by Kim Oh
What Cole sees is another old building next to this one, separated by a dark gap. Beyond that is the back side of the much bigger and taller, all sleek and silvery-glassy, office tower that he had been watching before.
Cole lowers the duffel bag, bends over it, and opens it up. From inside the bag, he takes out a coil of rope, glistening high-tech mountain-climber stuff, that he paid a lot of money for. He always paid top dollar for his equipment – but then again, just like a mountain climber, his life pretty much depended on it. That, and getting the job done, whatever it was.
Knotted on one end of the rope was a big grappling hook, the sort of thing you only see in movies like this one, where people are doing this sort of cool thing. You can’t buy something like that at Walmart, at least not in most towns. Cole told me he bought the three-pronged hook at some maritime salvage dump, out by the wharves. It wasn’t so expensive, just hard to find.
From where he was standing, he could see the next building’s fire escape. He gave the rope some length, swinging the grappling hook at its end in a slow vertical circle, just brushing the roof. Then he leaned forward and let the hook go, sailing across the gap between the two buildings. First try, the hook catches, one of its prongs snagging on the rusting metal of the other building’s fire escape. Easy enough for him – he’d done this before.
That other fire escape was a few feet lower than the roof of the office building he was standing on. So no problem looping the duffel bag onto the rope and letting it slide across the gap. With a little tugging and lifting, the duffel was safely deposited on the flat bars of the other building’s fire escape. Another sharper tug and the loop securing the duffel bag to the rope came undone. That left Cole with an unencumbered line hooked to the opposite building.
Which was all he needed to do one of his circus tricks, the sort of thing he did to get his jobs done. Putting a foot on the rope to keep it from slipping away, he pulled out of his jacket pocket a pair of heavy leather gloves, the thick palms polished shiny from use, and tugged them on. He pulled the rope taut, looping it around his gloved hands, and clenched his fists tight. He stepped onto the roof’s raised edge, jumped off, and swung Tarzan-like across the gap.
Sort of, at least. Because the rope’s anchor point on the opposite fire escape was lower than the roof he was starting from, first there was a drop of several yards. He had to hunch himself up and brace himself for the impact, to keep his arms from being pulled out of their sockets. And at the same time, bend his knees and cock his legs so that the nubbed soles of his Red Wing workingman’s boots came flat against the other building’s outside wall.
If there had been some wino who had woken up in the shelter of one of the dumpsters in the alley below, he would’ve witnessed some pretty impressive aerial action happening above him. And maybe there had been; it wouldn’t have mattered to Cole, as he went about his business.
Like I said, he’d done this sort of thing before. On other jobs. A couple of seconds of rope action later, pulling himself hand-over-hand, and then he was scrabbling onto the fire escape just below the one he had landed his duffel bag on. He climbed the rusty metal ladder, grabbed the duffel, and continued on up to the other building’s roof.
FOUR
Turns out I wasn’t the only one there, that late in the office.
Close in on Little Nerd Accountant Girl – I was hardly more than a teenager then, though just barely – sweating away in her cheap white polyester shirt, dripping sweat from her brow onto the reports spread out on the desk in front of her. There was $73 missing somewhere, and by God, I was going to find it.
“Aha!” Little Nerd Accountant Girl’s eyes light up behind her big round glasses. A misplaced decimal point, a number that had looked like a nine the first time around, but now she realized it was a five – something real exciting like that. She bends her head over the printouts, scribbling on them with a pencil. “Now we’re getting somewhere . . .”
She looks up blinking, mouth open like a moron, when there’s a knock on the door.
Back to Cole’s part of the movie. That is much more interesting.
Now he’s standing on the roof of the second office building, at its edge with the duffel bag beside him, looking over at the bigger office tower. There’s a window-washing platform way up at the top, slung over the side by a pair of gantry arms. That’s how the office tower stays so nice and shiny, gleaming in the moonlight like sculptured ice. Nobody’s washing any windows now, though. Which means that the platform is just sitting up there, ready for Cole to use it.
He takes from the duffel bag a little electronic device with buttons and a numbered dial on its surface. The thing looks a little crude and home-made – it should, since Cole built it himself, doing all the soldering on the circuit board inside and then wrapping the thing up in black electrician’s tape. He’s good on the technical details, but the aesthetics part has always been a little beyond him.
“If it works,” he told me once, “that’s all I care. The rest of the world should operate on that basis.”
Close up on the device in Cole’s hand as he pushes some of the buttons on it. He looks over at the window-washing platform at the top of the office tower. Nothing’s happened; it’s still just sitting there. He makes some adjustments with the dial on the device and pushes the buttons again. Success. The motors hooked up to the gantry cables come to life. The window-washing platform starts lowering itself slowly down the side of the office tower.
During the day, of course, the sound of the gantry motors would’ve been swallowed up, lost in the sounds of traffic from the street below, all the various noises of the city going on around the place. In the middle of the night, past three in the morning, you can hear them.
The bodyguard leaning against the limo, out in front of the office tower, certainly hears the motor noise. He looks upward, scowling, trying to locate where the sound’s coming from. In his line of work, anything unusual happening is not good.
