Some Like It Hawk(72)

“We shouldn’t jump?” Caroline whispered.

“They’d hear the sound of our bodies going splat on the loading dock,” I whispered back. “This is the best we can do.”

I backed out onto the ledge and then stepped sideways over the petunias. It wasn’t easy to wedge myself into the narrow space between the railing and the side of the hotel. I suddenly wondered if Caroline could do it.

Caroline grabbed the other side of the curtain, pulled it closed, and then began trying to squeeze into her end of the balcony. After a few fruitless attempts to wedge herself in, she used the petunia pot to give her a leg up and sat on the railing with her rump hanging over the outside. I suspected her perch felt as precarious as it looked and wondered, for a moment, if the ledge and the railing were really designed to hold this much weight.

I thought of closing the sliding glass door, but before I could do it, we heard the door opening.

The carpet underfoot muffled the intruders’ footsteps—that and the wool curtain between us and them—but we heard the door close again.

“Not much here,” one of the voices said after a moment.

“He’s not stupid enough to leave anything important lying out in the open,” said another voice. A familiar voice—one of our rival burglars was Leonard Fisher.

“No, sir.”

“Do a thorough search,” Fisher ordered. “And bring me any papers you find so I can check them out.”

“Yes, sir.” Two voices, in almost perfect unison.

“Stuffy in here, sir,” one voice said after a moment. “Shall we open the curtains?”

Caroline shifted slightly. I hoped she was preparing to come out fighting, not to go over the railing.

“Just turn up the AC,” Fisher said. “I don’t want to take any chance of being spotted.”

“Yes, sir.”

A few seconds later, I heard the hum and rattle of the HVAC unit kicking in. I breathed a small sigh of relief. Not that we’d benefit from the cold air, since we were outside in the broiling sun with the curtain between us and the AC, but at least the noise of the compressor would camouflage any small sounds Caroline and I made.

If only we could camouflage ourselves from possible onlookers outside. Luckily, the Annex was the only part of the hotel with windows overlooking the loading dock area, and the occupants of those rooms would have to step onto their ledges to see us. But the golfers would have a great view, if any of them happened to look this way. Or anyone who made a delivery to the hotel. Even a staff member coming out on the loading dock to smoke, as a discreetly placed ash tray suggested some did. To anyone who bothered to look up instead of straight ahead, we were about as unobtrusive as a black cat on a snow-covered roof.

But since there was nothing I could do to make us any less visible, I focused my attention back to what was going on in the room.

“If anyone spots us, pretend to be washing the windows,” Caroline hissed.

I realized that if I leaned as far as I could to the left, I could get one eye next to the place where the two sides of the curtains came together. I could only see a small fraction of the room, but since that fraction included the desk, on which we’d left the papers and the laptop lying, it was potentially an interesting fraction.

Leonard Fisher was sitting at the desk, leafing slowly through the papers I’d photographed. I caught an occasional glimpse of an arm or a leg clad in dark blue with red trim. From those glimpses, and from the sounds we were hearing, I deduced that uniformed Flying Monkeys were doing a rapid and thorough search of the room—and probably being a lot less careful than Caroline and I had been to avoid leaving any signs of our presence. Meanwhile, Fisher had booted the laptop and discovered the password screen. He made a few unsuccessful attempts to log in before frowning, muttering something under his breath, and turning the machine off again.

Caroline and I had a bad moment when one of the guards came over and searched the folds of the curtains. I jerked my head back from the opening. Caroline actually tucked her head down and under one arm, in a fair imitation of a sleeping bird, as if she could prevent him from seeing her if she didn’t see him.

Luckily, the guard was so focused on the curtains that he never looked out. And also luckily, he left the curtains very much as he had found them, so there was still a tiny gap for me to peek through when he moved off again.

A few minutes later the guards had finished their search.

“Nothing, sir.” One of them came to stand at Fisher’s elbow, rather like a dog coming to heel.

“Take that.” Fisher pointed to the laptop. I saw Caroline stir slightly. For a moment, I was worried that she’d leap out from behind the curtains to wrestle the guard for the laptop. I reached over and patted her shoulder a couple of times. She became still again, but I could tell from the tension in her shoulder that she didn’t like it.