He smiles. It’s the first time I’ve seen his expression change. “Safe Spot Storage.”
It’s all light industrial east of the 101, a.k.a. the Bayshore Freeway. Light industrial always looks scary at night. We park out back of a buzzing electrical substation between a couple RVs that don’t look like they’ve gone anywhere for a while. The self-storage place’s white, eight-foot-tall back gate is across the street. I ask, “Which unit is he in?”
“Don’t know exactly. See the second aisle past the gate? He’s in there. Half a dozen units at most.” He looks my way. “Do we go in?”
Why do I have to make that decision? Oh, yeah, because I’m project lead. “What about the cameras?” I point toward the warning sign on the gate.
George shrugs. “We can take them down. They’ll know something happened, just not what.”
“How?”
“I call Olivia, she calls her hacker.”
It’s weird to hear somebody I don’t know talking about Olivia. “Guards?”
“Don’t know. Website says they do a security check at closing time. Doesn’t say what happens after.”
Fun. “Locks?”
“They require keyed locks.”
“You can pick those?”
“I get by.”
So here’s where I get to decide if we’re going to commit burglary. This is why ICE wanted the client to fund a black-bag operation: so a couple idiots like us can do the illegal shit the feds don’t want to, then admit to it in writing. I’m starting to wonder if another year with my PO is such a bad thing.
The storage units look like white cargo containers shoved together. Each block of containers has two small roof-mounted floodlights pointing into the aisles between the blocks, one on each side. The doors I can see are painted purple. At least everything’s clean.
I look around at the RVs and campers surrounding us. No lights, but that doesn’t mean nobody’s home. I’ve read there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people living in cars in the Bay Area. Even people making six figures.
George asks, “What are we looking for?”
A pile of pots? A pile of money? A pile of old National Geographics? “If I knew, we wouldn’t have to look.”
“Fair enough. Do we go?”
It’s only two to three years of my life. No biggie. “We go.”
Chapter 26
38 DAYS LEFT
George says, “The hacker’s trying to find the place.”
“Okay. How do we get over the gate?” It’s gotten taller since I started staring at it.
“Climb.” He swivels his phone mic to his mouth. “What was that? Right.” He presses his phone against his chest. It’s the same kind as my work phone, but he’s added a translucent lime-green case. “He found it.”
“You have Olivia there?” He nods. “Tell her ‘hi’ for me.”
He does. “She says you haven’t rung in donkey’s years, whatever that means.”
It’s been two days. “Tell her I still love her, but I need my space.”
“Not telling her that.”
A couple minutes of silence pass. The gate gets taller. The butterflies in my stomach turn into giant bats that swoop up and down in time with the percussion solo jangling out of the radio.
George says, “Thanks.” He thumbs off his phone. “Cameras are down. The hacker went through the fax machine. Let’s go.”
Hacking a fax machine? Whatever. I snap on the yellow latex gloves he tosses to me, then follow him out of the Focus. A cold, sharp little breeze knifes down the street. When we get to the gate, George gets down on one knee and interlaces his fingers to make a step. I put my foot into the step; he practically throws me over the gate. He pulls himself up and over while I’m recovering from my flying lesson.
While it’s twilight on the road circling the ranks of containers, it’s noontime in the aisles between them. If there are guards or dogs here, they won’t have any trouble seeing us as they go by.
There are four violet rollup doors to my right in Bandineau’s aisle, one to my left. George brushes past me, heads for the singleton, plugs in his earbuds, then gets busy with his set of lockpicks. I’ve learned from Carson that the best thing I can do in this situation is to stay out of the way. After what seems like an hour (probably only fifteen or twenty seconds), the padlock comes off the hasp.
George pops an earbud. “This what you’re looking for?”
I smell the antique furniture packed in the forty-foot container before my phone lights it up. It’s a blend of old wood, dust, and baked varnish. Most of it’s from Europe, mostly the nineteenth century, and not a pot in sight. “Nope.”
