Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

I nodded as we walked up toward the doors of Whittier Place. “I just want them to leave my Boston alone, Ange. Go to Hartford if they want to build shit like this. Or L.A. Wherever. Just away.”

She squeezed my hand, and I looked in her face, saw a smile there.

We entered the visitors’ foyer through a set of glass doors, came face-to-face with another set that was locked. To our right was a bank of nameplates. The nameplates bore three-digit numbers beside them and there was a phone to the left of the entire bank of names. Just as I’d feared. You couldn’t even do the old trick of pressing ten buzzers at once and hoping someone would buzz you in. If you used the phone, the person who picked it up could see you through a security camera.

All those darn criminals have made it awful hard on us private detectives.

“It was fun watching you get worked up out there,” Angie said. She opened her purse, held it over her head, and dumped the contents on the floor.

“Yeah?” I knelt beside her and we began scooping things back into the purse.

“Yeah. It’s been a while since you got worked up over anything.”

“You, too,” I said.

We looked at one another, and the questions in her eyes probably lived in my own right then:

Who are we these days? What’s left in the wake of all the things Gerry Glynn took? How do we get happy again?

“How many sticks of lip balm can one woman have?” I said and went back to the pile on the floor.

“Ten’s about right,” she said. “Five if you gotta travel light.”

A couple approached on the other side of the glass. The man looked like an attorney, sculpted salt-and-pepper hair and red and yellow Gucci tie. The woman looked like an attorney’s wife, pinched and suspicious.

“Your play,” I said to Angie.

The man pushed open the door and Angie moved her knee out of the way, a long strand of hair falling out from behind her ear as she did so, swinging down by her cheekbone and framing her eye.

“Excuse me,” she said, chuckling softly and holding the guy with her eyes. “Clumsy as always.”

He looked down at her and his merciless boardroom eyes picked up her gaiety. “I can’t walk across an empty room without tripping, myself.”

“Ah,” Angie said. “A kindred spirit.”

The man smiled like a shy ten-year-old. “Coordinated people beware,” he said.

Angie gave it a short, hard laugh, as if his uncommon wit had surprised her. She scooped up her keys. “There they are.”

We rose from our knees as the wife moved past me and the man held the door open.

“Be more careful next time,” he said with mock sternness.

“I’ll try.” Angie leaned into the words a bit.

“Lived here long?”

“Come, Walter,” the woman said.

“Six months.”

“Come, Walter,” the woman repeated.

Walter took one last look in Angie’s eyes and went.

When the door closed behind them, I said, “Heel, Walter. Roll over, Walter.”

“Poor Walter,” Angie said as we reached the elevator bank.

“Poor Walter. Please. Could you have been any more breathy by the way?”

“Breathy?”

“‘Sex months,’” I said in my best Marilyn Monroe voice.

“I didn’t say ‘sex.’ I said ‘six.’ And I wasn’t that breathy.”

“Whatever you say, Norma Jean.”

She elbowed me and the elevator doors opened and we rode them up to the twelfth floor.

At Jay’s door, Angie said, “You got Bubba’s gift?”

Bubba’s gift was an alarm decoder. He’d given it to me last Christmas but I hadn’t had the chance to try it out yet. It read the sonic pitch of an alarm’s call and decoded it in a matter of seconds. The moment a red light appeared in the tiny LED screen of the decoder, you pointed it at the alarm source and pressed a button in the center and the alarm’s bleat stopped.

That was the theory anyway.

I’d used Bubba’s equipment before and usually it was fine as long as he didn’t use the phrase “cutting edge.” Cutting edge, in Bubbaspeak, meant it still had a few bugs in the system or hadn’t been tested yet. He hadn’t used the phrase when he gave me the decoder, but I still wouldn’t know if it worked until we got into Jay’s place.

I knew from previous visits that Jay also had a silent alarm wired into Porter and Larousse Consultants, a security firm downtown. When the alarm was tripped, you had thirty seconds to call the security firm and give them the password, or Johnny Law was on his way.

On the way over, when I mentioned that to Angie, she said, “Let me worry about that. Trust me.”

She picked the two door locks with her kit while I watched the hall, and then she opened the door and we stepped inside. I closed the door behind me, and Jay’s first alarm went off.

It was only slightly louder than an air raid siren, and I pointed Bubba’s decoder at the blinking box above the kitchen portico, pressed the black button in the center. Then I waited. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, come on, come on, come on…Bubba was pretty close to losing his ride back from prison, and then the red light appeared on the LED and I pressed the black button again and the air raid siren died.

I looked at the small box in my hand. “Wow,” I said.

Angie picked up the phone in the living room, pressed a single digit on the speed-dial console, waited a moment, then said, “Shreveport.”

I came into the living room.

“You have a nice night, too,” she said into the receiver and hung up.

“Shreveport?” I said.

“It’s where Jay was born.”

“I know that. How did you know it?”

She shrugged, looked around the living room. “I must have heard him mention it over drinks or something.”

“And how’d you know it was his code word?”

She gave me another little shrug.

“Over drinks?” I said.

“Mmm.” She moved past me and headed for the bedroom.

The living room was immaculate. A black leather L-shaped sectional took up a third with a charcoal smoked-glass coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table lay three neatly stacked issues of GQ and four remote controls. One was for the fifty-inch wide-screen TV, another for the VCR, a third for the laser disc machine, and a fourth for the stereo component system.

“Jay,” I said, “buy a universal remote for crying out loud.”