Elevator Pitch (UK)

by Linwood Barclay

  Nothing happened.

  “Maybe you were supposed to say ‘please,’” Bourque said.

  “Come on!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”

  The elevator did not move.

  “I want out,” Delgado said.

  “Same here.”

  He pressed the button bearing two triangles with their bases touching. The “open door” button.

  The doors did not open.

  “Try it again,” Delgado said.

  Bourque jabbed repeatedly at the button before giving his partner a What now? look.

  She pointed to the emergency button. “Give that one a try.”

  Delgado stuck out a finger and was about to touch it when, suddenly, the elevator doors parted, giving them a view of a deserted hallway.

  “Well,” Bourque said, looking at Delgado. “The elevator seems to be inviting us to leave.”

  She hesitated. “We might have to walk up the rest of the way.”

  “Or walk down the rest of the way,” he said. “If the elevators are down for the count, I’d rather head down before I start going further up.”

  “I vote we get off,” Delgado said, stepping through the opening and into the hallway.

  Bourque followed.

  The second he’d cleared the doors, he heard the elevator move. He and Delgado spun around in time to see the car—with the doors still open—slowly descend.

  “Jesus Christ,” Delgado said.

  Once the car had disappeared from view, they found themselves looking directly into the shaft. They both took half a step back.

  “What the hell is happening?” Bourque said.

  Within seconds, the elevator doors on the far left opened, exposing the shaft. Then the one third from the left, then the fourth, and finally, the fifth.

  All five doors were in the open position, but there wasn’t a car at any of them.

  They were looking into five open shafts.

  For several seconds, they were speechless.

  Delgado crept forward to one of the open doorways and peeked over the edge. “That is one fucking long drop down,” she said.

  Drop.

  “So what now?” she asked. Bourque said nothing. “Jerry?”

  Drops.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Let’s think for a second.”

  And for several seconds, neither of them spoke.

  “Wait,” Delgado said. “What’s that sound?”

  “What?” Bourque said.

  “Shut up and listen.”

  They both listened. Slowly, Delgado turned and looked at Bourque. “It’s you,” she said.

  Bourque had started wheezing. He rested a palm on his chest. “Oh shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “It’s … been triggered.”

  “Can you breathe?”

  “For now,” he said.

  “Have you got your thing?”

  Bourque’s chin went up and down. He patted the pocket of his suit jacket. He reached in and brought out the inhaler, uncapped it.

  “One shot should do it,” he said. “Two at the most.”

  Delgado nodded sympathetically. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  He was just about to insert the device into his mouth when the first explosion went off.

  That first blast, which sounded well above them, was quickly followed by three others, all strong enough that they could feel the building shake ever so slightly.

  Bourque was startled enough by the first explosion that he didn’t need the other three to lose his grip on the inhaler.

  It slipped from his fingers, bounced off the toe of his shoe, skittered across the marble hallway floor, and through the middle set of open elevator doors.

  Instinctively, he darted forward to try and catch it.

  “Jerry!” Delgado screamed.

  She went to grab for him but he was already moving. Just not quickly enough. By the time he reached the opening, had braced himself with one hand on the wall, and was peering down into the shaft, his inhaler was already plunging past the thirtieth floor.

  Sixty-Eight

  Barbara grabbed Arla instinctively, sheltering her in an enveloping embrace. She wanted to run, but had no idea where to run to as people around her screamed.

  The four blasts—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!—seemed to have come from all directions. Many of the elegantly dressed guests were crying, others were staring around wildly, panicked expressions on their faces.

  Once the screams died down, Headley moved toward the temporary stage, leaping onto it and grabbing the microphone.

  “Everyone remain calm!” he shouted. “Please stay calm!”

  That was a tall order, given that there was now a strong smell of smoke and sulfur clogging the air.

  Several guests were crowding around the five elevator doors, tapping away at the digital screen, entering L for the lobby.

  “We have to get out of here!” a man cried out frantically.

  “The stairs!” a woman yelled.

  That prompted a ministampede. Guests were following Exit signs that directed people to four sets of stairs that would, ultimately, deliver them to street level.

  “What’s going on?” Arla asked her mother.

  “I don’t know,” Barbara said, a protective arm still around her daughter’s shoulders.

  She scanned the room. There were plenty of others holding on to one another for comfort. Many had phones out and could be heard talking in frantic tones to multiple 911 operators about what had just happened.

  “I’m thinking,” Barbara said softly, “that we should get out of here.”

  Arla nodded. “Okay. They’re already waiting for the elevators.”

  “Yeah,” she said cautiously. “I’m not so sure I want to be first in that line.”

  “Jesus!”

  The high-pitched cry had come from one of the stairwell doors.

  “Stay here,” Barbara said, releasing Arla and darting between other guests as she headed for the stairs. Arla did not do as she was told, and followed her mother as she squeezed past a group huddled around the door, which had been pulled wide open.

  A section of the first set of stairs was missing.

