(Since 9/11, storage lockers had vanished from LAX as too tempting, but guess what—they’re still there if you know where to look and don’t mind being eyeballed by security. The coin-lockers used to be beyond the scanning points and X-ray pass-through. Now they’re inside the terminal near the check-in counters, far ahead of where your individual freedoms evaporate. But they’re still there.)
So I sat there for a moment, inventing assorted scenarios to explain the wayward locker key, subdivided across two general categories—“accidental” versus “intentional.” Assuming the first, it might have been left by: (1) the previous rental customer; (2) one of the guys working at the car agency; or (3) it might have fallen inside . . . somehow, which would have been a complete caprice of chance.
Assuming the second, I wondered, was the key left (4) on purpose for me, or (5) for someone else? Big joke potential, there. What a riot on old Conrad. Let’s see what he does.
At the time it never occurred to me that there might be a (6).
I could have stuck the key in the glove compartment and forgotten it. Or turned it in at the Hertz lost and found. But guess what: I’m not so dead inside (yet) that I’m not curious. I like that evil thrill you reap from a privileged peek into stuff that’s none of your business. You do, too. At the same time, I’m also cautious enough to know that maybe the whole temptation is a setup. Maybe the locker, if it is to be found in the airport at all, is staked out by two dozen undercover cops, waiting for some Colombian coke lord, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing? I mean, in addition to making me late and all.
I picked up the key and looked it over. I even smelled it. Number 202. Ultimately, I drove away with it. But over the weekend and into the problem packet of a new Monday I looked at it a thousand times.
Generally I take a lot of work home. Sometimes I just sleep at the office. There’s an executive washroom with a shower and amenities, and my corner office (right below Burt Kroeger’s corner; sometimes I can hear him stomping around up there, working late, like me) has the world’s best sofa for crashing. For thinking things out. Doping out small mysteries. Or positing possible scenarios such as (6) the key might have been left for me, specifically, on purpose.
I mean, what would you do?
I volunteered to collect Katy Burgess at LAX on Tuesday afternoon because: (1) Katy is undeniably attractive, (2) Katy is competent and fun, (3) I sensed a work-related entanglement that I want to toy with avoiding, and (4) as an excuse to stop thinking about the locker key.
Yes, Katy is the co-worker that interested me, despite myself.
Yes, I was baiting myself with the proximity of the airport.
Yes, I was already aware that I had whomped up a wicker basket of lies as perforated as a sieve—a desperate cover story that any intelligent scrutiny could smack to pieces—but at this stage of our budding relationship, Katy would be professionally polite enough not to question it. I told her that when I had gone to Pittsburgh, I remembered I was carrying a pocketknife, so I stowed it in a coin locker rather than risk a public panic, an evacuation, and a lockdown of the airport when the metal detector revealed me as a potential terrorist. Don’t laugh; this kind of childish, overreactive shit happens all the time (and usually gets on the news).
With this backstory in position, I had an excuse for reaching inside locker #202. If I did not like what I saw—a human head in a trash bag or something like that—I could withdraw my hand, palming the knife I’d already brought along.
When I saw the flank of the Halliburton, I pulled it out, casually said, “my briefcase, too,” and stashed my decoy knife in a single smooth move. Misdirection works. Katy assumed the knife in question was on top of the briefcase; she wasn’t more inquisitive than that. Airport security guys watched me approach the bank of lockers. They saw a business-looking guy remove a business-looking case. Normal, almost dull. No platoon of gun-wielding DEA agents sprang forth.
Katy and I strolled out looking like the most boring couple in the world. Then I did something more difficult: I locked the case in my trunk and tried not to think about