Every Day Above Ground Read online

  “Let’s see the back,” I said. He touched the gas and we drifted around the block. A large portion of the building’s empty ground floor had been occupied by an urgent care clinic. The clinic’s sign had survived the purge, though its red cross had faded to pink.

  The rear entrance was a mirror image of the front. O’Hasson craned his neck to see out my window. A few shops still survived on this road, but without so much as a neon sign glowing behind their steel gates.

  “Look at this.” O’Hasson grinned at the street like it was an amusement park. “We could blast our way in with a cannon and nobody would hear.”

  He was right. No signs of life nearby. Not even tents of homeless camps in the alleys. I pointed to the curb. O’Hasson pulled over and the engine ticked weakly into silence.

  “Let’s go,” I said, stepping out of the car.

  O’Hasson scrambled to catch up. “Sweet sugar.”

  I opened the Honda’s trunk. The backpack I’d stashed inside was so heavy that I had to lift it with two hands.

  “You catch the utility box?” I said.

  He nodded. “On the corner. I got it.” He snatched his duffel from the backseat and scurried off to the green metal housing with its PSE logo.

  I shouldered the pack and clipped the straps of its aluminum frame around my chest. The frame would support at least a hundred pounds, about as much weight as my old combat gear plus a ruck, once I ditched the equipment I’d bought from Corcoran. If O’Hasson’s miracle treasure really existed, we couldn’t walk away with gold kilobars stuffed in our pants pockets.

  An emergency exit door on the side of the building had a deadbolt that might be an imitation Schlage. Two minutes’ work, so long as we didn’t have to deal with an alarm.

  I grabbed our new car battery and joined O’Hasson at the utility box. He had cut open the plastic housing of the main cable and was methodically stripping and testing each power line with a multimeter. His work was clean, and his fingers moved rapidly. The cancer hadn’t eaten away his skill.

  “It’s cherry,” he said. “The power’s completely off on this side of the block.”

  “But no phone lines in this box.” On the narrow chance the building still had a working alarm system, it might run through telecom jacks.

  He shrugged. “You want to search for them?” I knew what O’Hasson’s vote would be. He shifted his weight excitedly from foot to foot, like a kid on hot sand. I wondered what medication he was on for the tumor. And what he might be taking on top of it.

  The block was quiet enough that I half expected a tumbleweed to blow through. We could burn half an hour finding the city box that held the fiber optics for the building, and another half to check every line. It was nearly midnight. I wanted to be gone within four hours. One glance at the safe would tell me if that timeline was possible.

  “We go,” I said. “You’ll watch the street.”

  He brightened and eased the metal lid of the PSE box shut.

  I used Dono’s old set of lockpicks on the emergency exit deadbolt. A pick gun might have been a little faster, but call me nostalgic. It was a way of having the old man along for the ride.

  The bolt drew back with a click and the door swung open. To silence.

  “Good start,” O’Hasson said.

  The door led to a long interior corridor. Once we had slipped inside and shut the door behind us, the blackness was complete. I turned on my small flashlight. Its halogen beam petered out before we could see where the corridor ended.

  “Find the stairs,” said O’Hasson. “Office 501.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder, stopping his forward rush.

  “You said the safe was under the floor,” I said. I shone the flashlight upward. “Ceiling looks like drop tile and plaster. That’s not going to hold any weight.”

  “Hey, I don’t know every detail. The senile geezer said his office was number five-oh-one. Like the denim jeans.”

  I let O’Hasson take point, following the narrow ray from his own penlight. The nearest stairwell was halfway down the hall. Dust coated the railings and grit crunched underfoot on every step. The air was muggy. I guessed no one had been inside in weeks, maybe since the building had been stripped. O’Hasson sneezed. The sound echoed up and down the stairwell shaft. We pressed onward and upward, through the stifling black.

  “Here we go,” O’Hasson managed to say as we neared the fifth landing. He was wheezing.

  “You all right?”

  “Don’ worry ’bout it.”

