When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  Surprisingly, DeMarco encountered no graffiti, which suggested that the building was at least visually imposing against casual or impulsive penetration. But that did not exclude the possibility that somebody who had been familiar with the place for over a decade hadn’t found a number of ways to sneak in and out, places DeMarco in his initial inspection had not noticed.

  And Benny Szabo was nothing if not a sneak. A sneak and a weasel. A slimy night crawler who time and again had proved that he would do anything for a few bucks. And now he was afraid. Even if he hadn’t done what DeMarco was certain he did in Michigan, Szabo had definitely committed assault. He had hidden behind Eugene Miklos’s front door, beer bottle in hand as he listened to Flores ask about him. He would not have known her identity but he would have recognized the tone of her voice. He recognized authority when he heard it.

  If he had any brains at all he had been watching from a higher point in the building when the team’s vehicles arrived that morning. Then had quickly scurried away to a hiding place he had picked out earlier. Either that or, like the weasel he was, he had raced straight to his favored exit and ran for the weeds where the law dogs couldn’t sniff him out. But if he had chosen to remain in the building, he would be tense and alert now. There were lots of things lying around that could be used to knock somebody out, lots of broken two-by-fours and pipes and heavy chunks of metal. He had a nest somewhere inside the building, of that DeMarco was certain. Might even have an arsenal tucked into his little hidey-hole. If discovered, he would run if he could, but if he could not run, he would fight back, just as he had when DeMarco had arrested him many years earlier. All weasels will fight when cornered. Viciously.

  DeMarco moved slowly and deliberately through what seemed to him a labyrinth, a long, heavy flashlight burning in his left hand, a 9mm pistol in his right. Every closed door, every open doorway, every black unfilled space could be hiding a murderer. And DeMarco was not going to approach Szabo as he had approached his last murderer, not rashly or without due consideration. He was in no mood to get shot again, nor conked on the hood or slammed in the grill with a board. Szabo was indeed a weasel but even small, solitary animals should not be underestimated. DeMarco was not going to make that mistake again. If he did, and failed again, it was doubtful that the handsome Mr. Death would come a second time to gather him up. Not in this place. DeMarco felt no angel’s presence here, only darkness and dirt and danger.

  Eighty-Four

  The light toward which the darkness creeps

  A long, tedious forty minutes had passed and all Flores had seen was nothing. Nothing but uninterrupted and motionless wall. Her eyes stung from staring into the sun rising above the far end of the building, and from raising and lowering the field glasses to her unprotected eyes. And her leg ached. The console in Jayme’s car did not allow her to slide to the right so that she could stretch out her braced leg. So she popped open the door and turned in the seat and put her leg outside. There, that was better. But this assignment was still bullshit. Sitting in a car and staring at a wall? Everything was bullshit.

  Okay, all right, she had screwed up again. She should not have approached Szabo on her own. Okay, she recognized that mistake. She owned it. So now she was benched. A freaking spectator. Was it ever going to change? Was she ever going to get another chance to prove what she could do?

  What a roller coaster her emotions were! Sometimes she loved DeMarco like a father and sometimes she resented him. Sometimes she was jealous of Jayme and sometimes she felt nothing but love and admiration for her. She liked Boyd, maybe more than she should, but he was inside and she wasn’t and that made her resent him as well. What a stew of emotions she had become!

  Some stew would be good right now. Her mother’s stew. The black beans and corn, the albondigas and chipotle salsa, the chunks of potato and squash. Damn, she should have brought something to eat. Maybe she could flag down some little kid off the sidewalk and send him over to the GetGo for a couple of spicy beef sticks and a—

  Hey, what was that?

  There it was again! A shadow at the ground floor window. There and then gone.

  No, wait, it was still there. Was that somebody’s head? Somebody at the corner of the window peeking out?

  She raised the field glasses, focused in on the window. No, nothing there now.

  But she had seen something, damn it. She was sure of it. And who could it be but Szabo? Had to be. Why would anybody else be so furtive?

  She turned a bit more on her seat, slid out and stood beside the car. There it was again—she hadn’t imagined it! Was he looking her way now?

  And in the next instant the shadow grew, rose higher on the window. He’s standing… Then it flicked across the glass and was gone. He’s running!

  And then she was running too, swinging her left leg out in an arc, right leg thrusting ahead. As she ran she gripped her cell phone in her left hand, glanced from it to the building as she tried to thumb type a text. Then gave up until she was standing at the building, scanning the windows, seeing nothing amiss.

  She texted DeMarco: South wall ground floor face at window. One of you? And waited.

  Nothing. No response.

  She waited another minute, which felt like ten. Still no response.

  Maybe the phones didn’t work inside. Too much steel and concrete. If that were true, nobody would know that she had seen him. She had seen that slimy little worm at the window. And nobody inside was going to know about it.

  She scanned the exterior wall. Hurried along it in one direction, searching for a point of entry. Nothing. Then returned to her original position, the window where she had seen the shadow of his head and shoulders. She put her face to the dirty window, cupped hands around her eyes. Was that a flicker of movement on the other side of the room? Maybe. Maybe not.

