Death Prefers Blondes

by Caleb Roehrig

  Leaping almost three feet into the air, Joaquin kicked off the wall opposite the vent, launching himself back across the narrow corridor and the rest of the way up to the shadowy opening. His boots gleamed with the red burn of the exit sign as he kicked a leg up, folding his body into the duct with impossible agility. Glancing back over his shoulder to where Leif continued to stare in amazement, the boy winked and then dropped out of sight.

  3

  A smile could be just as useful as a grappling hook if you knew how to wield it right. Other natural resources Margo had learned to weaponize included: doe eyes, short skirts, the male libido, and her well-known last name. They weren’t all as fun as firing a metal claw thirty feet through the air or slicing a hole in a pane of glass without a sound—but, employed properly, they could be three times as effective.

  Two weeks earlier, out of pseudo-drag and in her regular, daytime persona, Margo had waltzed right through the front door of the museum, there to attend the aggressively hyped reception for the high-profile rococo exhibit. The invitation had been just one of many that came like clockwork addressed to her father, this one being exclusively for LAMFA’s top-level donors.

  Come join us for an evening of hors d’oeuvres, wine, and fine art, the embossed cardstock had implored, as we celebrate the grand opening of PASSIONS TO ELEVATE THE SOUL, our temporary exhibition of rarely seen works by the French masters of the 18th Century.

  It had been a stultifying evening, one boring and self-congratulatory speech leading into another, lists of names read aloud and glasses raised to people Margo didn’t know and didn’t want to. Finally, the guests were released to mingle, drink, and admire brushstrokes—and, with a sigh of unmitigated relief, she’d made a beeline for a young man with an official LAMFA ID badge, whose eyes had not left her boobs for the entire presentation.

  She’d tossed her hair, batted her eyes, flattered his muscles, and generally played the Dumb Blonde to the hilt. Then she’d slipped her arm through his and nonchalantly mentioned that her father might be thinking of lending a few masterpieces from his private collection to LAMFA—but how could he be certain the museum would keep them safe?

  What followed had been the only truly interesting lecture she’d heard all evening, as the young man offered up a bounty of precise details regarding the museum’s security protocols. Two days later, when she’d gone downtown to bring her favorite corrupt city employee a bagged lunch composed of hundred-dollar bills sandwiched between other hundred-dollar bills, she’d walked out with blueprints and schematics of the Beaux-Arts building—a complete overview, right down to the ductwork and wiring.

  Now as she stood at the head of the administrative corridor, staring intently at the backside of the door that would let her out into a glossy, gilt-edged, camera-filled maze of art, she hoped that all her information was accurate—that all her precautionary efforts had this job as close to a slam dunk as possible. She hoped that they hadn’t been seen, and that no drunk would make the mistake of wandering up the alley to take a tinkle and play Good Samaritan by reporting the damaged window to the police.

  Breathing softly, waiting for her comm to activate, standing as still as one of the statues that waited in the gloomy chambers ahead, Margo went over the plan again and again. She’d been precise; she’d been careful.

  But there were always ugly surprises.

  * * *

  Inching straight down a metal chute for almost thirty feet proved to be about as easy as inching thirty feet straight up it in the first place. Joaquin had been so determined to prove himself, so proud of his daring exit line—maybe I’d like having you on top of me. He’d had a crush on Leif Dalby since the first time he saw him, with his freckles and flirtatious grin, and he’d been so determined to impress the guy that he hadn’t really stopped to consider that maybe going first was a mistake. Twelve hours trapped in a wall followed by a three-story climb up a glorified chimney had taken its toll; a subtle burn was beginning to develop in his shoulders and thighs as he maneuvered down the ventilation duct.

  It didn’t help that Leif really was practically on top of him, his large and booted feet mere inches above Joaquin’s boot-averse skull. It didn’t help either that, in spite of the conditioned air flowing around them, sweat was starting to roll from beneath the itchy, synthetic cap of his wig.

