The Lock Box, page 11
Another tray contained all kinds of hair fasteners, from berets and rubber bands to bobby pins. Locke grabbed a handful of those too.
After closing the train case, she turned to the carry-on. Again she slid her hands through, feeling for anything interesting.
Locke’s internal clock was telling her to hurry now. Given the way Queen had already exited the structure once, she or one of the others might easily come back. And if she got caught—
A voice from behind interrupted her thoughts. “I don’t think we wear the same size, hon. In anything.”
CHAPTER
13
LOCKE WINCED, THEN slowly peered back over her shoulder.
Queen was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. There was no way to know how long she’d been watching.
“I … uh …”
Queen took an exaggerated step into the room, then bent at the waist, hands on hips. The height difference put the two women nearly eye to eye.
“That’s twice now. Those guys may not see it, but I know what you’re up to. And what a woman like you is capable of.”
The hair on Locke’s arms was already standing at full attention. The way Queen said capable made her ears ring.
“Third time’s a charm. The next time I catch you, you’re gonna owe me something big.”
If Locke hadn’t been kneeling, Queen’s stare might have dropped her to the floor. Rather than anger, or cruelty, her pale-blue eyes were laced with … something else. Something that shrank the room.
Locke’s heart pounded against the inside of her ribs, marking time while her brain struggled to form a response.
“What is going on in here?”
Huang’s voice hit Locke like the first splash of cold water from a showerhead.
Queen spun and straightened in one motion, revealing him standing in the doorway behind her. Before Locke could even worry what Queen might say, the Pink Punker shook her head. “Poor thing doesn’t have clothes. It’s not like you packed her a bag, and that closet’s filthy. I was letting her look for something to borrow.”
Huang’s eyes narrowed.
Locke didn’t think he was buying it. The tools digging into her hip became hot in addition to sharp.
But, after a long moment, he grunted and spun on his heel. “We must measure her anyway. Bring her out.”
Once his head was turned, Queen glanced back and gave Locke a mischievous smile.
Locke exhaled. Her shoulders slumped with relief.
Until Queen offered her a hand up.
Queen’s fingers hovered inches from Locke’s eyes, providing a close-up view of her nails. Cut short and perfectly polished. Colored to match her hair exactly.
Normally, nails like that would have turned Locke green with envy, but these points reminded her of nothing more than upturned fangs—rattlesnake teeth, laced with invisible venom. Being within inches of any human being other than Evan right now made Locke edgy. The idea of deliberately taking someone’s hand …
But what choice did she have?
Locke tried hard not to flinch as she reached out, anticipating some kind of shock when they touched.
None came.
She rose to her feet. When they joined Huang outside, he handed Queen a measuring tape.
The Pink Punker began stretching it across and around various parts of Locke’s body, causing Locke to shiver. She hadn’t been sized up like this since reception at Fort Jackson. And they certainly hadn’t left the job to anyone like Queen.
Clamping her eyes shut, Locke tried to ignore the hands roaming over her. “What’s this for exactly?”
“Never mind,” Huang said.
“I might be more help if I knew the plan.”
“You know what you require. Be quiet.”
Locke waited through more measurements than she imagined could possibly be necessary. Once Queen declared herself done, Locke reopened her eyes to find Huang’s finger jabbing at her again.
“We will bring you clothes. Back to work.”
With that, he stalked away. When Locke’s eyes darted ahead of him, she found he was headed for the sliding metal door.
Was he … leaving?
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he doesn’t screw up too bad.”
Locke turned to see Queen wagging a mocking finger at her. “You be good while we’re gone.”
Queen skipped after Huang, leaving Locke dumbfounded. Halving the number of eyes watching her was simply too good to be true. Although she tried to hide her excitement, she doubted her poker face would fool anyone—she pressed her chin to her chest and started back toward her workspace.
When Huang and Queen reached the sliding metal door, though, Locke made sure to watch them. He used separate keys to open locks on each of the security bars. With both hands, he turned the wheel in the middle of the door and retracted the bars. The door slid open with another ear-piercing screech, a noise that repeated when he shut it from the opposite side.
Locke didn’t see any easy way to defeat that front door, but that didn’t take the shine off her moment. Going from four guards to two had her positively giddy.
She accelerated from a walk to a jog. When she reached the side of the plywood structure, she pressed her ear against it. She could hear rustling—King and Jack were still holed up inside, doing whatever work Huang had assigned them.
No time to waste.
Locke dashed to the emergency exit closest to her workspace, a set of doors located in the rear corner of the building. By the time she reached them, her heart was fluttering. Although she dealt mostly with combination locks, Locke understood key-operated locks perfectly well. The key slot was carved into a metal cylinder that could turn and move the bar that blocked the lock from opening. But that cylinder was held in place by a series of spring-loaded pins called tumblers. When the key slid into the slot, its jagged teeth pushed the tumblers up and out of the way, allowing the cylinder to turn.