  There was no Office 501 on the fifth floor. There were no offices at all. Every wall and door had been torn out, leaving only a huge empty space with exposed vents and a patchwork of carpet and wood flooring where rooms had once existed. It felt as wide as a football field. An uninterrupted span of windows glowed faintly at the far edge of each horizon. The rest was a dark void.

  “Jesus,” said O’Hasson. The shadows cast by my flashlight beam made his distraught expression grotesque. “What happened to the office?”

  I unclipped the backpack and set it down. The thump released a stink of mildew into the stale air. From the pack’s depths I removed a thick black tube that looked like an overfed nightstick.

  “What the hell is that?” O’Hasson said.

  “Metal detector.” It was a variation on the handheld wands TSA agents used in airports. This one had been enhanced—courtesy of Jimmy Corcoran—to focus its magnetic field to a narrow range that could pierce walls.

  I guessed that 501 would have been at one end of the building or the other. Maybe an executive suite. I flipped a mental coin and started with the east corner. O’Hasson followed me so closely I might as well have been carrying him piggyback. I bent low to sweep the tip of the detector above the carpet.

  “Can’t believe you thought to bring that,” he said.

  “You told me the safe was hidden. Did you want to pull up the whole floor?”

  “Look,” he said, poking his nose in front of the gauge as it wavered. The shine from his jittering penlight put spots in my eyes.

  “Any heating vent could make it tick. Go check the street.”

  He sulked but didn’t argue. The little burglar had been surprisingly agreeable to any task I gave him. Maybe that was why he and Dono had gotten along. My grandfather had never brooked much argument about who was in charge. O’Hasson retreated to the windows and split his attention between me and the road below as he paced.

  I traced a line out from the wall and back again, like mowing an invisible lawn, until I’d covered a square forty feet on each side. Nothing under the grubby carpet bumped the needle more than halfway.

  “North corner,” I said. I walked across the building to repeat the pattern. O’Hasson hurried along the windows, keen to stay close.

  On my third pass, twenty feet out from the wall and smack in the middle of a swath of stained brown carpet, the needle pegged itself firmly against the far edge of the gauge.

  I tried a few feet to the left, then the right. Up and down. Anywhere within a square yard, the detector was insistent. O’Hasson was immediately at my side.

  “Look for a seam,” I said, kneeling down and feeling the carpet. He dropped and followed suit.

  “Here,” he said, digging his thin fingers into a gap. We pulled and the carpet peeled back grudgingly, leaving rubbery chunks of its underlayer stuck in yellowed glue to the fiberboard floor beneath. I held my breath to keep from inhaling puffs of mold spores. O’Hasson dumped half the contents of his duffel out to find a linoleum knife in the jumble of tools and wires. He sawed at the tough strands until we could throw the loose pieces aside.

  There was a recessed iron ring pull set into the floor. I could just make out the edges of a square hole cut in the fiberboard. Beside me, O’Hasson inhaled.

  I grabbed the ring and pulled. The square tilted up on inset hinges, the dry wood crackling in protest.

  “Yes,” O’Hasson whispered. “Yes.”

  It was there. A Durman
combination safe, two feet by three. I knew the brand well enough to identify it from the bits of its stenciled name still visible under a layer of dirt and chalky dust. The box was face-up, door and dial pointed toward the ceiling. Shining my light down along the edges, I could see a lumpy line of solder where someone long ago had welded the rear side of the Durman to a steel crossbeam underneath.

  “Can you open it?” O’Hasson said, so quietly I knew he was dreading the answer.

  “Go get the pack.”

  He scuttled away for it.

  I knelt to brush the dirt aside and gave the dial an experimental twist. A little crunchy, but it moved. I grinned. The faint tick of each number sounded like a drummer, tapping out the beat before the music started.

  We unloaded the backpack. O’Hasson’s breath was short, and his hands trembled slightly. I hoped I wouldn’t be carrying him out of here before the night was through.

  It took only a minute by the beam of his flashlight to set up my gear. I’d modified the handheld drill’s electric cord to take juice through jumper cables. The car battery would power the drill all night, if we needed it to.