While George starts pulling the locks off the other four doors, I peek around the corner down the road leading to the front gate.
There’s a guy at the end walking our way. A dark nylon bomber jacket, dark baseball cap, flashlight. As he paces past an aisle to his right, he slows to look toward it.
The Star Trek battle-stations klaxon goes off in my head. I hustle toward George, who’s opening the third of the three small storage cubes at the end of the aisle. I stage-whisper, “Guard. Coming this way.” No reaction. I yank the nearest earbud out of his ear, making him jump. “Guard.”
“How far?”
“A couple hundred feet, maybe. Stay off your soundtrack.”
He stands back, then points to each of the small cubes in turn, starting from his left. “House junk, empty, kid stuff.” He means a cradle, playpen, and open boxes of tiny clothes.
“Nope.”
“Close them up.”
I do, then scurry to the edge of the drive. The guard’s closer, three aisles— maybe a hundred feet—away. I ask George, “How’s it going?”
“Somebody got a good lock.”
Great. “We’ve got maybe two minutes.” I’ll regret saying this… “Let’s get in the empty one.”
We duck into the unused storage cube after George pops the padlock in about two seconds. It’s six feet square, plywood floor, white ribbed steel walls. George carefully pulls down the metal roll-up door partway (I’m sure they can hear the scraping and rattling in the Financial District), ducks underneath, then eases it closed. It gets very dark. It’s still cold, but at least the breeze is gone.
Faint, hard-edged jazz squeaks nearby. It takes a moment to figure out why. I hiss, “George. Kill the tunes.” He grumbles, but the music stops. “This one had a lock.”
“Yeah, a cheap-shit one.”
“Why do you lock an empty locker?”
“Keeps the homeless out.”
With housing prices the way they are here, I get that. “He’ll notice it’s gone.”
After a few beats, George mutters, “We’ll see.”
I concentrate on the thin glowing line at the bottom of the door where the floodlights leak into the cube. It reminds me there’s an outside. I’ve always been mildly claustrophobic, but prison made it way worse. Of course, I end up hiding in a closet at least once every project.
My ears strain to hear footsteps outside, but all that comes through is the wind rattling things around. Well, not all—there’s a scratching sound I can’t place. I hiss, “George! Stop it!”
“What?”
“That scratching.”
“Not me.”
Great. Rats, maybe. Squeakless rats. Giant, genetically-engineered silent rats. One of Google’s secret science projects, escaped from the lab. They eat stray dogs and cats and people hiding in storage cubes… “How long?”
“Two minutes.”
That’s all? I gotta get a watch; using my phone as a clock just isn’t cutting it anymore. My eyes have adjusted to the not-quite-complete darkness. George is a dark shadow against a slightly less-dark wall across from me. It doesn’t help.
More wind, more scratching.
Footsteps. Outside.
George and I try to squeeze into the eighteen inches of wall on either sid
e of the door.
The door clatters up about three feet. A flashlight beam stabs into the back corners, sweeps along the base of the back wall and halfway up the side walls. The sudden light burns my eyes. I stop breathing. I stop thinking. If I could stop my heart, I would.
If that circle of light gets a few inches closer, I’ll end up in a place like this for years.
The guard mutters. The door slams down.
We wait five minutes after the footsteps fade away. By then, I’m ready to chew my way through the door. “I’ll check.”
George says, “Careful.”
We inch the door up far enough for me to stick my head out. No guard. George lifts the door higher so I can crawl out. Good thing I wore jeans. It’s dead outside by the time I get to the corner.
George gets back to work on the last door while I watch for guards or dogs or drones or rodents of unusual size. For all the trouble George’s having with that lock, there better be something good inside. After enough time passes for the San Andreas Fault to move L.A. several inches closer to San Francisco, I hear the click of a lock opening and George’s whispered “finally.”
We enter together, close the door. He flips on the strip lights.
