THE WHITEVALE BANK wasn’t a large bank. It certainly wasn’t one of the Big Five, what we called the biggest Canadian banks. Whitevale was more like a medium-scale credit union or investment bank. They catered mostly to industrial corporations in the energy sector—corporations which handled their own payroll. For this kind of bank, there wasn’t a need for the same level of security that the larger banks had. Oh, sure, they had maybe a dozen branches across Ontario, but those were almost entirely administrative operations. The bank primarily operated through electronic or online means. They had partnerships with other banks, so withdrawing money was a little more complicated than going to an ATM, though there was an ATM in the main headquarters in downtown Pickering.
I knew all this because they recently hired me as the Night Security Chief. Really, it was a fancy way of saying security guard, but you can take a few liberties with names and titles when no one cares.
The aforementioned ATM stood by the front door of the lobby atrium in a 12-story building near the shore of Lake Ontario. The bank owned the building, but leased out all but the three floors it occupied. A mining company, Green River Minerals leased floors 1 and 2; they were a client of the bank. The Whitevale Bank held office space on floors 3, 4, and 5. The rest of the floors were mixed use: there were some dentists and cardiologists on floors 6 and 7; two different software companies on floors 8 and 9; an architecture firm on the 10th floor; and an insurance firm on the 11th. The 12th floor was a publisher of textbooks, or some such thing. There won’t be a test later, so don’t sweat it.
My own bank account was running dry, so I hit Vijay up for some odd jobs. He said he had a bailiff job available. That didn’t work out. I really didn’t like the idea of stealing people’s things. Back. Stealing things back. I know what you’re thinking … if someone’s just going to leave something lying around, why not take it? You’re not thinking that? Well, good. Because that’s wrong.
The other option was this—a job as a security guard. All the way up in Pickering. A long commute for me, but I was able to stay at a friend’s place for the duration of the contract. She was a small-time, small-town journalist on the edge of a big city. Always looking for the next big story, but always relegated to advertising copy in a limited reach weekly. Sarah Marlowe worked diligently at the Leaside Advertiser, but after three years of hard work, she realized she would never succeed as a journalist until she started covering major stories. One big scoop would do it for her, she said.
“One big scoop will do it for me.”
“It would have to be something big,” I said. “Like the price of flea market trinkets suddenly skyrocketing.”
“Oh, ha ha, mister I-never-have-any-money.”
“Hey,” I said to my phone, “I-never-have-any-money is my middle name.”
“I thought trouble was your middle name,” she said. I could hear her smile.
“That’s just my side business. I eat trouble for dinner.”
“Huh, I was wondering who took all the trouble out of the fridge.”
“Oh, you mean the ham? Sorry. I’ll buy some more.”
“Don’t sweat it, Virtue.” She called me by my last name. A lot of people did that.
And if you’re wondering (and I can’t blame you for it), yes, she was quite attractive in a short and perky kind of way, and no, we weren’t sleeping together. Not unless I got scared during a thunderstorm. We were just friends.
“By the way,” she said, “how much ham should I be buying? You never did tell me how long this gig was for.”
“It’s because I never got a straight answer from Vijay. He just asked what I was doing for the summer, and wouldn’t Pickering be nice this time of year.”
“So for two months?”
“No, no. Only maybe six weeks.”
“You’ve been here two weeks already.”
I paused for comic effect. There was no laughter. But again, I could practically hear her smile.
“Is the weather always so hot up here? I was told the lake effect would moderate the heat.”
“Global warming, fella. But wait, isn’t the bank air conditioned? I thought all those big, fancy buildings were.”
“It’s not that big. But it is fancy. I’m beginning to think they turn off the A/C at night when there’s no one around to complain.”
“You complain a lot.”
“And I’m a nobody. Go figure.”
“Okay, Noah Body, try to get some work done.”
“I’ve got my sketchbook. I’ll be fine.”
I brought my sketchbook along to do a little art while I was away from the studio. There was a real itch to paint, but my paintings stop selling when I’m not in the news, so it’s good and bad for me. I’d much rather be poor and anonymous than rich and famous because of some crime I foiled, or committed, or something in between.
