Chapter 9
Dustin
I hadn’t meant to bring Wade along with me on this illegal little jaunt. He was supposed to collect the key from Mina, but stay in the car while I did the dirty work. Except he flat-out refused.
“I’m not letting you take all the risks.” The stubborn jut of Wade’s chin was less endearing when he was demanding to endanger himself.
I sighed as I steered through the dark suburban streets. “There are fewer risks if I’m by myself.”
“With no one to watch your back.”
“I’m a werewolf. I have pretty good situational awareness.”
“I’m a werewolf too, with a lot of hunts under my belt.”
I snickered and bit back an inappropriate joke about what else was under his belt.
He continued, “I’m good at being sneaky and staying unseen. Plus, if we have to search through a bunch of file cabinets, two sets of eyes are better than one.”
“Oh, all right.” We were almost at our target. “But you listen to me, do exactly as I say. You may have experience with hunting, but not felony breaking and entering.”
Wade grimaced at the reminder this was not a law-abiding venture, but he nodded.
City Hall stood alone on a narrow lot off Main Street. Police headquarters loomed just a block nearer. Wade flicked a look at the cop shop as we rolled past. “Lovely. Fast response time if someone sees us.”
“The goal is for them to never know we were there.” I drove well beyond our target, then down a side street, parking in front of an apartment building similar in size to Wade’s but a lot more upscale.
I stuck a favorite camera and an extra roll of film in one pocket of my dark jacket, a flashlight in the other, and got out.
My lock picks and a few odds and ends bulged the pockets of my black khaki pants, beneath the blackout drape wrapped around my waist.
Wade, also dressed in nondescript dark clothing with a scarf around his neck, strode beside me down the block.
The best way to be ignored was to act confident, like you had somewhere else to be, until the last possible moment.
We marched along the sidewalk until we reached the parking area for City Hall.
After a glance around, I whispered, “Here,” and ducked into the shadow of a hedge.
Wade followed me alongside the building. Thank God for ornamental plantings.
The door I was aiming for opened on the side of the building, flanked by a modern alarm keypad.
I motioned to Wade to stay put in the shadows, walked up to the pad, entered the code I’d observed, and held my breath.
A beep and a green light rewarded me. I picked the lock and eased the door open, poised for flight.
No alarms rang. No lights flashed. “Come on in but cover your face,” I whispered to Wade.
We both wrapped the scarves over our mouths and noses before we ducked inside.
I pulled the door shut. The red of the exit sign gave light enough to see by as I reset the alarm, then led the way down the corridor.
I knew the layout. I’d checked the construction plan of the main floor before coming here for my reconnaissance run that afternoon, noting the doors and the hallway cameras.
The mayor had his office near the back of the building.
At the nameplate for “Mayor Joseph Kling,” Wade handed me the keys Mina had loaned us.
The largest key turned smoothly in the lock.
I ushered Wade through, closed the door behind us, and used my flashlight to scan the room.
No video camera lenses caught the glitter of the beam, unlike in the hallways, but I kept my scarf on as a precaution.
Across the office, the conference room with its sleek table and upholstered chairs sat dark and empty behind its glass window.
I didn’t see any document storage spaces in there.
The other door was presumably the mayor’s inner sanctum.
Mina hadn’t had that key, but I’d been picking locks since I was thirteen, and needed less than thirty seconds to open the door.
Once inside, I went to the office window, fully shut the venetian blinds, and draped my blackout cloth over the slats.
Wade, still standing by the door, whispered, “What’s that for?”
I ran my flashlight around the upper reaches of the office, not finding cameras here either. “We’re going to need light to read and photograph files. The darker the window, the safer we are.”
“Okay.” His scarf muffled his words as he came toward me. “Can I take this off my face?”
“I don’t see video surveillance in here. Can’t be a hundred percent sure, though. I didn’t get to scope out this part of the building in decent light. Maybe keep it on.”
“Right.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Filing cabinets.”
“There are five.” Wade eyed them. “Where do we start?”