  Between every floor were about forty steel and concrete steps, each with a landing at the halfway point where the stairs reversed direction. What everyone had been looking at, through the smoke and dust that was still wafting throughout the stairwell, was the gap that began seven steps down from the stairwell door. Four steps were missing, their crumbled remains having fallen to the steps another flight down.

  Four separate stairwells, Barbara thought. Four explosions.

  When she turned around, Arla was there.

  “How bad is it?” Arla whispered.

  “Bad,” Barbara said, coming back into the main room. “We better hope the elevators are working.”

  Not for a moment did she believe they would be.

  But Barbara and Arla headed for them, anyway. They heard other guests confirming, in loud, panicked shrieks, that the other stairwells had been similarly sabotaged. Headley was still calling for calm but could barely be heard above the mayhem.

  The sound of the chiming elevators brought an almost instant chill throughout the room.

  The lights flashed over all five elevator doors.

  “Thank God!” a woman shouted.

  Another woman could be heard consoling her husband, whose entire body was shaking. “It’s going to be okay, Edmund,” she said within earshot of Barbara. “It’s going to be okay. The elevators are here.”

  The five elevator doors opened simultaneously, but there wasn’t a car in a single one of them.

  The guests were greeted with five ninety-eight-story elevator shafts. All the hopefuls who’d been waiting for a ride down backed suddenly away. One brave woman in a glittery silver gown crept forward and peered over the edge and down.

  “My God,” she whispered. “You can’t even see the bottom.”


  A man shouted. “Who’s doing this? What do they want? How are we going to get out of here?”

  “Everyone!”

  It was Coughlin at the mike again, his face a mask of anguish. “Everyone, please!”

  The crowd slowly went quiet and turned to look at the developer.

  “Okay, I understand everyone is very upset, but I’ve already been in touch with building maintenance and I’m assured this is just a glitch that can be—”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence as various terrified guests drowned him out.

  “Those were explosions!”

  “How do we get down?”

  “Who’s doing this?”

  “Why didn’t you call this off? What were you thinking?”

  That question prompted Coughlin to raise his hand in the air—a bid to get everyone to quiet down again—and turn and look at Headley.

  “Perhaps the mayor would like to field that one.”

  An anxious looking Headley approached the mike. “People, people, please, listen.”

  A few people, anxious to hear the mayor over all the nervous chatter, went “Shhh!”

  “Thank you,” Headley said. “What I want you to know is, I personally assigned one of my own people to oversee a thorough inspection by qualified technicians of all the elevators in this building. All five were deemed to be in excellent working order. Based on the results of that inspection, I authorized resumption of services. I was told we were good to go. Where’s Chris? Chris Vallins?”

  Barbara’s eyes darted around the room, searching him out. Finally, she spotted him, standing a few steps ahead of the middle elevator’s open doors. Next to him stood Glover Headley.

  Vallins raised a hand. “Here,” he said.

  Glover, as well as everyone else in the room, turned and looked at him venomously. So, they all appeared to be thinking, this is your fault.

  “What did you find?” Headley asked.

  “Find?” Vallins said. “Nothing.”

  “You were here, yesterday?”

  Vallins nodded. “That’s correct, Mr. Mayor. Today, too.”

  Glover was shaking his head. He looked from Chris to his father and said, “Dad always uses the best people.”

  The room fell silent.

  “Uh, thank you, Glover,” Headley said. “But as I was saying, the building had been checked as recently—”

  “And yet here we are, trapped at the top of this fucking monstrosity,” Glover said. “Look at all that’s happened on your watch.”

  Valerie was moving through the room toward the mayor’s son. She said softly, so as only to be heard by a few, “This is not the place.”

  Glover was not dissuaded, even when Vallins also started moving closer to him. To the crowd, he said, “By the way, is anyone here hiring? In case you haven’t heard, I’m no longer working for the mayor of New York City.”

  There were murmurs throughout the room. Barbara felt a growing unease, that Glover’s performance was not unrelated to what was happening to all of them.

  Headley spoke. “Son, just tell me. Why did you meet with that man?”

  “What man?” Glover said.

  “That elevator expert. Weeks ago.”

  A collective gasp swept the room.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” the mayor’s son said. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Headley searched the room, spotted Barbara, and said, “You tried to tell me. That it was personal. I had no idea how personal.”

  Barbara didn’t know what to say. This hardly seemed the time for an I told you so.

  Even if she could have thought of some response, someone else had something to say first.

  “It is personal.”

  Chris Vallins was speaking.

  He was standing only a step away from Glover and looked at him as he spoke.

  “Someone in this room blames the mayor for how he treated his mother. How he neglected her. How he didn’t give a shit about her.”

  Vallins turned his head to stare squarely at the mayor.

  “I’m that person,” Vallins said. “Mr. Mayor, you killed my mother.”

  More gasps. More whispers. Everyone was wondering what the hell was happening.

  Including Glover. He looked at Vallins and said, “You signed out that car. You used my name.”

  Vallins nodded. “Sins of the father and all that,” he said. “Sorry.”