It’s a twenty-foot cargo container. The door’s about ten feet from the far end. Half the wall opposite the door is covered by two black, five-shelf steel commercial shelving units. They hold pots.
Dozens and dozens of Nam Ton pots.
George says, “This is what you’re looking for. I can tell.”
“Yeah.” I’m sure there’s a huge blinking sign on top of my head saying Eureka! “Look for paperwork.”
The pots are like magnets dragging me to the shelves. There’s almost a hundred Nam Ton pieces arranged in neat rows on the lower four tiers. Each one has a yellow sticky note plastered to the shelf in front of it; each note holds a numeric code that looks like an inventory number. Bandineau’s a museum guy, all right.
I check “15-0131,” an elegant, foot-tall tapered vase right in front of me. It’s clean: no dust, no dirt, ready for a display case. Because I don’t see duplicates of the last four digits following the “15,” I assume it’s the 131st pot brought over in 2015. What’s really disturbing: there’s enough room in the numbering scheme to support ten thousand pots smuggled in one year.
Ten thousand pots a year. Is Bandineau delusional, or is that really the volume he’s moving? Could there possibly be that much Nam Ton ware in the world? I was expecting maybe a few dozen a year sneaking into the country, stuffed in the back corners of shipping containers. Even at a thousand a year, it wouldn’t take long to empty whatever archaeological site they’re in.
Which is plunder, not collecting.
I use my phone to shoot overall photos of each shelf and close-ups of groups of three to four pots. It takes more time than I like, but I need complete documentation when I send it to ICE. I ask George, “Find anything?”
George’s been rummaging on and under the workbench behind me, trailing a whisper of jazz behind him. “The only paper here is butcher paper.”
“His records must be on his phone or laptop.” Bandineau’s gotta have records; there’s no point to inventory numbers if nothing tracks them. “What’s with the—”
Bangbangbang.
After I scrape myself off the ceiling, I realize the noise came from the door. A guy’s voice yells, “Open up in there!”
George and I swap stares. His eyes are as round as mine feel.
Bangbangbang.
My brain reboots. When in doubt, brazen it out. I grab a Nam Ton water bottle off a shelf, place it on a large green beanbag on the workbench, then jam on the nearby magnifying visor. “Hold on, in a minute.”
Georges scowls at me. I motion to him to take off his gloves and go to the cube’s far end. Then I clomp across the wooden floor to roll up the door. “What?”
It’s the guard I saw earlier, a pale, youngish guy with a scrubby ginger beard. “What are you doing here?” He swings his flashlight beam into my face.
My first instinct is to be nice, try to get on the guy’s good side. After losing his cameras, though, he may not be looking for a friend—he may be looking for somebody to blame. What would Carson do?
Go on the attack.
I growl, “Get that goddamn thing away from me.” My heart sounds like a diesel engine at top rev. I hope he can’t hear it. When the light slides away, I puff myself up as big as I can and try to work up an attitude out of thin air. “Twenty-four-hour access, right? What’s the problem?”
“I didn’t see you come in.” The guard tries to peek around the doorjamb.
I block his view. “Not my fault. You weren’t there. Aren’t you supposed to be guarding the place?”
“I was on patrol.” He waves to his left, toward the three small cubes. “See anyone else around? Someone swiped the lock off onea those.”
“Just got here. I’m working.”
“Late for that, isn’t it?” The guard squints at me. “I don’t remember you around here before. What’d you say your name is?”
“None of your fucking business. With two esses.” Don’t push it too hard. But he’s getting too nosey and I’m starting to channel my inner Carson, who’s all about pushing too hard. “Look, you got a problem with us being here? Call Mr. Bandineau. He’ll be pissed if you wake him up, though. He’ll want to know why you didn’t see us on your cameras.”
“Well, I—”
“Whatever.” Good thing he can’t see the back of my long-sleeved black work shirt—it’s plastered to me with sweat. “It’s the middle of the night and we’ve got work to do. Either call him or let us finish. Decide now.”
