Mister Petty #3
I thought about calling Viti again, just to be annoying, but she had occasionally shot me out of pique, and I didn’t feel like healing up another wound.
Viti is very good about establishing boundaries.
Monster LLC had plenty of shady contacts, but it would take her more time to dig around the more legitimate, private parts of the net.
Having nothing better to do, I hung around across from the tennis club, waiting to see what happened.
Mostly what happened was older men and expensive-looking women coming and going, and Cammy came out looking freshly showered in business casual attire.
She waited for a few minutes, looking at her phone, then got into a car that had a ride service sign in the window.
What the hell. I got on my unstolen bike and followed her.
Traffic was slow, and if anyone had been looking for me, it would have been a problem to blend in believably rather than blowing past stalled traffic.
No one was. I did a lot of loitering. Cammy and her pretty calves wound up getting out of the car at an office building on the north end of the Loop.
I changed my face again, put on a ball cap to make me really unrecognizable, and hurried ahead of her to open the building’s door for her.
She took no notice of me. She was talking loudly to someone on the phone as she walked, wearing wireless earbuds.
“…and where do they get these drivers? He just sat in the traffic and did nothing at all to get me there faster. One star, bitch. And a review that says he was staring at me like a creep. That’s what he gets… I know, I know, right?”
I followed Cammy, still without being noticed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m good at not being noticed, supernaturally good at it in fact, but I could have been wearing a poster-board sign that said, “I’m the guy from the club today” and Cammy wouldn’t have seen it.
So I got in an elevator, pushed the button for the top floor, and stood quietly while Cammy kept chattering.
“Uh-huh, I know. I know. Good, that was exactly what you should have done to the bastard. He deserves exactly that. Right. Okay. Okay.” She hung up without saying goodbye, gave me a withering glance, and said, “Don’t even think about it, buddy. ”
I didn’t move, look at her, or otherwise show that I’d heard her at all.
“Fucker,” she said, and got out on the fourth floor.
I rode the elevator to the top and back down, found the office index on the wall of the ground floor, and scanned over which businesses had the fourth floor: an orthodontist, a title company, an engineering consulting firm, and a tax attorney’s office, Acumen, Inc.
Ah hah.
That would seem to be some kind of financial person’s business.
I went back out to my bike, which admittedly looked pretty junky—I just buy old used ones so when they get lifted it’s not a big deal—and got on it for a leisurely ride back to my office.
Viti looked up from her laptop when I walked in. She was straight-up mortal, but she’d been working with me long enough to know me in any shape, unless I’d gone really deep—something I avoided, unless absolutely necessary, because going that deep into a form meant that I might lose track, myself.
“Grey,” she said, “we need better internet.”
“It’s expensive,” I said.
“Then I need a boss who isn’t so cheap.”
“Harsh,” I said, “and creating a hostile work environment. Keep it up and I’ll report you to human resources.”
“I’m the only human here,” she said.
“Hmm. You have a point. Draw it from petty cash.”
“Do you mean from the ten thousand in cash in your desk drawer?”
“I do,” I said.
She frowned for a moment and then said, “Oh. You’re attempting humor again.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I accept your apology.”
Viti gave me an exasperated look and followed me into my office. I sat down at my desk, took about half the stack of bills from the drawer, and slid it across to her. “I assume better internet is expensive.”
She took perhaps a quarter of that and slid the rest back. “This will do.”
I tucked it back into the drawer. “What did you find?”
“Little,” she replied. “Stunningly, a skilled accountant working for organized crime is quite apt at concealing his financial affairs.”
I leaned back in my chair and pursed my lips. “Did you find a Cammy anywhere?”
“I did not.”
I nodded. “See what you can find out about a company called Acumen, Inc.” I told her about Cammy.
“Interesting,” Viti mused absently.
She vanished to her desk. I’d done my part of the legwork, so I let her do hers, fired up my game console, and spent some time battling digital aliens.
She appeared a bit later and said, “Acumen, Inc. is owned by a Ms. Cameron Montecrist.”
I hit pause and lifted my eyebrows. “Oh ho.”
Viti frowned. “Oh ho?”
“I can’t say ‘ah hah’ every time,” I said. “I’ll sound like a jerk. I assume her last name isn’t a coincidence.”
“Correct. Ms. Montecrist is Mrs. Petty’s younger sister.”
“Heh,” I said. “Heh, heh, heh.”
