Diamond White

by Stephanie Andrews

  “I have a message for your boss, and you are going to deliver it. My sources tell me that he is coming here soon, because his diamonds are missing, and it has led him to wonder if he has misplaced his trust in you.”

  “But it wasn’t my fault—”

  “I know it wasn’t,” said Don, pulling a small felt pouch from his lab coat pocket. “I know because I have the diamonds right here.”

  Dexter’s eyes widened in disbelief.

  “You are dealing with a power greater than you can possibly comprehend,” said Don smoothly, laying it on thick. “You are going to convince Mr. Negron to meet with me, at a time and place of my choosing.”

  “I don’t—”

  “If the meeting goes well, I will return Mr. Negron’s diamonds, and we will perhaps do business together.”

  He turned on his heel and walked over to Jorge. He returned the diamonds to his pocket, withdrawing a cell phone and, from the other pocket, the gun. He laid the gun in Jorge’s lap.

  “Here, hold this for me a moment, would you?” He took the phone and put it in the breast pocket of Jorge’s white t-shirt. Jorge looked at the gun, tantalizingly close in his lap, but out of reach of his bound hands. He opened his mouth to speak, but Don just shook his head.

  “Shush, little gangster. I don’t know how big or small your role in this whole thing is, but selling guns to rival gangs means you have no soul. Therefore, I have a special job for you. Ready?”

  Jorge nodded his head.

  “From now until I meet with Mr. Negron, you are Mr. Dexter’s shadow. If he does anything you think I wouldn’t like, you call me.”

  “Now wait just a minute!” Dexter objected.

  Don picked up the gun and pointed it straight at Jared Dexter’s face.

  “Or, my friend, you can just shoot him instead. Comprendes?” He lowered the gun and dropped it back into Jorge’s lap.

  “Si,” said Jorge in a defeated voice.

  Don turned on his heel, walking toward the waiting ring of darkness.

  “Goodbye gentleman,” he called over his shoulder. “You will hear from me soon.”

  On his way out of the room he flicked a switch on the wall, and the spotlight went out, a glowing red afterimage dancing in the vision of the two men left alone, bound, in the darkness.

  Twenty-eight

  “He didn’t even call the police!” I said indignantly to Ruby, as we kayaked around the lake. Ruby wasn’t big on exercise, but she couldn’t think of a good excuse when I introduced kayaking. Her bad leg was no hindrance to an afternoon of paddling.

  The sky was bright blue, and there was a light, cool breeze blowing across the surface of the lake. All along the banks, oak and maple trees were ablaze with the yellow and orange of autumn. We had been at it since lunch, and had barely seen another person on the water.

  “Sure, it was too late for Hansen, but I was supposedly still alive. In fact, Don pretty much said he was going to haul me off for torture and rape, and the guy doesn’t even call the police.”

  “It’s this Negron,” said Ruby, frowning as she paddled. Over the course of the last two hours, she had lost all her awkwardness in the kayak, and was now proceeding like a pro. I had to work to keep up. Ruby never did anything by half. “If all your enemies are so afraid of him, are you sure meeting with him is a good plan? I know you’re in pretty good hands with Elgort, but still...”

  “You’re not wrong, Ruby. Dexter has barely shown his face in the two days since we released him. According to Earl, the mayor still hasn’t been able to find him, which means Dexter is lying really low. We’ve only heard from Jorge once so far, and that was just a quick text to say all was well.”

  Ruby chuckled. “I bet he didn’t like being called ‘little gangster.’”

  “Not at all, but he stuck to the script.”

  “I find it odd,” Ruby mused, laying the paddle across the kayak and coasting as we made our way back up the canal to the cabin. “You’re a good woman, who’s become a criminal. And you’re surrounded by bad people, who are trying to become better. It’s an odd match-up.”

  “Not Earl,” I countered. “Or Park. She’s like me. A former rule follower.”

  “Speaking of the devil,” said Ruby.

  I looked up. We were only about fifty yards from the dock, now, and standing on it, waving cheerfully to us, was Ellery Park. I looked at her and my heart lurched.