Also, I was never rich. On a good day, I was an artist. On a bad day, I was a private investigator. Today, I was a security guard in an office building.
Sarah was an extravert. She was also bored a lot, which was strange since she had a big circle of friends. I guess she was selective about who she hung out with. Probably why she called me while I was at work. I sometimes called her while she was at work to bug her, but she seemed to like it.
I expected to get three or four more calls from her before the night was through. I wondered if she ever slept.
Me, I was still getting used to the night shifts. Two weeks in, and I was still occasionally nodding off around 3:00 a.m., so I drank a lot of coffee. Luckily, the bank had a really nice coffee machine, and they even had a small coffee kiosk in the atrium downstairs. The unlucky part was that the coffee machine was constantly broken, and the downstairs coffee place wasn’t open at night. So, I had the foresight to purchase a Keurig machine and a bunch of those coffee pods. They were what kept me going during these long, boring nights.
I figured I had some time before my next call from Sarah, so I grabbed the flashlight and wandered off to the lunchroom, checking the corridors as I went. This counted as patrolling, so I didn’t feel at all bad about leaving my desk.
I left much of the security uniform at my station. The mauve sports jacket hung over the back of the chair, and the clip-on tie sat by the mouse pad. There was no reason for me to wear any of that in this heat, and no one was around to see me not wearing it. I still had the wrinkle-free polyester slacks and the short-sleeve dress shirt with the “Security Guard” patch glued over the pocket. None of it fit very well, as they just pulled stuff off the shelf for me and never checked back.
The bank had a modest decor, but it was tastefully done, considering it was a corporate office with cubicles and grey carpeting. The main corridor was a little more industrial, and had light grey linoleum tiles, and this continued into the lunchroom. I gave the broken coffee machine a disappointed look and went to select a pod for my cup. It was just a ceramic mug from the overhead cupboard, but it was one of those novelty items people buy for each other. On the side, it read, “I like painting, my cats, and 3 other people,” so I grabbed it right away. It was a cryptic message, and one comma was scratched away, so it looked like the cup’s owner enjoyed painting their cats and 3 other people.
With a hot cup of coffee in hand, I wandered the rest of the quiet, darkened hallways of the bank, occasionally shining the light into empty offices and around corners. Most of the offices were full-on executive offices, with heavy fire doors and windows with security glass. Only the area opposite my office had a cubicle layout. That space reminded me a lot of the Taiji Satcom building where I used to work as a part-time network admin and full time cleaner.
At least, as a security guard, I was kind of a mashup of those two jobs: I had access to the corporate network, security cameras, and the respect that goes with that power. But, like a janitor, I had access to just about every room in the place, and all the respect that came with that job.
After a half an hour of traversing the three floors of the bank, my cup was empty, so I circled back to the coffee machine for a refill. I walked past a serving tray that probably held cookies or muffins during the day and lamented not bringing anything more than a protein bar for lunch.
I returned to my desk in the security room just off the cubicle farm. It had a single, large LCD screen and a keyboard/mouse layout, with the tower case below. I banged my knee against it every time I sat down, and this time was no different. Some of the coffee from my mug spilled on the desk and I used the tie to mop it up. May as well put it to use.
I jiggled the mouse, and the bank’s bouncing logo went away. In its place were fifteen smaller screens representing the video cameras for the building. You could swap out each camera as needed, and you could fill the screen with one camera if you wanted. Everything was digital these days, and these cameras were about as high-tech as they got in the 2010s. Three cameras for each floor, one in front of each elevator, one for each floor in the stairwell, and three more for monitoring the outside of the building. One of the outside cameras caught a loading bay with a roll-up door, the security door beside it, and the parking lot behind the bank. The other two captured the east and west corners of the front of the building.
I looked at each one of them. Then played with the controls a little, moving the camera’s field of view for each of the ground floor zones. Then quickly got bored and pulled out my sketchpad. Two weeks in, and it was almost full.