  When he finally reached his destination, a wide metal grate set into a wall on the first floor, offering a view into a cramped and dismally appointed room, Joaquin was practically delirious with relief. From his pouch, he produced a small, battery-operated device—another tool from Margo’s spectacular arsenal—that used powerful magnets to turn screws from the inside, rotating their threads and forcing them out.

  Within seconds Joaquin freed three corners of the grate, allowing the vent to swing open, and he gulped in a blessed mouthful of musty-smelling air. Scrambling up, he eased through the opening and dropped quietly to the floor. Behind him, Leif continued down the shaft, offering a silent and abbreviated wave before he vanished.

  Dusting himself off, Joaquin looked around, on high alert. Raw wood shelves bore a bounty of cleaning supplies beside the dented cover of a sizable fuse box; a sink set into the floor gave off the sickly reek of mildew; and an array of ancient-looking pipes, crusted with lime deposit, rose up through the floor. It was a custodial closet, a hidden corner of LAMFA’s sprawling empire, which happened to share a wall with the central guardroom.

  Cords snaked through holes in the ceiling, over thirty of them, twisting together in groups of five and six before disappearing through the wall to feed the bank of monitors that allowed the watchmen to see the entire museum at a glance. Swallowing uncomfortably, Joaquin eyed the jumble of brightly colored cables, trying not to feel overwhelmed. Each one of the lines brought in the relays from multiple cameras, representing a hundred or more views throughout the museum, on alternating four- and five-second intervals.

  Digging into his pouch, Joaquin pulled out yet another useful device: a portable monitor attached to an auxiliary cord, which ended in a clip fitted with sharp metal teeth. When snapped around any one of the cables, the clip would slice through the rubber casing and complete a circuit with the wire underneath, splitting the video feed and siphoning it to his private screen.

  All he needed to do was isolate the input from the third floor, figure out where all the cameras were, determine the exact order in which the relays alternated, note which feeds would be up on separate monitors at the same time, negotiate a safe passage, and commit the information to memory. And he had to do it before Leif got into position in the basement. No sweat.

  Drawing a shaky breath, he fitted the clip around one of the many snaking cords and drove its teeth home.

  * * *

  The museum’s backup power generator was unmistakable, a fifteen-foot-wide metal enclosure housing a diesel-powered riot of tubes and wires—a slumbering, steampunk dragon just waiting for its wake-up call. Margo’s source at the reception hadn’t offered any details about make and model, merely boasting that, “In the highly unlikely event of a power outage,” the museum had a secondary system that would automatically come online within thirty seconds; so Leif had studied countless schematics from different manufacturers, wanting to make sure he’d be ready, no matter what.

  In the highly unlikely event of a power outage: The generator would kick in, and any alarm that had been tripped in the interim would start screaming immediately. If the generator did not kick in—which was Leif’s objective—the alarms would stay silent and the video feeds blank. But the guards would still call for backup, and police response times were somewhat breathtaking in the service of well-funded museums.

  Caged fluorescents hung from the ceiling, but Leif had left them dark; they’d be going out soon enough anyway, and there was no time like the present to get used to navigating without them. Even if the musty basement was spooky as hell in the dark. Even if the surprisingly fierce beam of his little LED flashlight had a way of se
nding massive, distorted shadows dancing across the walls like demons, freshly risen from hell and hungry for souls.

  Sweeping the light around, Leif watched as black shapes jumped and melted like smoke, the emptiness that greeted him somehow sinister. Water dripped somewhere, and the sound of his own breathing threw quiet echoes around the room.

  His voice embarrassingly thin, he activated his comm. “I’m in place.”

  * * *

  Rachmaninoff was a piss-poor substitute for cigarettes, but smoking was another one of Margo’s “variables”—the euphemistic term she used when she meant “shit I hate”—and so Davon Stokes hadn’t touched tobacco in over nine months. Usually the withdrawal was surprisingly okay; but there was nothing “usual” about the nights that they pulled these jobs, and on each occasion, he found his fingers restless and his blood itching for relief. Whatever, it was fine. He’d been meaning to quit anyway, and giving up his one real vice had been worth the leverage he’d needed to take a stand on the eyelash thing.

