have to do it covertly and drop it in the gutter when he’s got a picture,” Ben said. “The whole appeal of this job is that there’s no burglary at the facility. There’s no crime. Some random person gets pickpocketed outside the facility a week before the fire, and—”
“I know. I know.”
The two firefighters looked at the lawyer. The smaller man had a strange expression on his face, standing there, watching them discuss the next phase of their criminal plan with all the ease and familiarity of men coming up with dinner arrangements. Ben knew what it was. It was a mixture of intrigue and disgust. He’d seen the same face on people driving by prisons, watching men in the yard through the fences. He felt his hackles rising at the idea that now that their business had been ironed out, Ichh would try to launch into more casual, curious chitchat about “the life” and how long Ben and Matt had been in it. He imagined the little lawyer gently pressing Matt about why he broke bad in the first place. Why he stayed that way. Whether the rumor he’d heard, that Matt was a 9/11 first responder, was true. Ben looked over the railing and wondered if the lawyer would survive a fall from this height.
He was walking to his car when Andy called. That morning they’d discussed greetings they’d share on the phone that indicated whether it was safe to talk, so he said “Hey babe” in greeting rather than “Hi, Andy.”
“I’m going to tell you an address,” she said. “Can you meet me there? Just do a couple of tours around the neighborhood first to make sure you’re not being followed.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a tow yard.”
Ben felt his mouth run dry. He listened carefully to the address as he walked a block down and into a private parking lot. “What about you?” he said when she was done. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” Andy said, and hung up.
He clicked the key fob a long ways out, just because it was in his hand. He didn’t notice the guy standing smoking against a pillar until he got close. The guy was thickly built, with white wings in his hair that Ben had seen a few times in gangster films, only these looked real rather than painted in. He was getting tingles of instinct about the guy as he slipped into the driver’s seat, but played them off as dread or terror at what he might find in Luna’s car. The man was just a man, standing in a parking lot, probably waiting for his chatty wife to quit making small talk over at the charity thing and meet him at the car so they could fight all the way home.
Ben pulled out and drove away without giving the guy another glance.