Slipping a narrow tool into the lock to bump the tumblers up was simple enough—the tricky part was holding them out of the way. Because each tumbler was spring-loaded, it wanted to pop right back into place. If you didn’t keep enough pressure on all the tumblers you’d already cleared as you moved to the next one, you’d get to the end and the lock wouldn’t budge.
Locke knew she needed to temper all the nervous energy coursing through her, so she forced herself to take a deep, cleansing breath. Then she squatted down to get a better look at things.
The padlock was the size of her fist and at least an inch thick. Judging from its dingy exterior, this wasn’t something Huang had slapped on recently. Maybe the original owners, when they’d shuttered the factory.
Locke fished into her spandex and pulled out two of the bobby pins she’d taken from Queen’s case. Prying one pair of tines apart, she measured it against the side of the lock—it looked the perfect length to reach all the way inside.
When she flipped the padlock over, though, her positivity drained away in an instant.
The lock itself might be old, but the clear lump of superglue blocking the key slot was fresh and shiny.
Locke poked at it with the tip of the Bobby pin, but the glob of glue covered the lock completely. No way to get through. And, if the liquid cement had spilled inside, the spring-loaded pins would be frozen in place.
She didn’t stand a chance.
Although Locke knew the result before she started, she forced herself to check the padlocks on all the other exit doors.
Every one had suffered the same fate.
Locke trudged back to the janitor’s closet. There wasn’t any point in continuing to carry the picks and pins around and risking getting caught with them—she was halfway tempted to return them to Queen’s case. Still, she decided they might come in handy later, so she deposited them on top of the highest shelf inside the closet. She couldn’t see up there, and King was the only one taller.
As she returned to her workspace, Evan rose and called to her. “You okay, Momma?”
Locke nodded but avoided looking over—he read her expressions too well. Instead, she slumped into a chair, making sure her back faced him.
Without a phone, she had no clue how long Huang and Queen had been gone. Not knowing their surroundings or what they were shopping for, she had no way to anticipate how soon they might return.
Even though this was her single best chance of getting Evan and herself out of this crazy concrete lockbox, she had absolutely no idea how to do it.
“Fuck,” was all she found to say.
CHAPTER
14
LOCKE SAT MOTIONLESS, trying to puzzle out her next move. Although her headache had returned, she did her best to ignore it.
She had plenty of other things to worry about.
Assuming the locks were identical on both sides of the sliding steel door, she had no hope of exiting that way, not now. Not until Huang returned and relocked it from the inside. But even then, her prospects of getting Evan safely through that screechy hatch seemed slim at best. How could she possibly open the door without the whole crew hearing?
With no other means of escape, Locke figured she’d better tangle with the Ticonderoga again. To keep Huang happy, if nothing else.
Having already discovered the secret slip in the dial, she now worked to perfect her feel for the wheel. Over and over, she practiced, first on combinations she knew completely, then with random digits thrown in. Eventually, she started setting the entire combination blind. She was so consumed, she barely noticed King and Jack descending from the plywood structure.
By the time sunlight slid from the floor up onto the side of the box, Locke could manipulate the dial to five unknown digits without a problem. And, for once, she figured Colonial’s precision would work against it. With some lesser company, she’d worry about variation between individual safes—not Colonial. Their standards were so exacting, she knew the boat safe’s dial would spin exactly like this one.
Of course, that wouldn’t help her in the slightest with the digital lock.
Locke’s eyes drifted to the keypad.
Mounted on a circular platform raised a quarter inch off the door, the keypad was surrounded by a ring of chrome that matched the Ticonderoga’s embossed logo. Its black buttons and green screen reminded her of a calculator more than anything else.
To see what she was truly up against, Locke swung the safe door all the way open. Unlike the Malibu box, this one had been hollowed out—no drawers, no shelves. Cavernous enough that Queen could sit inside it. The back of the door was formed from solid steel except for two small access plates. Using a screwdriver from the rolling toolbox, Locke removed the plate behind the digital lock. Underneath, she found a shallow cutout containing a shiny gold circuit board.
This, she recognized, was the brains of the keypad lock. The circuit board bore two black squares. One was a memory chip that stored the combination, the other a processor to compare it to whatever numbers were entered on the keypad.
Adjacent to the circuit board, Locke spotted a compartment holding several AA batteries. Dead batteries were actually the most common problem with digital locks. Although factory manuals warned safe owners to replace batteries annually, nobody ever did. Like with your house’s smoke detector—you only remembered the thing needed new batteries when the old ones expired. But where a smoke detector would chirp maddeningly until you fixed it, a safe just sat there silently.
Storing the batteries inside the safe wasn’t particularly common, though—if they died, you couldn’t open the door and replace them. That suggested Colonial had added a backup.
Locke closed the door and inspected the chrome ring more closely. A small section on the bottom looked different from the rest. With a little tinkering, it popped open, revealing a pair of wires. She teased those out and found they ended in a plastic cap meant to snap onto a nine-volt battery.
While that’d allow a technician to provide external power to the keypad, Locke didn’t see how it helped her. It wasn’t like she could reach up through those wires and control the lock. She still had to know the combination somehow.
The knot behind Locke’s eyebrow cinched tighter.
