“Of course you know somebody on the board,” Kai said in a drawling voice. “Is there anybody here in Houston that you don’t know?”
Ice flashed her bright grin. “It helps to know a lot of people, not only the local ones,” she said. “I just had a private conversation with him, and he’s not impressed. He said, whether it was a clerical error or a theft, it’s not a drug they want to have floating around, particularly as the lot numbers would lead back to his company’s research lab.”
“Never thought of that,” Kai said. “That gives more weight to getting this solved.”
“Well, it should have been resolved right off the bat,” Johan said.
Ice looked at him with interest. “You wanted to do a job, right?”
He nodded immediately.
“Good,” she said. “Then you and Galen can go.”
At that, a silence hung around the place. Johan looked around and said, “And why is everybody all of a sudden staring at me that way?”
“You’re not one of our regular guys, don’t know the lay of the land here,” Harrison said easily. He looked at Ice and said, “Don’t you want one of us to go too?”
“You mean, besides Galen, who is also one of Bullard’s men?”
Harrison gave a one-armed shrug. “Yeah. Like which streets to avoid and who to call at the police department. And which restaurants to avoid.” He chuckled at his own joke.
She pondered it and said, “Well, I do have a job in the same area. I could send two of you over there, and, if these guys needed help, you could step up to aid them, and vice versa.”
Harrison frowned but said, “I’m game. It’s in Houston, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “And so is the other job.”
“We don’t get many jobs close together like that,” he said. “What’s the second job?”
“A large art theft,” she said.
He stared at her in shock.
She shrugged. “What can I say? Apparently we’re broadening our horizons.”
“Please tell me it’s something exotic, like involving an international jewel thief or something like that,” he joked. “Sounds mundane to think of a local museum getting broken into.”
“African sculptures,” she said.
“So then we should do the Westgroup job and their stolen drugs,” Harrison said, “and Galen and Johan should do the African sculpture job.”
“Like I know anything about African sculptures,” Johan joked.
Just then Galen walked into the area. He lifted a hand, walked over, and gave Ice a gentle hug, then tossed his bag on the floor, and dropped into a squatting position beside Johan. He grinned at his old friend. “Sounds like she’s got a job for us.”
“Oh, yeah. She’s just trying to keep us together and away from her pretty boys,” he said. “Everybody knows they can’t handle the heat.”
Galen burst into laughter. “Well, if they can’t,” he said, “I’m not sure anybody can.” He stood and stretched. “Glad I’m here, though, man, that’s a long set of flights to get here.”
“It is, indeed,” Ice said, staring at him. “We just got word that our men arrived there too.”
“Yeah, Bullard’s gnashing his teeth already,” he said. “They’ve taken over some interesting security stuff. I wouldn’t mind hearing what they’re up to.”
“Well, you can learn while you’re here,” she said. “In the meantime, Bullard wanted you to get some North American experience.”
“So it’s interesting that you’re putting the two of us together,” Galen said.
“Well, only because a job is right next door with a museum that had another kind of a theft. African art statues.”
Galen rolled his eyes. “Art’s not really my thing,” he said, “unless shooting them up and leaving a room devastated is an art form.”
“We have more than enough of that art form ourselves,” she said in a mocking tone. “So, you two go to the ketamine theft, and I’ll assign the art theft to another two guys.”
“You know what? If the museum had only hired us in the first place as security,” Harrison said, “they wouldn’t have had an issue.”
“Unfortunately,” Ice said, “they are just now realizing that.”
“So how major is this art theft?” Harrison asked.
“Well, it’ll definitely be an issue between the two countries. The display was on loan from Nairobi,” she said, “and they’re very unhappy to know that four pieces have gone missing.”
“Right,” Harrison said, standing up and reaching over to shake Galen’s hand in greeting. “So, me and who else?”
“Good question,” she said, looking at her sheet. “I’ve got nine jobs in progress right now.”
Harrison looked around. “I thought the place was pretty damn empty.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got Tyson here. So maybe you and Tyson.”
Harrison crossed his arms over his chest and nodded. “Pretty boy Tyson. He’ll do just fine in a museum, but me, not so much.”
“You’ll do fine too,” she said cheerfully, “because that’s the job.”
*
Joyce Baxter, or Joy as she preferred to be called, stopped in her tracks, sighed deeply, and faced the mammoth building before her. It may look like one building, but it seemed to be two buildings sharing one common wall, in her mind. She worked in the corporate section, basically the front of the building on all the aboveground floors, even on some of the basement levels, like where her office was.
In the corporate world, the peons were given the windowless offices, reserving the window-filled penthouse offices for the CEOs, the owners, the board members. Those in-between positions got the offices on the in-between floors.
Regardless, she could enter the main entrance without setting off alarms. Supposedly the back of the building housed a portion of the research department and had its own entrance at the rear as well.
Even the elevators were segregated. One set in the front of the building was strictly designated for the office workers, with the other set for the researchers not even visible or reachable from any floor on the front side of the building.
Joy shook her head. She knew, per employee records, some 240 people were employed by the company. Yet Joy saw only a handful of those, all dressed in suits, in her section. Most of the employees seemed to work for the lab itself, which was in a separate building on the same block. Yet still a research department was in her building, but she had never seen evidence of it in her weeks of working here. She envisioned the researchers all wearing white lab coats, but what did she really know about this place? Maybe those researchers were more the evidence-gathering types, searching the web, wearing jeans and T-shirts. That would place the lab-coat guys at the actual lab itself down the road. Possibly.
She sighed again and walked into the building on one more Monday morning, already feeling the cramping tension going up her spine to the back of her neck. She’d been so happy to get this job, but now all she could think about was the fact that everybody was hiding something, and she hated it. She was very much a straightforward, up-front, easy-to-get-along-with kind of gal, but don’t screw her around either. Now she felt like something was not quite right with her job, and nobody would talk to her about it.