  “Ruby,” I said, “we’ve got to get her out of here and into law school somewhere. Somewhere far away. Promise me?”

  “Pinkie swear,” she said, holding her right pinkie out toward my left hand, which, of course, had no pinkie.

  “Nice.”

  “That joke, it never gets old,” said Ruby, cracking herself up.

  My left hand still had a middle finger, though, which I put to good use.

  “So then I go all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor,” Park was telling us over coffee on the front porch, as we watched the sun go down, “and Miss Archer herself comes out and invites me to her office. She is amazing! Like, you can feel the power just coming off her in waves. And great clothes. She just exudes strength. And her office!” Park gestured horizontally with her arm. “Windows, all the way across!”

  “El—”

  “Yup, of course. Sorry.” She took a big drink, draining the last of her coffee, which I was beginning to think was a bad idea if she was going to be this hyper. “She’s pretty sure, based on what we got out of Dexter’s phone while he was unconscious, that she’s isolated Negron’s phone. And, if she’s right, then Negron landed at O’Hare this morning.”

  “That’s great! Then we’re on. I’ll let Don know, and he can set up the meeting.” Park beamed. “But,” I added, “you didn’t have to drive all the way up here to tell me that.”

  “No, but I brought all the stuff Marty made for you. Or his people made for you. It’s in my car. I thought you might want to practice with it before the big showdown.”

  “Thanks, but El, seriously, what the hell happened in Florida?” Her black eye had turned a repulsive yellowish green.

  “A hurricane happened!” grimaced Park, looking as surly as I’d ever seen her. You sent me into a hurricane! And then it just got worse!”

  Oops. Guess I should have looked at the weather more closely.

  “So, you didn’t bring me any Butterbeer, then?”

  “No,” she responded through tight lips, “I did not.”

  “When did you see Martin?” asked Ruby, changing the subject.

  Park blushed. Oh crap. Law school. Hawaii maybe. We had to save this girl from getting too enmeshed in this life of crime we had built.

  “I just stopped in to say hi, after I left the Farnham Building. He said he was terribly busy, so I offered to bring you the stuff.”

  “Relax,” I told her. “Ruby’s just messing with you.”

  El looked hesitantly at Ruby. “It’s me you have to worry about,” I added. She swiveled back to me quickly.

  “Are, are you and Marty? I mean—I didn’t mean to, not with...” I let her sputter to a stop.

  “Of course I’m not,” I said, laughing. She and Ruby both started to frown. “Not that he isn’t a great guy, and handsome, but we’re just friends. He’s ten years younger than me, after all.”

  Park’s little jaw dropped. “You’re thirty-four?”

  Now it was my turn to frown. “I can’t tell if you’re impressed or horrified.”

  “I thought you were twenty-five, twenty-eight at the most. You look incredible.”

  Now I blushed.

  “Aw shucks, El. You just earned yourself a dinner invitation.”

  “Which,” said Ruby, levering herself up out of her chair and collecting the coffee cups, “I will go make.”

  “Do you need help with the cooking?” asked Park.

  “Not for about thirty years now,” said Ruby without looking back, “since I first got married.”

  Park and I looked at each other in
shock.

  “Ruby,” I started to ask, but she had timed her exit line perfectly, and the door had already shut behind her.

  A story for another time, it seemed.

  Twenty-nine

  El and I stood with Marty in the Art Institute of Chicago, looking at the Chagall Window. It was 3 a.m. With the lobby lights off, but the backing lights on, the stained glass was more beautiful than ever. My mother would have bemoaned the fact that natural light no longer shone through the panes, but she would have loved the vibrancy that the restoration had brought to them.

  “Ahem,” coughed Marty, quietly, and I snapped out of my trance.

  “Right! We’ve got to get out of here, I know. I just can’t come to the Institute without visiting these windows.”

  “Even at night,” added Park.

  “When not a creature is stirring,” I said.

  “And the guards are asleep,” Marty chimed in.

  “And the cameras are off,” I concluded.

  We turned and headed back the way we had come.

  “Is it safe to open the doors?” Park asked.

  “Yes,” Marty answered, “everything’s down, but we don’t want to go out the front, obviously.”