She and Kori had hugged and high-fived the night they learned they’d be going from basic to advanced individual training together. But once they reached AIT at Fort Lee, their paths diverged. Kori tested into a job the army numbered 91F, small arms and artillery repairer, while Locke drew 91E, machinist. Part of that was their stature—Kori’s slender fingers were perfect for tinkering with the tiny parts inside everything from rifles to radios, while Locke’s broad shoulders were better suited to the lathes, saws, and presses in the machine shop.
But some of it was mental too.
Locke could follow an army manual’s troubleshooting guide like any other dummy, but she never really got how the systems worked. Too much math, too many things going on you couldn’t see. Kori understood all that technical mumbo jumbo like a second language; she’d scan the innards of something and start spouting off about voltage and current. At the time, it had made Locke laugh—the girl who started marches on the wrong foot had a knack for electronics.
This wasn’t so funny.
As Locke tried to focus, the headache continued to flare. Her stomach grumbled too. When she ordered it to settle down, it protested even louder.
One reason, she realized, was a hearty smell in the air. Salty, and the slightest bit sweet.
Locke set down her tools and approached Evan, who sat cross-legged between a folded-open manual and a mountain of Lego bricks. Engrossed in the instructions, he gave her no reaction except “Hey, Momma.”
“How’s it going?” Although the car was as long as his arm, he’d finished the wheelbase and now was working his way up the sides.
Even at home, she marveled at how building absorbed him—he’d sit and do sets like this for hours. And the things his little digits could do, the tiny pieces he could place just so. Like Kori with her little baby hands. Locke often helped him with the bigger pieces at the start, but by the time it got down to details, it was all Evan.
“Pretty good.” He snapped two pieces together without looking up. “What’s for dinner?”
“No idea. Wanna go see?”
They found Jack working over a steaming flattop. No line had formed this time—she and Evan were the only ones in sight.
“What’s on the menu?” Locke was hoping for something substantial. Burgers or steaks.
“Fried rice. Plus sashimi for the boss.”
When she snorted, Jack’s expression hardened. “I’m not talking food-court fried rice here, love. I know how to make the real deal.” Then, under his breath, “Even if the boss man won’t admit it.”
Using a broad metal spatula, Jack folded the rice over itself as he poured and sprinkled ingredients into it. She had to hand it to him: it smelled wonderful. Not just soy-salty but succulent and rich. On closer inspection, she could see large chunks of shrimp and lobster meat scattered through the browned rice.
Jack looked at Evan. “How about you, young man? You willing to give it a try?”
“I … uh … okay.”
From his expression, Locke could tell he’d prefer another grilled cheese.
“Attaboy. You won’t be sorry.”
“Does your back hurt?” Evan asked.
Locke flushed at the unprompted question. But when her eyes darted to Jack, she found him smiling.
“Wee bit.”
“I fell on my back real hard once,” Evan said. “I couldn’t breathe.”
Locke’s insides clenched at the memory. Evan had discovered the old Alpine safe from the Mule’s classroom, out where it had come to rest in the craftsman’s shed. Compelled to climb it for some unknown reason, he’d slipped and landed square on his back. She’d walked in and found him gasping for air. One of her worst parenting moments, until now.
“Got the wind knocked out, did you? I bet your momma took good care of you.”
Evan nodded vigorously.
Good care would have been not letting him fall in the first place.
“Like she tried to help me this morning,” Jack said.
“Momma’s super brave.”
“I agree.”
Jack gave Locke the first smile that didn’t leave her nauseous. It also made her think she might have more of a shot to earn his help than she’d originally thought. But now she needed to lay on some charm. “Did you learn all this overseas?”
“Aye. But I been cooking my whole life. My uncle owned a small pub in Inverness, little town in north Scotland. I grew up working for him, making stovies and Scotch pie. For my seventeenth birthday, I took a holiday in London. Had my first dim sum, and I was hooked. Decided right then to get my arse overseas. Saved two years for the airplane ticket. Barely spoke a word when I got to Hong Kong but worked my way up from a dishwashing job.”
“How long—”
“Fifteen years.”
She whistled.
“Long enough I don’t know myself anyplace else.” Jack twisted his wrist to build three connected circles of rice. Quick pops of the spatula created two eyes and mouth, leaving the rice pile resembling a smiling Mickey Mouse. When Evan giggled, Jack flashed him a grin, then looked back to Locke. “You been?”
She shook her head. While the navy ported in sexy international hot spots, the best she’d done in the army was a fifteen-hour layover at Ramstein Air Base. “I’ve heard it’s pretty.”
His eyes glazed over before dropping to the griddle again. “People talk about the neon lights here in Miami.” He shook his head. “Hong Kong harbor? At night? Makes this town look like Inverness.”
“So you wanna go back?”
“Aye, before there’s no Hong Kong left. I gotta straighten out a few … misunderstandings first. But it’s home.”
Suddenly, all Jack’s ass-kissing of Huang made more sense. Plus, he’d given her an opening. “Going home is what I think we all want.”