“First, if any are unlocked, we’ll skip those. If it were me, I might use a locked one as a decoy and go unlocked, but most crooks don’t.”
I led the way over and we began tugging drawer handles.
Three of the cabinets opened at a thumb on the drawer latches.
Two didn’t. “Right.” I tried Mina’s little key in case it worked, then switched to a small set of lock picks.
Honestly, filing cabinets only had about a dozen different keys between them.
Back in my Chicago office, I had a ring of keys that could get into almost all of them, but these locks were so cheesy, the picks were faster.
Once I’d popped the top corner lock-tab on both of them, I handed Wade my smaller flashlight and waved him at the cabinet farther from the window.
“Take that one. Start at the top.” I’d seen pictures of the mayor, and he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d like bending and kneeling.
“Start at the back of each drawer unless there’s a folder with no label. Then start there.”
“Got it.” Wade pulled out his top drawer, eased down his scarf enough to hold the light in his teeth, and began riffling through the files.
I got to work on my own. The top drawer held nothing useful. I was halfway through the second one when Wade said, “Hm, this might be it.” He lifted out a folder labeled “Duplicate tax records.”
“Put it on the floor.” I wanted to keep lights below window level, precautions or not.
We crouched over the file and I spread out the pages.
Sure enough, there was the revised map, showing the road widening project shifting from west to east, right over the top of Wade’s building.
The switch could possibly be justified by cutting off a curve, but it meant a more complicated construction process, crossing the existing roadway twice.
And there… yep, buildings that would have to be purchased, with valuations way over the tax assessments I’d found.
“Do we steal the file?’ Wade asked.
“Hell, no, we take pictures. Once we have the evidence, we put everything back the way it was. Hopefully they’ll never realize we were here.
In three days, the video cameras in the hallway begin recording over their own tape.
If no one bothers to check before then, we disappear.
” I passed him my stronger light and unslung the camera from around my neck. “Shine that on the page.”
My first try with just the flashlight was such a long exposure even my steady hand probably would create blurs. “Take off your jacket. Screen me from the window. I need to use the flash.”
I got photos of all the pages as quickly as I could, including some financial documents I didn’t take the time to read through.
Then we reconstructed the file, replaced it in the drawer, and relocked both cabinets.
I wrapped my blackout cloth under my jacket, eased the venetian blind back to the half-open position it’d started in.
“Cover your mouth again,” I reminded Wade.
As we retreated, I relocked doors, then keyed off the alarm for our escape.
One last sequence punched into the keypad to reactivate the system, a brief scurry behind the hedge, and we took off our scarves, straightened, and strolled toward the sidewalk.
We were still on the grass, close to the bushes, when a cop car rolled toward us down the street.
In a moment, their headlights would reach us.
Wade gulped something that sounded like, “Eep!”
I murmured, “Go with this,” and hauled him against the bush, pressed myself close to his body, and kissed him. A second later the light swept over us, kept going… paused.
The car came to a stop at the curb. I let go of Wade and turned to face the cops, tucking him behind me and hoping my loose jacket covered all my gear.
The cop on our side of the car rolled down his window. “Hey, you two. None of that! Take it inside your house, you hear me?”
I waved to him. “Sorry. I didn’t think there was anyone around.”
“This is city hall, not a public park. Get out of here before I haul you both in for indecency.”
“Yes, sir.” I hustled Wade off the grass and turned us in the opposite direction from the cop car.
They’d have to get out on foot or pull a U-turn to come after us.
For several breathless seconds, their reaction hung in the balance, the car idling at the roadside as we walked away— not too fast, not too slow—down the sidewalk.
Then the engine revved and they drove off.
Wade heaved a sigh of relief.
I murmured, “Short stroll to the car, cool and calm, nothing suspicious.” We turned the corner, continued a few blocks, and doubled back the other way, sauntering side by side, two men with nothing to hide.
We reached my car, got in, started the engine.
I drove five blocks deeper into the sleeping neighborhood, pulled over, and banged my forehead on the steering wheel.