The guard’s jaw bunches. Did I go too far? He reaches for a jacket pocket. Hesitates. Shines the flashlight in my eyes again. “Make sure you go out the front.”
“Make sure you’re there to see me.” I slam shut the door, then gulp air to shove the bile down my throat. It takes a few moments to breathe semi-normally again.
George whispers, “Brazen. I like it.” We bump fists.
I pull off the magnifying goggles and wipe my forehead on my sleeve. “What’s with the crates over there?”
“I’ll check.”
I scan the bench for anything that looks like a clue. Everything’s freakishly neat. Then I look in the black metal trash can under the bench. It’s empty… well, not quite. I drop it on the bench and shine the articulated lamp in it. There’s a dusty half-round something plastered to the inside, about halfway down from the rim. After I poke at it some with a dental pick, I get it to unfold into a round sticker, about an inch across.
The center is a series of parallel red, white and blue stripes that mimic the Thai flag. The dark-blue outer band holds white sans-serif lettering that says “Made in Thailand.” It’s like something you’d see on a flowerpot at Cost Plus.
“George? You find anything over there?”
He’s been rattling around, moving things. “Nothing so far.”
“Look for anything about Thailand.”
He doesn’t ask why. I manage to pry the sticker off the trash can and attach it to a square yellow Post-It. Then I start (carefully) turning over pots to look for stickers. There aren’t any, of course. No rolls of stickers anywhere.
My phone says we’ve been in here just shy of fifteen minutes. That may be too long. What if the guard decides to call Bandineau? SFPD could be lining up outside to blast through the door. “We should—”
“Got something.”
George’s hunched over a loose top from a wooden crate, about two feet square. He shines his flashlight on a sturdier version of those plastic sleeves you put on the outside of FedEx packages. Ghost text from the shipping document that used to be inside transferred to the plastic. Some of it uses standard Roman characters, while the rest is in Thai. I point. “What’s it say?”
“Do I look Thai to you?”
I sh
oot a couple pictures with my phone, then use a metal putty knife from the bench to scrape the sleeve off the wood. I’ll figure it out later. “We’ve been here too long. Let’s go.”
Are the cameras online? I try not to worry about it on the way out. We walk in the street’s darkest part, keeping our heads down. The front gate doesn’t open when we reach it.
My heart starts doing aerobatics. I count to ten, then look toward the office’s glowing windows. The guard’s standing in one of them, watching.
We stare at each other for forever. He doesn’t look happy. He finally aims a remote at the gate, which starts to squeak and rattle open. George and I walk toward the growing gap. We’ll be out in a minute.
The door screeches to a halt, then starts to close. I glance at the office; the guard’s sneering at me. Little men with little power. I make a dash through the opening, George a couple steps behind me. We don’t stop running until the floodlights can’t reach us anymore.
Chapter 27
37 DAYS LEFT
Savannah’s waiting for me at Achara’s door when I get there at just before ten on an overcast, cold Wednesday morning. The wind bashes through my steel-gray Canali suit coat.
I say, “Well, if it isn’t Savannah Abigail.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’ve been reading Mother’s Wiki page.”
“Is it accurate?”
“As far as it goes. They’re way too easy on her.” She steps up to give me a lingering kiss. “Hiiiii.”
“Hi. This’ a different look for you. I’m used to you in a dress.”
“It’s too cold for that. You like it?” She turns a full circle to show off a cropped black suit coat with a standing collar and a low-cut white shell tucked into high-waisted, tapered-leg black slacks.
“I do. It’s very sophisticated.” I touch the necklace of cylindrical, earth-toned stoneware beads. “What’s this?”
“It’s Khmer.” She takes my hand. Her skin’s warm. “Ready to buy your first Nam Ton piece?”
“Yeah. Ready to protect me from the wolves?”
Chasing Clay (The DeWitt Agency Files Book 3) Page 16