  “Back the way we came in?” I suggested.

  “Yes, that’ll work,” Marty agreed.

  “This is so strange,” said Park as our footsteps echoed. “Like we’re the only ones left alive on the planet.”

  “Night of the Comet,” said Marty.

  “Holy crap, Martin. Do you not watch any movie made after 1990?”

  “I do, but I am a student of the eighties. It will be our most studied decade, from a cultural standpoint, mark my words.”

  Park looked back and forth between us, then smiled.

  “What?” we both said to her at the same time.

  “Riley’s right, you two are like siblings.”

  “Great,” I moaned.

  Marty beamed. “Can I call you Sis? Big Sis?”

  “Only if you want to die...”

  An hour earlier, we launched this operation in preparation for our meeting with Negron. We had decided the Institute was the perfect place: Negron would have no upper hand, but would also assume that we didn’t have the upper hand either. We were counting on it.

  First, I freeclimbed the back side of the Museum while Park kept a lookout, and Marty looked for the security WiFi. While building the new wing, they had replaced the miles and miles of coaxial cable for the security cameras with digital cameras wirelessly connected to a network. A lot easier to maintain, but a lot more vulnerable as well.

  The climbing wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be; there was a secluded area in the corner, away from the new Modern Wing, and good handholds all the way up. I was wearing beige tights and a turtleneck, with a matching ski mask, to blend with the color of the stone wall. I couldn’t find a beige fannypack, so we spray painted one. It was already flaking off, but it didn’t have to last long.

  Marty had given Park all the gizmos I asked for, but at the last minute he decided he wanted to come along. I couldn’t tell if he was being protective of El, or if he was just tired of being cooped up in his office. What’s the point of making cool stuff if you don’t get to try it out yourself?

  I scuttled across the roof, then climbed quietly down into McKinlock Court. This was the most dangerous part, when I was most visible, but I made it without incident. I lay on my back, flat on the ground; pressed hard up against the interior wall, I was nearly invisible.

  I surveilled the courtyard carefully, looking for guards and security cameras. None of the first, plenty of the second.

  I waited. My iPhone was taped to the small of my back. It was agreed that Marty would send me vibrating texts to alert me when it was time to move to the next part of the plan. As I lay there, I pictured Marty on the outside of the wall, typing furiously on his keyboard, and it brought me back to the day I lost my fingers. Aldo Frances had locked a bomb around my wrist, and Marty had worked frantically to try to diffuse it, putting his life in terrible danger the entire time.

  The phone buzzed once against my back. The cameras were off. I rolled onto my stomach and crawled along the wall to the corner. I was about to make a move toward the closest door when I spotted the first guard, only a few yards away!

  He was sitting at one of the outdoor café tables, smoking a cigarette, earbuds trailing from his ears into his shirt pocket. He was heavy set, Middle Eastern-looking, and clearly bored. Was he listening to music? The news? Language lessons?

  He was so motionless I might have thought he was dead if the end of his cigarette didn’t pulse orange each time he took a drag. The umbrella for the table had completely hidden him when I looked down from the roof. I had gotten lucky.

  Now it was time to test one of the first gizmos, and I eased it out of my pack. I had asked Marty to make a knock-out spray. How hard could that be, right? You see them in spy movies all the time. Turns out those movies may not be totally accurate. Like knocking people out with a karate chop or a truncheon. Generally, people don’t just drop to the ground unconscious. They scream, and yell, and bleed, and roll around on the ground. I wanted the knock-out spray to work like in the movies, but it turns out that wasn’t quite as simple as it looked either.

  Instead of something like a can of mace, I had a little gas mask attached to a round rubber bladder like you would have on a kid’s bike horn. Marty said a spray wouldn’t be concentrated enough. Trouble was, you had to hold the mask over the target’s mouth and nose for about ten seconds. Then, they’d be out for an hour or more. Ten seconds, that wasn’t going to be easy.

