CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Computers.” Finn capped off another five-gallon container. “That’s the problem. All this technology.”

“They’re just tools.” Jake kept his eye on the outflow valve, alert for drips and spatter.

“No. A hammer is a tool. An excavator is a tool. But computers are just one big pain in the ass.”

“You having trouble with your phone again?”

They were in the galvanizing shop: a vast interior, sixty feet high, a single open floor. Finn slid another canister under the valve. He and Jake were crouched at the end of the shorter pickling tank—seventy-five hundred gallons of hydrochloric acid, enough to descale steel work twenty feet long. The shop’s owner had shut the line down for the day, leaving them to it, but the acid still seemed in slow, constant motion. Nearby, molten zinc burbled quietly in its tank. The faint swashing sounds made Finn nervous.

“Hey, careful there!” he said. Jake had reopened the valve too quickly, and a small amount of acid splashed onto the floor. “Damn, I hate this stuff.”

“You got gloves on, right?” Jake didn’t seem concerned. “You got goggles on. You even got that fancy-pants apron. Don’t worry about it.”

True enough. Finn adjusted the shopworker’s leather apron he’d borrowed and watched the gas can fill up. Jake stopped the flow at the right point, no rush.

“The scar on my leg is still dead white,” Finn said. “From fifteen years ago. Remember that?”

Jake laughed. “Have to admit, we weren’t so smart back then.” They’d stolen a tanker out of the lot of a chemical distributor in Woodbridge, not sure exactly what was inside but confident that a Class 8 hazmat placard meant something valuable. It wasn’t so different from hawking shoplifted steaks at restaurant alley doors: a hundred miles away, at the back entrance of another, less scrupulous company, Finn offered the foreman the entire vehicle for dirt cheap. The guy insisted on checking volume, reasonably enough, but when they opened the line, a sudden pressure release sprayed hydrogen fluoride everywhere. Finn, in front, got the worst of it.

“One more and we’re done,” he said now. Eleven of the plastic gas cans, red and yellow, innocuous enough. “You’ve got a closet for them, right?”

“What?”

“To store the cans.”

“These aren’t going in my shop.” Jake looked offended. “Come on, the fumes. I don’t have ventilation like they got here.”

“Where did you think we were going to put them?” Finn tightened the second-to-last cap. “We don’t have the warehouse yet, and I’m sleeping at a motel. Maid service won’t like finding a superfund site in the room.”

“Uh-uh.” Jake shook his head. “Too dangerous.”

“Too dangerous for you, so you want them next to my bed?”

They argued it out while the last can filled. In the end, all eleven went into the back of Jake’s truck.

“What do we owe your buddy?” Finn asked.

“Nothing.”

“Really?”

“He told me they go through hundreds of gallons of this stuff every month. Recyclers come by for pickle sludge and refill the entire tank. What we took is a drop in the bucket.”

The air was clean and cold outside—at first pleasant, after the chemical sting inside the galvanizing shop, then a little too cold. Finn felt a shiver and glanced at the sky.

“Might rain again. Or snow.”

“They’ll be fine.” Jake gestured at the array of canisters.

“All the same. You have a cover or something? Someone notices, it might be a little hard to explain.”

“Sure.”

Finn drove the truck fifty feet to park in front of Perricona. Jake went inside and came out a minute later with a blue plastic tarp. It was stained and frayed at the edges, bundled into a loose roll.

They flipped it over the truck bed and Finn began tying down the eyelets. Snow was in the air.

“So anyway,” he said. “The computers, the cameras, the sensors. We’ll need to bypass all that crap, and I’m way out of date.”

“Breaking into systems, cracking security—it ain’t so easy as in the movies.”

“Maybe we can hire some geek teenager.”

“I might know someone.”

“Is he reliable?”

“She was on a job with one of my customers. Alarms, remote monitoring, hardwired sensing in the walls—kinda like this one, actually. Sounded impossible to me. But he said she broke it as easy as taking a piss.”

Finn lashed the final eyelet to a bolt in the truck bed, tying it off with a taut-line hitch. “She?”

“Girls go to MIT, too, nowadays, I hear.”

“She’s from MIT?”

“I don’t know.” Jake shrugged. “I’m just saying. Cody liked her.”

“Not sure I know Cody.”

“He’s a good guy. Kind of a fuckup though. He just started ten-to-thirteen at Rahway.”

Finn tossed the rope end into the truck and straightened up. “That’s some recommendation.”

“It wasn’t her fault. Cody was a little too easy with the money afterward. Went to the bars and started talking. Dumb, considering a reward was out.”

“I’m not impressed.”

“Well, he went to jail and she didn’t.”

Finn sighed. “We can’t do it without a hacker.”

“Nancy, Nicki—something like that. Want me to call her?”

The first snowflakes began to fall. Finn pulled on his gloves. “Get me the number, okay?” he said. “I’ll sound her out.”