Rafe looked up at the roofline as we made our way around to the side of the building. “Not a single camera.” Disgust dripped from his voice. “What a bunch of fucking amateurs.”
“Better for us,” I pointed out.
The back of the building was identical to the front except for the dumpster lurking against the building next to another door. Here the parking lot was smaller, and I could almost imagine the scene Lilah had described to us: Lilah emerging from the building with a bag of trash in her hand, the black car idling outside, the terrified girl pushed into the backseat.
It was like an imprint on the place, a dark one. I felt the energy of it lingering in the air.
“This one doesn’t face the road,” Nolan said, considering the door.
“It’s like you want to get involved in this shit,” Rafe muttered, removing a lockpick set from the pocket of his coat.
“We’re already involved,” Nolan pointed out.
Rafe bowed his head to the lock on the door. “Yeah, and it’s not too late to get uninvolved.”
I wasn’t fooled. Rafe’s determination not to get mixed up in Vic’s shit wasn’t some kind of newfound discipline. It was his determination to get away from Lilah.
And the sooner the better.
I tried not to think about the possibility that in this case, Rafe might be the reasonable one. The idea was too radical to consider.
It took him less than a minute to pop the cheap lock. He opened the door and waited for the shriek of an alarm that never came, then stepped inside.
“What a surprise,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
I knew what he meant. Kind of wild for Vic to be mixed up in something shady at the Dive and not have cameras and decent locks on the doors, not to mention a basic security system, although maybe the lack of cameras was intentional.
Nolan closed the door and hit the lights. A narrow hall with stained linoleum stretched toward the shadowed recesses of the bar. Doors marked the men’s and women’s restrooms along one side of the hall. On the other side, another door stood closed.
“This must be it,” Nolan said, opening the unmarked door.
He turned on the lights on our way in and we stepped into a small, dingy room. A rusting metal desk stood on one side, an ancient worn chair behind it. A hulking desktop computer hummed on its surface along with scattered piles of paper. Two metal file cabinets stood against one wall.
Despite its minimal furnishings, the room felt cluttered and dysfunctional. Would it have killed Vic to add a houseplant? There weren’t even chairs on the other side of the desk for fuck’s sake.
My observations weren’t relevant to the task at hand, but it was second nature to see everything as a composition,something I could draw, and I had to resist the urge to move things around, try to make the room more pleasing to the eye.
Bad design grated on my nerves.
“I’ll check the filing cabinets,” I said.
Rafe moved toward the desk. “I’ll take the drawers.”
“I’m going to dig through this pile of crap,” Nolan said, looking at the papers in haphazard stacks on the desk, “see if I can find anything interesting.”
“We’re not looking for something interesting,” Rafe said, bending to open one of the desk drawers.
“No reason to stand here with my dick in my hand while you guys look for Lilah’s stuff.”
The first filing cabinet held nothing of interest, just a bunch of old-school files with sloppily written labels (who kept paper files anymore?), boring shit every business kept track of: payroll, purchase orders, receipts for repairs to the building.
We were looking for Lilah’s purse. Her ID and credit cards were inside it, but most importantly, so were the keys to her car. We could hot-wire it — older cars were easy to hot-wire — but then Lilah would need to get the car rekeyed, which would be a hassle.
I had the sense that Lilah had a lot of hassle in her life, that she couldn’t afford something like rekeying her car, and I wasn’t dumb enough to think she’d let us pay to have it done, not after the way she’d stood with her arms crossed over her chest, face flushed, when we’d paid the locksmith to rekey her apartment.
She’d protested when we said we were going to get her stuff from the Dive, had been worried Vic would fuck with us if he saw that we’d taken her car, but Rafe had just laughed, the one and only time I’d heard him laugh in Lilah’s presence.
We weren’t afraid of Vic Lombardi.