  At which point he swiftly placed his palm flat on Glover Headley’s chest, knocking him off his feet and through the open elevator doors.

  Sixty-Nine

  Mom? Mom? Say something. Mom. Please don’t die. Mom? Mom. Open your eyes. Look at me. Mom. Mom! I love you, Mom. I love you. Oh, Mom. No no no no no.”

  Chris thinks she is dead, but then she opens her eyes again as she lies there on the floor of their tiny apartment.

  “I need … I need your father.”

  This hardly seems like the time to remind her that his father—her husband—is dead, and has been for a long time.

  “I’m calling for help,” he says, on his knees beside her, rubbing his hand across her forehead.

  He jumps up and goes for the phone, dialing 911. He quickly tells the operator their Bronx address, that he thinks his mother has had a heart attack, that she’s been complaining about pains in her chest for weeks, that she’s just come up six flights of stairs carrying bags of groceries, that they need to get here quickly.

  “They’re coming,” he tells his mother, tears streaming down his cheeks. “You’re going to be okay. Just hold on until the ambulance gets here. Okay? Mom? Mom? Say something. Mom. Please say something.”

  She makes a low, moaning noise.

  “I’m gonna be gone for just a minute. I’m gonna run down and wait for the ambulance, show them how to get up here.”

  Chris bolts from the room, runs down the hallway past the elevator with the Not in Service sign held to it with tape that has gone yellow with age. He nearly flies down the six flights of steps and is running out the front of the building as the ambulance comes screaming up the street.

  Chris runs out between two parked cars and waves his arms in the air. The ambulance screeches to a halt out front and two paramedics—a man and a woman—leap out.

  “This way!” Chris says.

  They want to take half a second to confirm. “Maude Vallins?”

  “Yes! Room seven-oh-three! Hurry! She’s still breathing!”

  They grab their equipment and run in after the boy. As he heads for the stairwell door, the woman says, “Where are you going?”

  She points to the two elevators in the lobby. She hasn’t yet noticed the Not in Service signs taped to them.

  “They don’t work!” he shouts.

  “Ah, Christ,” says the male paramedic.

  Chris takes the steps two at a time, reaching the seventh floor more than a minute ahead of the other two. The paramedics enter the hall winded, sweat dripping down their temples. Chris is at the door to his apartment, waving them in.

  While the two emergency workers kneel over his mother, Chris cannot stop babbling.

  “The doctor’s always saying she has a bad heart and it’s really hard for her going up and down the stairs and I told her I’d do the shopping, you don’t have to do it, or even if she goes out I can carry all the bags up, you know, because it’s way too hard for her but she’s always saying she can do it, that it’s not my job, that my job is to go to school, but I could do it after school but she says no and I talked to the man, who comes for the rent, and I’ve asked him and asked him to please fix the elevators, that my mom can’t handle the stairs, that one day she’s going to have a really really really bad heart attack but he’s this total asshole and I told my mom not to pay the rent until he fixed them but she said she couldn’t do that because—”

  The woman stands, turns, and asks, “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Christopher.”

  She tips her head toward the hallway
.

  “I can’t leave my mom,” he says.

  “We need to talk, Christopher.”

  Once in the hall, she walks him a few steps away from the open apartment door. “What family you got? Brothers, sisters? Where’s your father?”

  “It’s just me and my mom. My dad’s dead. I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

  The woman’s eyes sadden. “Uncles? An aunt?”

  He nods. “Fran. She’s my mom’s sister. She lives in Albany.”

  “You got a number for her?”

  “Does my mom have to go to the hospital?”

  The woman swallows. “How old are you, Chris?”

  “Twelve.”

  “We’re not taking your mom to the hospital, Christopher. Maybe if we’d gotten here a little sooner …”

  Chris says, “Like, if the elevator had been working.”

  The woman says, “I guess we’ll never know. We need to get in touch with your aunt, tell her—”

  She glances down the hallway at the sound of the stairwell door opening and closing. A young man, early twenties, dressed in a suit and tie, strides toward the paramedic.

  “What’s going on?” he asks in a voice that suggests he’s entitled to know.

  “That’s him,” Chris whispers.

  “Him?” the woman says.

  “The asshole,” he whispered.

  The man is now face-to-face with the paramedic. “What’s happening here?”

  “Emergency call. Heart attack. Who are you?”

  “Richard Headley,” he says. “My father owns this building, among others. I’m the property manager.”

  “Do you live here?” the woman asks.

  Headley looks as though he’s been slapped in the face. “Hardly. I come by twice a month. Check on things, collect rent.”

  “My mom’s dead,” Chris says.

  Headley looks down at the boy, noticing him for the first time. “Sorry to hear that, sport.”

  “If they’ d got up here sooner,” Chris says, holding back his tears, “they could have saved her. If you’d fixed the elevators. Going up and down the stairs killed her. It’s your fault.”

  Headley bends down so he can look the kid in the eye. “One thing you’ll learn, when you get older, is you can’t go blaming others for your troubles. If your mom didn’t like the way things were here, she could have moved.”