  The abrupt shriek of the drill’s motor made O’Hasson jump. I aimed its whirling diamond bit at the edge of the dial. Gave it a bit of pressure. A high banshee keen, and curlicues of metal spun away as if in a panic.

  It was a tough position to work from. I concentrated on keeping the drill perfectly steady. Too shallow an angle and I’d miss the inner lock. Too acute, or too deep of a hole, and I might fuck up the lock entirely. Then we’d have to try brute force, using the heavier tools in my pack. Bad odds on that method.

  After five minutes I turned off the drill to wipe sweat from my face with the back of my glove. “Pass me the scope.”

  The handheld scope was a simple illuminated magnifier, not much different than the kind used by optometrists to check a patient’s retinas. I swept the dirt away and lay on my stomach to stick my face down next to the safe. Its steel smelled like fresh water. With the tiny fish-eye lens against the drill hole, I could see the smooth sharp edge of the first lock gate, as clear as dawn and just as beautiful.

  O’Hasson edged closer, trying to see around my head. I turned the dial until the gate budged. Get all the gates lined up like good little soldiers, and the lock would be open. If it still worked.

  “Check the street,” I said to O’Hasson. My breath fogged the lens for an instant.

  “Come on. If an alarm had gone off—”

  “I have to look, and I have to listen. And right now all I can hear is your skin vibrating. Go over there.”

  He backed away. Not all the way to the windows, but far enough.

  First gate open. I looked at the dial and marked the number as 37. I turned the dial slowly until the second gate quivered a little, then a little more. The lens only let me see an inch or two into the lock. The dial showed 12. Call it somewhere between 10 and 14 to open the second gate. That was as far as I would get with the scope.

  Safecracking was often about reducing permutations to a workable number. I backed off, spun the dial, and started experimenting. Sixty numbers around the dial. I tried 37-10-59. Then 37-10-58. Steady pressure on the door handle as I turned the dial through every tick. I hardly used my eyes. My fingers could keep track on their own.

  It became a rhythm, left and right and left again, through each combination. It felt good. It felt right. I’d known I could beat the Durman the instant we’d seen it. That I could drill the pilot hole just so. That I could work the gates and open the lock.

  Call it by its name. It was fun.

  I got all the way down to 37-10-0, without any telltale give in the handle. I took it from the top, bumping the middle number from 10 to 11.

  At 37-11-24, I felt the handle tremble. Just a little. No more than if a small bird had alighted on its silver surface.

  O’Hasson caught the shift in my posture. “You got it?” he called.

  I turned the dial one more tick. The handle clunked. Answer aplenty.

  “I told you!” he shouted, running to meet me. “I said it, didn’t I?” He was right on top of me as I swung the safe open.

  The jumpy little son of a bitch had said it.

  And he was absolutely right.

  Slim golden bars glittered from the black interior of the safe. Dozens of them, each about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and arranged in meticulous stacks, with their minting stamps and serial numbers all facing the same way. As merrily brilliant after their long airless confinement as if they’d been polished yesterday.

  O’Hasson whooped and shouldered past me to reach for the bars. I let him. He’d found his treasure.

  “God. God. More than I fucking imagined,” he said, gasping. Stray bars fell from his grasping hands to thump heavily on the floor.

  I picked one up. Its density was surprising, even though I’d been prepared for it. I clicked open my knife and dug the blade into the edge of the bar. The soft metal parted.

  It was real. I’d kept myself from fully believing it until that moment.

  O’Hasson had caught my smile. “How much is here?” he said.

  I made a quick count. At least a hundred kilobars in the stacks. If they were as clean as O’Hasson claimed, we could clear forty grand per.

  “Four million dollars,” I said. “Conservatively.” I might have been a little breathless myself.

  “Holy mother,” O’Hasson said.

  A heavy mother, too. “I can make this in one trip,” I said, “if the pack doesn’t rip. But it will be slow.”