  The Eyelash Thing. What did it say about his life that he’d once Norma Rae-ed for false eyelashes?

  Checking the time, he took a breath, flexed his hands, and tried to focus on the classical music coming from the van’s cheap speakers. In his side-view mirror, up the parking ramp and half swallowed by darkness, the front end of a second SUV gritted golden teeth under yellow safety lights. He didn’t mind being on the outside for this job. Not exactly. He was going to take home his full cut of the haul whether he put his ass on the line or kept his ass in the car. But the waiting was unbearable.

  The waiting, and Axel’s constant stream of wounded outrage beside him in the passenger seat. “I just can’t believe she would do something like this. After all the years we’ve been friends, all the things we’ve gone through, I can’t believe she would let Quino just … do this without even telling me! And you know she knew she was being shady, or she wouldn’t have tried to hide it!”

  Davon’s fingers twitched, his lungs burned, and he turned up the Rachmaninoff just a little bit. Staring a hole into the side-view mirror, examining the golden mouth of the SUV up the ramp, he wondered who would leave such an expensive car overnight in a downtown parking garage. It didn’t belong there.

  * * *

  “Okay, Miss A.” Joaquin’s voice erupted in Margo’s ear, puncturing the silence of the empty corridor so suddenly it made her jump. “The third floor is clear. When I give the signal, you’ll have six seconds to make it through the Dutch masters, four seconds for sixteenth-century Venice, eight seconds for the Spanish Counter-Reformation, and then six seconds for French Renaissance sculpture.” There was a momentary silence, and then he added, “That’s the long gallery.”

  “Twenty-four seconds, total.” Margo cracked her knuckles. “How much elbow room?”

  “For the gallery? None.” The answer was definitive. “Sorry—it’s just too exposed. Parts of it are visible on three different cameras.”

  “Got it.” Margo put her fingers on the handle of the door in front of her, tried to feel the building’s energy—imagined that the museum could sense her, too. “It’s fine. I can do forty yards in six seconds.” She made the claim with as much confidence as she could muster, determined to believe. “Just … you know, make sure you cut the power right on the sixth, okay?”

  “Confirmed,” Joaquin responded. “And … you know. Break a leg, or whatever the hell you’re supposed to say for stuff like this.” There was another moment of tense silence, and then, “Okay. Now.”

  She stepped out of the dusty corridor and into a high-ceilinged chamber drowned in shadows, narrow windows letting in a sepia glow from outside that colored the air a tarnished bronze. Paintings encumbered the walls above an elaborate wainscoting, and through a wide opening Margo could just see into the next room before it was swallowed up in darkness. Floor-level bulbs burned through the gloom ahead, a handful of sickly golden pinpoints marking out the sides of each passage.

  Two weeks earlier, this space had been crowded with the heat and chatter of high-end donors, all red-faced with drink and self-importance, name-dropping Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer as if they were personal friends. The artifice of it made Margo choke, and she’d barely paid the works any attention; now, alone and embraced by silence, she found herself awed. Animated faces peered out at her from oiled canvases, intelligent eyes and luminous skin offset by folds of luxuriously rendered fabric.

  Behind her, the door to the administrative corridor slipped home, the latch snapping into place like a hammer striking stone, and Margo’s breath caught.

  Six seconds.

  Turning on her heel, she darted across the room. She tried to move as quietly as possible, but each salon flowed into the next, and the empty spaces gathered sound and tossed it about until her heartbeat was a kettle drum in her ears.

  As she passed into the next exhibit hall—Veronese, Bassano, and Titian welcoming her to sixteenth-century Venice—an updraft of cold air lifted the shimmering ends of Margo’s pale wig. To her right, an opening spilled downward, a flight of wide, marble steps that plunged to the second floor through a cavernous, echoing space. The ceiling of the museum climbed high above the staircase, its carved and gold-painted roundels like craters on a distant moon.