On the roof of the old office building, Cole takes out from the duffel another piece of his neat-o working gear. It’s a collapsible metal ladder, for which he also paid a lot of money. The high-tech alloy it’s made out of is light enough for him to carry, but strong enough to bear his weight when he has it unfolded all the way. He watches the window-washing platform coming down the side of the office tower for another couple of seconds, then pushes another button on his little home-made black box. The gantry motors stop, their cables vibrating like giant violin strings for a moment, leaving the platform directly opposite from where he’s planted himself. He picks up the extended metal ladder from the office building roof and swings it in a horizontal arc across the gap. The collapsible ladder is just long enough – he knew it would be – to reach from the edge of the office building roof over to the tower’s window-washing platform. The L-shaped hooks at the end of the ladder catch onto the platform rail.
That gives Cole a narrow passage right over to the office tower. Of course, he doesn’t walk across like a tightrope artist – he’s not crazy, at least not in that way. He crawls across the horizontal ladder on his hands and knees, going from one rung to the next.
Granted, that’s still not the kind of thing you or I might want to do. I mean, picture it: yeah, the collapsible ladder’s all high-tech and stuff, some alloy they build the Space Shuttle out of, or something like that, but it’s still bending under Cole’s weight, each careful forward shifting of his weight causing it to bounce up and down a little. I would’ve been puking from sheer dizzying fear by the time I was halfway across – too bad for the wino down in the alley, looking up at me – and then I would’ve frozen witless, hands locked on one of the ladder rungs, the only thought in my head being a serious reconsideration of my life choices so far . . .
Cole, on the other hand, dug this sort of stuff. So maybe he really was crazy back then.
He inches across the ladder, with the duffel bag tightened onto his back. Then close up on him as he finally reaches the o
ther side and scrambles onto the window-washing platform. He stands up, takes a deep breath – and hears the collapsible ladder making a different, kind of creaking noise behind him.
“Damn –” He looks over his shoulder and sees the ladder tilting and swaying. Over on the other side of the gap, the edge of the old building’s roof has started to crumble away. Then it gives way completely, the other end of the ladder swinging down toward the outside of the big office tower. Cole has just enough time to dive for the end of the ladder that’s hooked onto the rail of the window-washing platform he’s standing on. He holds onto the ladder, bracing himself as the loose end clangs against the tower below him.
That was way more noise than he had been planning on making. The impact’s clang bounces, echoing off the flanks of every building for blocks around, then dies away. He lifts his head and listens, trying to catch any other sound in the night.
Of course, if the ladder bridge had given way while he had been halfway across, he would’ve been dead.
Stuff like that never bothered him. The only thing on his mind was knowing that the bodyguard stationed by the limo might be shouting into his cell phone right now, alerting his partner inside that there was something funky going on, while he ran with his gun raised up in his other hand, heading around the corner of the tower and toward where all the noise had come from.
A couple of seconds tick by, with nothing like that happening. Cole relaxes a bit, then hauls the ladder up onto the platform, collapses it back down, and stows it away again inside the duffel bag. He looks around the platform and finds its set of controls, mounted on the rail. He pushes a green button, and the gantry motors come to life again, hauling the platform up toward the top of the tower . . .
Back in my part of the movie, the Little Nerd Accountant Girl is watching the door of her office. She’s such a timid little mouse – hard to believe, but I really was back then – she probably figures it’s somebody who sneaked into the building, come to murder her. Or some other fate worse than death, if whoever it was had been able to figure out that I actually was a girl, with the appropriate equipment somewhere under those dorky knee-length plaid skirts I used to wear.
That was the sort of crap I used to worry about. Things are a little different now. To put it mildly.
Meanwhile, Cole was having still more fun.
FIVE
Cole’s on the roof, and nobody seems to know, even with the screwup of the collapsible ladder nearly falling down to the alley below. He crosses over to the other side of the tower’s roof, the side overlooking the street, and checks. Way down there, the one bodyguard is still leaning back against the side of the limo, arms folded across his chest. Everything under control. Which suited Cole fine.
“When you’re out making trouble for people –” More words of wisdom from my instructor. “You want them believing for as long as possible that God loves them, and they got nothing to worry about.”
If they’d been able to see Cole and what he was doing, they would’ve worried, all right. Because now he was really getting down to work.
From the duffel bag, he takes out another electronic device, one he didn’t build himself. Something called a Camero Xaver 400, made by some company in Israel. That one was seriously expensive. In real movies, you see SWAT teams and secret agents using thermal imaging devices to see through walls and inside buildings. Those actually don’t work, at least not the way they do in the special effects shots. The Xaver 400 does – it’s got some kind of high-tech, Ultra-Wideband radar going on. Cole switches on the device, sets it flat on the tower roof, and peers at the lit-up screen. And at whatever might be going on down below.