  He shrugged exaggeratedly. Happy enough now to slow down and enjoy his moment of victory. “I’ll carry what I can.”

  I tossed the circular and reciprocal saws out of my pack to make room, and began loading the bars. The challenge wasn’t size—all of the bars together would make a bundle smaller than two shoeboxes—but weight. A hundred bars added up to 220 pounds, more than I weighed myself. I was in for some exercise.

  O’Hasson loaded fifteen or so of the bars from the safe into his half-empty duffel and hefted it, first with one hand and then quickly a second, grunting with the effort. “That’s enough.”

  “Go get the car. Bring it around to the door.” I didn’t want to lug the loaded pack any farther than I had to.

  The little burglar tottered off to the stairs, listing steeply to one side under his load.

  Four million dollars. I mean, god damn. Even a third of that could let me rebuild the house as a freaking castle, if I chose.

  I scooped up the bits and pieces of O’Hasson’s electronics that he’d left on the floor and stuffed them into my pockets. My own tools were untraceable to me, but I wouldn’t count on my accomplice to have taken the same care. The shining kilobars went into the main compartment of the pack, down at the bottom where the massive weight wouldn’t crush my spine once I’d shouldered it.

  As I reached down to grab the last two bars, my latex-gloved fingertips brushed the bottom of the safe.

  It was softer than it should be. I prodded at it. Hard rubber.

  A pressure plate.

  A howl sounded in the back of my mind. The atavistic internal cry of danger, even as my higher intellect started calculating just how much trouble we were in.

  The pressure plate was jet black. It would be next to invisible even under normal light. Hooked to an alarm, no question. Wireless. Very twenty-first century. Definitely not something abandoned twenty years ago.

  We’d walked into a trap.

  Five

  I sprinted to the window, checked the road below. It was clear. For now.

  Who would be alerted when the alarm was triggered? Had the alarm gone off when we’d moved the very first gold bars, or when the weight tipped over a certain point? There was no way to tell.

  I ran to the opposite side of the building to see the street in front. No movement there either. But someone might already be on the way.

  Time to run.

  The pack was sitting
up on the floor, like an obediently patient dog. I sat down and hurriedly clicked myself into its web of straps and belts, and used the open safe door to haul myself and the crushing load up to my knees. It felt like I was trying to drag an anchor through sand. One foot under me. Two. Push. I was up, and taking one thudding step at a time toward the stairs.

  Descending the pitch-black stairwell was a nightmare in slow motion. I gripped the railing with both hands to stay vertical. Stepping sideways. Left, right. Acutely conscious that a bad step might destroy my knee, or send me and two hundred extra pounds of metal into a fall that would likely snap my neck. Right, left. At two floors, my thighs were quivering. After four, sweat blurred my vision—not that there was anything I could see in the stygian dark—and the shaking had expanded to my chest.

  When I reached the corridor at the bottom, I stole a moment to take a long unsteady breath before lurching toward the exit. I was counting steps. Thirty to the exit, maybe another twenty to O’Hasson’s stolen Honda. Then relief. I yanked the door wide and looked out onto the street.

  The car wasn’t there. Neither was O’Hasson.

  Dammit. Where was he? I cursed him as I leaned against the wall of the corridor, sliding clumsily down to my butt, and freed myself from the taut straps of the pack. Had he gone back upstairs? Had the wreck of a car not started?

  I wasn’t going to be as lucky as that. Something was wrong. Maybe the sick man had collapsed under the strain. Or become disoriented in the dark building.

  Standing up gave me a lightheaded rush, like I had landed on a different planet with weaker gravity. I took a pry bar from the pack and left the heavy bulk leaning against the wall, and found a passage that led from the corridor toward where I knew the central lobby would be. If O’Hasson was on the opposite side of the building, that would be my fastest path.

  I had just reached the span of the main reception area when someone yelled incoherently from the upper floors, the cry echoing down the central flight of stairs that wound around a small atrium at the ground level. Was that O’Hasson, calling for me? I began running up the flights, leg muscles objecting.