  She looked at her phone’s screen. Nothing. No response to her text.

  “Son of a bitch!” she muttered.

  She pulled the flashlight from her belt and smashed out a pane in the window, the glass tinkling as it fell to the floor, the noise quickly swallowed by the emptiness inside. She peered through the opening, was surprised to see how much illumination could enter through filmy windows, the open doorway across the room a rectangle of muted light. She reached through the broken pane, felt around for and finally found the small locking lever centered atop the frame, pushed it with a thumb until she felt her thumb would break. Then the lock gave way with a rusty creak. She eased her arm out past the jagged glass, placed the heels of both palms against the exterior side of the frame, heaved and grunted and shoved till the layers of paint and grime split open.

  She raised the window as far as it would go, made a space maybe fifteen inches high and twenty wide. Stuck the flashlight and half of her arm inside and waved the light from wall to wall and across the floor. A floor stripped of its tiles, leaving only the wavy pattern of old tile cement. Three buckets lined up against the far wall. Four still-wrapped bundles of new tile. The walls looked newly painted. The ceiling newly plastered. Dusty footprints all over the floor, leading in and out of the doorway.

  She shut off the flashlight and slipped it into her belt, stretched to get hold of the inside of the sill with both hands. Then shifted her weight to the good leg and leapt up, diving head and shoulders through the opening so that her belly caught on the bottom frame, legs dangling off the ground. She paused for a moment to squint again through the now dimmer light, then took a deep breath and crawled and wriggled and dragged herself inside, a fiery tracer of pain shooting up her leg as she did so.

  Eighty-Five

  Like a gastropod in search of slime

  For forty minutes DeMarco crept along through the tunnels at a snail’s pace and assumed that those above him were doing more or less the same, though perhaps in less filthy and better illuminated surroundings. The sluggish pace, though necessary in such dimness, made him wish he ha
d a snail’s shell for protection, plus tentacles that could turn his eyeballs from side to side and to the rear, and another set that could sniff the floor for Szabo’s scent. Unfortunately he had none of that equipment, only a flashlight whose beam seemed intimidated by the darkness, leaving him forced to shuffle along like a blind and naked snail with a sticky foot.

  His neck and shoulders ached from the tension of having his spine and skull exposed, but to relax was to invite an ambush. He worried less about what lay ahead in the flashlight’s beam than in what might be approaching in the pitch-darkness behind him or off to the side. The air was cooler there twenty feet below ground, but it lay heavy in his lungs. Went in thick and dark and came out darker. He paused frequently to listen. Had something rustled behind him? Was that a footstep’s squeak?

  The so-called tunnels, he soon realized, bore no resemblance to actual tunnels. Just neglected corridors branching off in every direction and opening frequently into disemboweled rooms large and small, all right angles and corners. Chips of paint dangling from ceilings and walls like tiny tattered prayer flags in the mountains of Tibet. Chunks of ceiling plaster littering the floors. Splotches and streaks of rust bleeding through once-white paint. Here and there a puddle of stagnant water on the floor. All that was missing, he told himself, was the scurry of rodents and cockroaches. But there were none, not even spiders. Only paint chips and dust to eat.

  DeMarco could not imagine what had gone on in these rooms. Whatever the captains of industry had ordained. He had been told that some ten thousand torpedoes had been designed and built and tested in the facility during World War II, torpedoes that had eventually sunk ships and blasted souls out of their flesh. He could not remember ever being in a place so thick with darkness.

  At one point he thought he might have gotten turned around. Had entered a room, worked his way around the walls, looking for hidden alcoves and niches. Found a space that had worried him until he painted every inch of it with light, a hole in the floor stuffed with rags, pipes emanating a few inches above the floor, more sticking out from a wall. A bathroom. Empty. But upon coming out into the larger room and into the corridor, had he turned the wrong way? Was he following the dusty tracings of his own footsteps now?

  The vibration in his pocket startled him as much as a shout would have, so that his whole body jerked and tightened. Quickly he fished the phone from his pocket. Read Text from Dani. Opened it and read: South wall ground floor face at window. One of you? It took him a couple of seconds to make sense of it. Then he shoved the phone back into his pocket and, whipping the flashlight beam back and forth, up and down, plunged in what he could only hope was the right direction. Stairs! he told himself, his heart racing now, pulse beginning to drum. Where are the damn stairs!

  Eighty-Six

  In pursuit of the shadow of self-respect

  She moved as quickly as she could through the empty room, then peeked out into the hallway. Nobody. Nothing. Some kind of rumbling noise in the distance. Traffic? The blood and adrenaline roaring in her head? Or just the building itself grumbling?

  She could see clearly now, no need for the flashlight. She laid a hand on her holstered weapon, let her thumb slip down to the safety. Stepped out into the hallway and froze in a half crouch, right knee bent, left leg stretched out to her side so that her legs formed an isosceles triangle atop the shiny floor. Cocked her head and listened. Cocked her head the other way. Only the dull, muted rumbling.