  She stumbled into the Spanish Counter-Reformation in the nick of time, four seconds exactly, her pulse rising. Here, lugubrious canvases by El Greco and Velázquez contrasted with ochre walls suggestive of sun-drenched stone. Margo slowed, eased her breathing; adrenaline could burn a hole through your energy faster than a 10k—and the sculpture gallery was next.

  The noises reached her, heavy steps and murmured voices lifting to bounce against the vast ceiling, a second before her comm coughed to life in her ear.

  “Guards,” Joaquin squawked, voice pitched high. “Two of them. Climbing the stairs to the third floor.” Instinctively, Margo looked back, rising onto the balls of her feet as Joaquin asked, “Miss Anthropy, do you copy?”

  Unable to speak, she clicked her comm once to signify that she understood.

  “Are we calling off the job?”

  Margo clicked twice, decisively: No. This was an unfortunate complication, but not a deal breaker. She’d tangled with security personnel before. The guards were behind her anyway, and with luck, they’d return to the ground floor when the power went off. If they didn’t … well, adrenaline fueled fight just as well as flight.

  “Okay.” Joaquin didn’t sound thrilled. “Three seconds until you can enter the sculpture gallery. The micro-charge is already in place, and I’ll stand by.”

  Margo stood in the wide doorway, looking down the length of the next room. Roman gods and Christian saints shared a checkerboard marble floor with the busts of lesser nobles, a straight shot nearly a hundred and twenty feet long to the entrance of the new rococo display. To the left, massive windows of darkened glass were draped with heavy, brocade curtains; opposite them, a stone railing with carved balusters was the only barrier preventing a dizzying fall to the second floor.

  “Go! Now!”

  Margo took off. She tried to be stealthy, but time was not on her side. She rushed past a pale cupid and a mournful Madonna, ornate chandeliers dripping with crystals overhead and the air swimming with the guards’ voices as they came closer.

  “—that civil war they got going on in Malawi.”

  “The hell are you talking about?”

  “Man, don’t you ever watch the news?”

  Up ahead, yellow lights beckoned at the entrance to the rococo room, walls taking shape in the shifting darkness. She could make it, she knew it—and, in her ear, Joaquin was counting down, “Four … three … two…”

  The guards’ conversation stopped abruptly, one of them asking, “Did you hear something?”

  Fifteen feet from the doorway, Margo could finally see the actual writing on the actual wall—PASSIONS TO ELEVATE THE SOUL.

  “… one … zero.”

  And then everything wen
t dark.

  4

  Among the many things that Joaquin Moreau had never done before, detonating a localized EMP was one of the most exciting. Roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes, the micro-charge was designed to release a high-intensity burst of disruptive, electromagnetic energy that would fry the circuits of any electrical equipment within its blast radius—and he had placed the device squarely inside of LAMFA’s central fuse box.

  His stopwatch running to track Margo’s remaining time, the portable monitor connected to the input from the camera aimed at the two guards mounting the main staircase, Joaquin had kept his thumb on the micro-charge’s trigger while anxious perspiration rolled down his neck. He was sweating so much he was afraid his whole, awkwardly made-up face was melting clean off, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  And then the moment came, and he pressed the button. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting—a ripple of blue light, the crackle of lightning, maybe an actual explosion—but the EMP emitted only the quick snap of a dry spark … and then the lights had gone out, and there was silence. Real silence. The kind of silence you notice only because you’d thought it was quiet before.

  The fluorescents dimmed and died, the portable monitor flickered and went blank—and in the sudden darkness, the faint hum of machinery that lay underneath everything faded like an exhaled breath. The circuit breakers, incapacitated by the pulse, were now useless. There would be no toggling of fuses to fix this power outage; the museum’s state-of-the-art alarm system had just been neutralized.

  Switching on his LED flashlight, Joaquin swiftly recovered the spent EMP—per the team’s rule to leave none of their tech behind—and then rushed for the door. There was no time for a laborious escape through the ductwork; within seconds one of the guards would be heading for the custodial closet to see about bringing the power back online.