Wade laughed, a touch of hysteria in his tone. “That was too close. I can’t believe you did that.”
“Yep. But we survived. I wouldn’t have tried to pull that ‘we’re just here making out’ game ten years ago. They’d have run us in for being queer in their presence, probably with a punch and kick to remember them by, but it’s 1974 and times have changed. I took a gamble.”
“I don’t understand, why?”
“Two guys off the sidewalk over by the bushes? Must be up to no good of some sort. So I gave them a different no good they could believe.”
“Sure. Right.” Wade whipped the scarf from around his neck and tossed it over the back of the seat, followed by his jacket. “I sweated like a pig. How did you have the code for the door?”
“A little advance planning after checking the blueprints. That was a fire exit door. You know, ‘Push in emergency, the alarm will sound?’ I went to City Hall shortly before closing and brought this teen kid with me. I’d paid him twenty bucks to go through the emergency exit and beat it as fast as he could.
Security came running, and one of them entered the code to turn off the alarm.
I was watching from down the hall with little opera glasses.
” I smirked. “They called that kid a lot of names for that stupid prank.”
“Oh.” Wade grinned back at me.
“I do this for a living, you know. Ninety-five percent is preparation and research. Five percent is luck. The cops not arriving two minutes sooner was luck.”
“Now what?”
“Now we go home and get some shut-eye. In the morning, I’ll run the film down to my Chicago office where I have a darkroom.
” I wasn’t about to let my negatives and images pass through someone else’s hands on cases.
Particularly since a number of them featured naked people.
I developed all my own stuff. “Then I’m going to snoop around Rosswurn and Quentin, who both live in Chicago.
See what I can dig up on that unholy duo.
People who are sleazy about money often have other sins they hide. We need leverage.”
“Leverage for what?”
“Whatever it takes to shut this down.”
“Going to the press, you mean?”
“Potentially, yes. Downside is, if we bring the press in, we shine a light on the building, the residents, you. Attention, stories.”
Wade flinched, as any werewolf would. “What’s the alternative, though?”
“Blackmail? Quid pro quo? We keep quiet, they give up this scam and keep the extension where it belongs.”
He frowned. “That seems…”
“What? Unethical? Criminal?” I put a little bite in my voice, because that was how the job went, being a Fixer. The Alpha said, “Get this done,” but they and the pack didn’t want to know what we did to achieve those results. I’d done far worse things than blackmailing a crook.
“I was thinking more along the lines of difficult,” Wade said mildly. “Complicated.”
“Ah. No, in many ways it’s more straightforward. I’ll have to see if what we’ve found is enough, if I can’t get better leverage.” I’d print out the pictures, enlarge them, and read them, then do a deep dive into Misters Rosswurn and Quentin.
“Can I help?”
“Do you know how to develop film?” If he did, I could dig into the other stuff faster.
“No. Sorry. You could teach me?”
“Sometime.” I liked the idea of guiding Wade through a new skill.
Another new skill. My ass clenched in memory of the last excellent talent I’d taught Wade.
“Not instantly, though.” He wasn’t trained for the sneaking around I planned to do, either, so this venture into the city would be all mine.
“See if you can find out when the next city council meeting is. Mina might know. I’ll get her to contact you.
The mayor and his cronies will need approval for this change of plans.
Hopefully, we have until the public unveiling to convince them this grift is a bad idea. ”
“That’s logical.”
I pretended the note of approval in his voice didn’t warm me down inside, and put the car in gear.
We arrived back at Wade’s and I parked a block away, but hesitated. I didn’t want to assume my welcome was unlimited. “I could let you off here. Head down into the city now.”
Wade growled deep in his throat, then blinked and glanced away. “Sorry, but no, what kind of tomfool idea is that? Get some sleep at my place. Drive in the morning.”
That was reassuring. I reached over and rubbed his knee. “Just sleep?”
“If you’re too tired.”
“I’m almost never too tired.”
A smile bloomed on his face. “Good to know. Neither am I.”