Which right at the moment was the private executive elevator bringing the white-haired guy and the other bodyguard up to the top level. In the plush mahogany-paneled reception area on that floor, the numbers light up above the elevator doors. They open, and the white-haired guy steps out. There are people waiting for him, including another important-looking dude, this one broader across the shoulders and with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. He’s flanked by his own pair of bodyguards. Gives a big smile to his partner who’s just arrived, and a wave of the lit Cohiba in one hand; the cigar’s thick around as a baby’s arm. The white-haired guy turns and gives some instructions to his bodyguard, who stations himself by the elevator doors. With a thump across the first one’s shoulders, the other important guy ushers him into the conference room past the reception area, the two bulky bodyguards following them inside.
Up on the office tower roof, Cole has had mixed luck with the Xaver 400. Good as it is, there are too many pipes and ducts and other stuff running right under his feet, to get any kind of clear picture about who might be moving around inside. But that’s all right; he always has a backup plan. He throws the Xaver 400 into the duffel bag and takes out another gizmo, this one with what looks like a doctor’s stethoscope headset attached to it. Basically a high-sensitivity microphone-in-a-box – he puts on the headset, cranks up the device’s amplifier, and starts moving the sensor around in a widening spiral, kneeling down and moving from spot to spot on the roof.
Bingo. He can hear voices down there. Not clearly enough to make out what anyone’s saying, but definite enough to know exactly where they are. Which is all he needs at the moment. He pulls off the headset and throws the gear back in the duffel. Now the real fun will start . . .
Right about that time, Little Accountant Nerd Girl is all relieved to see that it’s just her boss standing in the doorway of her crummy cubbyhole office, and not some mad murderer who’d somehow gotten into the building after-hours.
“How’s it going?” A big smile from him.
Actually, knowing what I do now about the guy, I should’ve preferred the murderer I’d been imagining in my scared little mind.
“It’s . . . it’s going fine, Mr. McIntyre.” I sit back with my hands in my lap. “Just fine.”
“No, it’s not. Otherwise you still wouldn’t be here this late.”
He liked to come across all kind of concerned. Like he was the good kind of boss. I was still fooled by him back then.
“Well . . .” Now I was embarrassed, because I knew how ratty and sweaty I must’ve looked. “It’s been better. There are a couple of the club accounts that are off.”
“By how much?”
“Um . . .” In my throat, my voice dwindles down to a timid little squeak. Like it’s my fault. “A couple thousand, actually.”
He keeps on smiling. He’s got a Hermès tie on, the knot loosened, and a nicely tailored suit that’s worth more than everything I own.
“You’re worried about that?”
I can’t answer. Can’t even breathe. He can’t see it, but I’m wringing my hands into bloodless knots underneath the desk. I can’t even look at him.
“Kim,” he says, all kindly and paternal and stuff. “What does a few thousand matter? Really.”
“It does matter, Mr. McIntyre.” A mouse could’ve spoken up louder. I’m still staring down at the reports scattered across the desk. They’re going all blurry, as though my glasses were filling up with salt water. “Things like that . . . they add up after a while.”
“I knew you’d say that. Look. Here’s what I want you to do, Kim. Give it your best shot for another, oh, I don’t know – maybe another quarter-hour. All right? And if you don’t crack it, you don’t find the money, then don’t worry about it. Just go on home. Try again tomorrow, when you’re fresh. Okay? I’m serious.”
Little Accountant Nerd Girl bites her lip and manages to nod, still looking down at the papers and all the blurry numbers. I would’ve died for the man right about then. That’s what kind of twit I was.
“All right, Mr. McIntyre.” Nothing but a whisper. “I will.”
“Promise?”
I nodded again.
“And give Donnie a hug for me when you finally get home.”
Another nod, and even a brave little smile, to myself.
Just as I�
�m aware of him stepping back out into the hallway and pulling my office door shut, he stops and says something else. “Oh – one more thing, Kim –”
This time I manage to look up at him.
“Actually, I’m kind of glad you’re still here. And if you could stay just a little longer, that’d be great.”
The smile fades. Because I already know what he’s going to say.
“Cole might swing by later. So if you could have a check ready for him . . .”
I don’t move, but there’s already a lump of ice in my gut. My spine’s gone completely rigid, as though somebody just shoved a poker up my schoolgirl butt.
“Sure.” I nodded. This was the part of my job I hated the most. Having to deal with Cole. “I’ll take care of it.” I knew what account my boss wanted the payment to come from. The one that was way off the books. “You don’t have to worry about anything.”
“I knew I could count on you.”
“Great.” His big nice-boss smile again. “Good night.”
I just sat there trembling, even after the door was shut. I didn’t say anything until I could hear the elevator at the end of the hallway, heading down to the building’s lobby.
“Shit!”
Little Nerd Accountant Girl was in a bad mood. That was just about as scary as I got back then.
How times change.
I went back to work, and I found the missing receipts. They’d gotten stuck on the back of one of the plastic binders. That cleared up all my problems for the time being.
Except for that jerk Cole.
SIX
Cole’s on the office tower roof. And he can hear the elevator coming up. The structure housing the motors and the cables is right up there on the roof with him. At its door, he runs through his set of passkeys until he finds one that works. Inside, the sound of the big motors and the thick, braided cables running over the machinery’s reels is louder. Then it’s all suddenly quieter when he goes over to the control panel and flips the emergency power cut-off switch. The reels and the cables grind to a halt.