“What’s so funny?”
“Right now, I’m guessing,” I said. “But what an ugly little triangle we have going.”
“There’s something else.”
I tilted my head.
“Acumen, Inc. is a subsidiary of the LaChaise group.”
“Ghouls,” I murmured. “At a guess, that’s how a schmuck like Sheryl heard about me.”
Viti leaned her hip on the edge of my desk, frowning. “I don’t like guesses.”
“For good reason,” I said. “But now we know where we need to look next.”
Viti nodded. “Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
“Burglary?”
“Exactly.”
She smiled. “I’ll bring the laptop. You bring the lockpicks.”
“Well?” I asked Viti. It was about eleven, and we were parked a block from the office building where Acumen, Inc. was located. We’d been sitting there for an hour.
She stared at the screen of her laptop, adjusted one of the bits of electronic skulduggery she had in the car, and chewed on her lip thoughtfully.
It was one of her few uncalculated mannerisms. “They didn’t use store-bought,” she said.
“But they didn’t spend a lot more, either.
” She picked up a tablet and tapped it a few times, entered something on the keyboard, and said, “Oh, that makes it simpler. Here.”
She twisted in the driver’s seat and leaned back to a black box in the back seat of her safety-minded Volvo. It spat out a plain plastic card with a magnetic stripe and a security chip on it, and she passed it to me.
“Front door?”
“Office door,” she said. “You’ll need it after hours.”
“There’s a security guy on the front door,” I said.
“Yes.” She picked up the tablet and showed me a security camera view of an overweight, bored-looking man sitting at a desk with his feet up, watching something on his phone. “He just got back from a sweep, so you’ll have about forty-five minutes. I recommend you go in through the roof.”
I grunted and picked up an earbud. I knew enough to turn it on at least, and slipped it in. “Check, check.”
My voice came tinnily out through a handheld communicator on the dashboard. Viti nodded, picked it up, and clicked a button on the side twice. I heard it in the earpiece, and I swung out of the car. “You got the circuit on the top door?”
“I doubt the security guard has had to fend off many looters seeking to break into an orthodontist’s office,” she said primly. “However, I am somewhat offended to be asked such a thing.”
“My mistake,” I said. I kicked off my shoes and socks and tossed them into the passenger seat.
She nodded, mollified, and I shut the car door and moved silently through the night toward the back of the building.
I shifted my fingers and toes into climbing claws as I went, nails thickening, lengthening, becoming pointed with a low rustling sound as I approached the building.
A bit more went into it than a simple face change.
Muscles in hands and forearms, feet and calves swelled.
Tendons thickened. Pangs of discomfort flickered through me in time with my heartbeat.
It was a ten-story building, and I went up it with little difficulty.
Once on the roof, I took out my lockpicks, went to the access door, dealt with the dead bolt, and used a jimmy in one hand and my claws in the other to swing it open.
I’d been doing this kind of thing for a long while.
I didn’t leave marks on the door or the lock.
Once inside, I dilated my pupils wider, turning the near darkness into a cloudy afternoon, and started silently down the stairs. At the fourth floor, I bypassed another lock, slipped inside the hall, found Acumen, Inc., opened that door with the key card, and slipped into Cammy’s business.
It wasn’t much. A small reception area and an office beyond it.
“Grey?” Viti said.
I try not to talk too much when I’m doing burglary. I clicked my teeth together once in acknowledgment.
“A town car just pulled up outside the building,” she said calmly. “Two men are approaching the front door. I don’t think they’re human.”
“Damn,” I murmured. “Keep me posted.”
The door to the inner office was locked. I had it open in three slow heartbeats and went in. Filing cabinets, a desk, a personal computer, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The computer was shut down. I slipped the little portable drive into a port and booted it up. “Drive is in.”
I heard the clicking of Viti’s keys through the earpiece. “They’re showing ID to the guard.”
“Maybe they’re orthodontists,” I said.
A soft snort came over the earpiece. “You only have a few moments.”
I went over to the filing cabinets. They were locked, too. There wouldn’t be time to go through all of them.
If I was an attractive, self-absorbed crooked tax attorney, where would I keep my most incriminating things?
There was a door at the back of the office, to a small bathroom.
It had a mirror.
I went to it, ran my claw tips around it, pried gently, and popped it off its mount. There was a hollow space behind it in the wall, roughly formed. A brown legal folder rested inside.