Read Online Thirteen Million Dollar Pop by David Levien - Free Book Online

o’clock …” she said, and used a hand gesture to indicate her going away.
    “Okay,” Behr said, remembering that he had had to pay in advance that night and had received an exit ticket to feed into the machine since the booth would be closed and the attendant off duty. “Security?” Behr asked, pointing to the ceiling. “Cameras,” he added. But she just shook her head. “Security? Guard?” he continued.
    “Guard. Yes.” Now she was nodding. “P one, P one.”
    Behr found the garage security office, an offshoot of the building’s main security center, through a battered metal door near the elevator bank. He knocked and entered a cramped space that was dominated by a desk, which was crowded with black andwhite monitors blinking views from one area of garage to the next.
    “Help you with something?” Sitting behind the desk was a middle-aged square badge in a rent-a-cop uniform. His glasses sat loosely on his face, the arms bent wide from being removed too often.
    “Yeah, it’s about that incident the other night,” Behr began. In his experience security guards were either buffs, who could be induced into enthusiastically sharing all their information, or scared bureaucrats, who wielded their scrap of power like a truncheon. He wasn’t sure which he had in front of him.
    “What about it?” square badge asked.
    “Were you on duty?”
    “Go ask your buddies,” the guard said. “Buddies” implied the cops, and Behr smelled some resentment there.
    “I’m not with the cops,” Behr bit out. Instead of this information opening the man up, it closed him down.
    “Then why would I tell you anything about our system?” the man said with some edge, crossing his arms.
    “Not asking you for state secrets,” Behr said, “just wondering if you were around.”
    “Are you suggesting some failure on the part of building security or garage security in specific?” the man said, his voice thinning to an almost aggressive whine.
    Great
, Behr thought,
shut down, self-important, and paranoid—the perfect subject
. There was a time when Behr would’ve grabbed the geek by the neck and shaken him until the information fell out, but nowadays, as a Caro boy, Behr was doing things differently. He was trying to, anyway. So he spread his feet and settled, as if he had no plans to leave anytime soon.
    “But for your information, no, I wasn’t on. I’m the day man. I punch out and another guy handles the afternoon and early evening. There used to be an overnight shift, but that got trimmed because of budget. So, you know, what does management expect if they don’t pay for coverage?”
    Behr pictured the guard, had he been on duty, armed with aflashlight, rounding the corner into the firefight. That would’ve done a lot of good.
    “So it was just the cameras, then. They get a pretty good look at the whole thing? What’s the storage length on the footage?” Behr asked as lightly as he could.
    A cagey look came to the guard’s eyes. “Why’re you so interested?”
    “I know the guy involved.”
    “You work for him?”
    Behr just shrugged.
    “I was in charge of burning copies to a disk for the police,” the guard said. “You can ask them what was on the tape. As for storage, we used to run thirty days—probably would’ve had footage of guys casing the garage. But now it’s seventy-two hours, because they took a bunch of our hard drives for the lobby. Lobby guys get it all. New cappuccino makers, new chairs, extra hard drives …”
    Behr cut a glance at the bank of monitors, wondering what he’d be able to pick up if he saw the footage from the shoot.
    The guard leaned forward. “I think we’re done here,” he said.
    Behr was headed back to his car when he saw a janitor, a Hispanic kid wearing earbuds and pushing a rolling garbage can.
    “Hey, man,” Behr said loudly, tapping his own ear. The kid stopped and pulled out the left earbud, allowing the tinny sound of congas and trumpets to spill into