  Sneaking up behind guard number one, however, was a snap. Whatever he was listening to, he had it turned up loud. I moved slowly until I was right behind him, and waited for the instant he pulled the cigarette from his mouth to tap the ash. I clamped the mask over his face, squeezing the bulb and pulling backward at the same time until his chair overturned and his head almost cracked on the pavers. I went down on my knees, pushing them into his chest with all my weight, trapping his face and the mask between my shins and thighs. I caught one hand by the wrist as he raised it to try and ward me off. His other hand groped for his belt— no gun, but he had a walkie-talkie. I leaned forward and grabbed it from its holder before he could find it.

  I was at about five Mississippi, and he was flopping like a beached whale, but with his legs up in the air and my weight on his torso, he couldn’t get any leverage.

  At seven Mississippi he started to fade and by ten, just like Marty promised, he was out. I rolled him under the table, stood up, and righted the chair. I took the used plunger bulb off the mask, and swapped it for a fresh one from my pack. I also retrieved my lock pick set and headed quickly for the door.

  A few moments later I was opening the service entrance to the museum’s café; Marty and El slipped in quietly. Marty opened his shoulder bag and handed me eight small disks made of pink plastic. They looked exactly like air fresheners. I held one up to my nose; they even smelled like air fresheners. They were actually remote WiFi disruptors, and would allow Marty to turn the cameras on and off without having to hack into the system again. I slipped them into my pack, then held out my hand to El, motioning for her to give me the large backpack she was carrying. She slid it off her shoulders and handed it to me.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “Meet at the Chagall window in thirty minutes. And stick together.” I needed to make sure Park would keep Marty safe. I wanted to take him with me, but I was heading into the more dangerous area of the museum.

  My first stop was the Impressionists. Always one of Mom’s favorites. If I had a dollar for every time I stood in front of that Caillebotte, well, I’d have a lot of dollars. I crossed the lower level without incident, placing one of the disks on the underside of the staircase before heading up.

  Cautiously, I made my way to the front of the building. From beside the grand staircase I could see into the lobby, where the g
uard at the front desk seemed to be slumped over. I was bewildered. Marty and El couldn’t possibly have gotten here before me. I watched carefully as his chest rose and fell, his hands joined on his considerable gut. My God, he was asleep. Well, that saves me some of the knock-out gas. I placed the disruptor in an inconspicuous spot and headed upstairs to the second floor, moving slowly and peering over the top of the staircase.

  This is where my luck would end. Strolling through the Impressionists, heading my way, was a very tall young man. No headphones, wide awake; he actually seemed to be looking at the art! Probably a graduate student at the Institute who took this job as a way to earn money and get some studying in.

  I kept my head down until he stopped to look at “Sunday in the Park,” his back to me as he examined the painting close up. I slid the pack off my back and set it on the steps. From the fanny pack I got out the knockout gas, but I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get the mask on his face—the guy was about fourteen inches taller than me. Fortunately, he also looked like he weighed about 160 pounds. He was thinner than most of my excuses.

  I reached into the small front pocket of the backpack and found a penny. Watching the back of his head, I waited until he was looking to the right of the frame, then pitched the penny as hard as I could through the entryway on his left, into the room with the Van Gogh in it.

  Ping!

  That snapped him out of his studies. He put his hand on his radio, reflexively, but did not take it out of its holster. He must have decided to check it out on his own first, and headed into the other room.

  I scrambled up the last few stairs, moving silently across the floor in my flexible rock-climbing shoes, turning and sitting on my heels with my back to the wall, just under the painting the guard had been staring at only moments ago. I stilled my breath, then looked down to check that the gas mask was still attached to the squeeze bulb and ready to go. I heard his hard shoes on the floor as he returned. Still no call to anyone else.

  I glanced up toward the corner of the ceiling, where a camera stared back blankly. The fact that no alarm had sounded yet was confirmation that Marty’s gizmos were effective. That would cause its own problem, though, and soon. I figured the guards in the control room would spend about ten minutes, tops, banging the sides of the monitors and checking all the connections before they called someone in tech services for help. Well before then, according to the plan, Marty and El would have located the control room and run sleeping gas in under the door jamb. I was going to assume that their part of the plan was going just fine, unless I heard otherwise, likely in the form of police sirens.