Page 5 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

I press the intercom button on the armrest. Nothing.

I press the button that lowers the divider. The divider stays up.

I knock on the smoked glass, twice. “Driver. Lower the divider, please.”

The driver’s hands stay easy on the wheel. I knock harder. He ignores me completely.

A car passes in the other direction. I look around frantically but my escort vehicles are nowhere to be seen.

We slow at a crossing and stop at the red light. I take the door handle quietly and pull. The handle lifts and nothing else happens. I pull harder. The lock pin beside the window is down; I get two fingers on it and it does not come up.

The window switch clicks under my thumb. Dead.

My heart is going hard now. Under the patches, I can feel my own scent trying to rise. Something is not right. I don’t know when it went wrong, but it has.

The light turns green. The car rolls through the empty crossing, unhurried, and takes a turn away from the towers, and gathers speed. We are not going to the studio.

2. Roan

The slip is at the dead end of a road with no name on it, past a scrapyard and a gravel lot lined with rusty semis.

I park where the streetlight doesn’t reach and sit for a minute with the engine off, watching. I don’t see anyone out there. Doesn’t mean they’re not there, but old habits die hard.

The call caught me at the diner out on 41. Two weeks of babysitting freight and I get thirty grand, half up front, starts tonight.

It’s short notice, but short notice is what I usually get.

“They asked for you,” Sully told me on the phone.

Couple of years ago, somebody stole four Picassos out of a museum. For three months, while the feds turned this city upside down, those paintings sat in a rented garage with me on a folding chair in front of them. I never opened the wrapping. I never asked a single question. When the heat dropped, the crates went out the door and I got paid.

That’s my reputation. I hold things. I move things along. I don’t ask, and I don’t touch. It’s the only thing anyone has ever wanted me for.

Crews have asked me onto the taking end of jobs plenty of times. It’s better money but I always pass. Too risky. I just do guard duty. Less money but I’m not going to wind up shot dead in some gone-wrong burglary.

Sully is waiting at the bottom of the gangway with his collar up against the rain, smoking with his hand cupped over the cigarette. He waves like we’re old friends.

“Kessler,” he says. “You find it okay?”

“I’m here.”

Sully is soft, round and friendly, and he brokers work for people who are none of those things. He’s discreet, pays well and doesn’t take unnecessary risks. That’s the whole reason I answer when he calls.

The barge sits low and black against the pilings, a hundred-something feet of rust with a deckhouse at the stern and the hold amidships under steel covers. There’s a work light rigged over the gangway and nothing else lit anywhere. The river smells of diesel and mud.

“She’s a beauty, right?” Sully says.

“She’s a wreck.”

“At this price, same thing. Come on up.”

I follow him up. The gangway is new aluminum, which is the first thing on this job that doesn’t match. Everything else on this boat is forty years old and dying, and somebody bought it a brand-new gangway.

“Who else knows I’m here?” I ask on the deck.

“Me. The crew that loaded, and they’re gone — out-of-state guys, hired blind. And the people paying.” He shrugs. “Short list.”

“And at the end of the two weeks?”