  She straightened her back. Two options, right or left. Well, three options really, but going back to Jayme’s car was out of the question. She knew what some of the guys at the barracks had called her behind her back, just because she had been so exacting and, okay, maybe a little too brusque at times. Bitchpatcher. Yeah, well, this bitchpatcher had the long eye on the subject, and she wasn’t about to let a chance to go habeas grabus on him slip out of her hands.

  Her motto at the academy, whether on the obstacle course or while dealing with the mutters of other cadets, had been never retreat. There had been no end to having to prove herself. She was always being sold short. Besides, she had already committed herself by abandoning her surveillance position. So she said it again now, a steely whisper. “Never retreat.”

  Question was, which way to go? The light seemed brighter to her right. So go left, into the darkness. That was where someone like Benny Szabo would go. Rats always run for the darkness. Cockroaches too. Szabo was the embodiment of both. If given the chance, she would shoot one and step on the other. The staples in her scalp throbbed.

  Within five minutes she had lost all sense of direction. Too many rooms, too many sets of double swinging doors. And after the last set the surroundings changed significantly, no more new tile, no more finished walls. The light had diminished by half. Okay, good. That was the way Szabo would run. She kept moving, each forward lurch making her left shoulder dip. And eventually she came to a T. Peeked around one corner and then the other. Which way?

  Maybe she should try texting again. She eased her left hand into a pocket but kept her head turning, eyes focused down the long hallway. And there, yes…something anomalous. What was that? She leaned forward and squinted. Yes, there was somebody or something there, down at the end of the long hallway, a darkness against the wall. It was just a silhouette but…it looked smaller than Szabo. But that’s at least fifty feet away, she told herself. Of course he looks smaller. But no, it couldn’t be him, it was just a wisp of a thing. And for a moment she had the strangest feeling that it was looking at her.

  Then the shadow moved across the wall and disappeared to the right. Flores jerked her left hand off the cell phone in her pocket and slapped her right hand over the holster, gripped the butt of the pistol and, with her scalp throbbing with the urgency of Morse code, hobbled in pursuit of that shadow as fast as her broken body would allow.

  Eighty-Seven

  Trial and error

  It took DeMarco a lot longer than he would have liked to find the stairs and race up to the ground floor. Longer still to catch his breath and orient himself and determine direction by glancing up at the light through the high windows. He had emerged onto the ground floor far from the attractive front entrance and its fancy lobby. The walls were of white-painted concrete here, the floors of gray concrete, a high-peaked metal ceiling held aloft by fat metal beams and a series of thinner metal spiderwebs. A row of high windows, catwalks running along both sides of the room. The place was enormous. Down at the far end to his left, at least fifty or sixty yards away, several RVs were parked against a wall. Also a few vintage cars, boats covered in tarps. They looked tiny from where he stood. Storage, he told himself.

  No sign of Szabo. In the other direction, corridors branched off from each side of the room. DeMarco started in that direction but took only three steps before thinking, The RVs! He could be hiding in one of them.

  He crossed toward the RVs quickly but alert, eyes fixed forward. Took out his cell phone and stole glances at the keyboard while typing a group text to his team: Dani saw something in south window ground floor. I’m near there now. Might flush him your way. Stay sharp.

  Eighty-Eight

  Something in her eye

  The size of the room stunned her, swallowed her, was too vast to be believed. The space was huge and everything in it was huge. The standing and overhead beams, the giant yellow hook so thick and ominous hanging from its yellow bar, everything was huge but for tiny her. Flores felt like an ant in the Astrodome, a speck of dirt on the threshold of infinity. And where was Szabo? The enormous concrete floor was empty, not a person or thing or—

  An echoing clang. It seemed to emanate from above. She lifted her gaze and swept it side to side and saw him then, saw a man who must be Benny Szabo fifteen feet up on the far wall, crawling quickly up a steel ladder inside a circular metal cage.

  “Hey!” she yelled. Her voice echoed once and was swallowed. But he turned, looked at her, t
hen climbed faster. She lurched across the floor, felt blood rushing to her face, tightening the skin, and yelled, “Freeze, asshole! Don’t move or I will shoot you down!”

  He kept climbing. A full story and a half above her, he crawled out onto the metal catwalk and raced off to her left. Where was he going? Moving quickly but awkwardly in his direction, Flores whipped her gaze ahead of him down the catwalk, her eyes stinging again, watering. The distance between them was increasing. She was going to lose him.

  The catwalk ran behind a large yellow box of some kind, a crane operator’s control station, to emerge on the other side onto a balcony. Set in the center of that balcony was a black rectangle. An open doorway. If he reached that he would disappear into the bowels of the building again. Another failure for her. And he would reach it if she didn’t do something now.

  Ahead of him, descending a few feet from the crane operator’s station, was another caged ladder, but she could never get to it in time. Even if she could, climbing that ladder would be nearly impossible with an unbendable leg.

  She stopped in the middle of the floor. Took aim at his skinny chest. Slid the barrel an inch ahead to the left. And fired.

  The bullet pinged off the metal rail in front of him, though she heard only the blast of the gunshot itself and saw the spark of contact. Szabo stopped abruptly but only long enough to shoot a glance at her, then started running again. Again she took aim.