Midnight Rider

by D V Wolfe

  Footsteps coming towards us. I looked at Mick and Vince. From the looks on their faces, they didn’t bring anything that would be helpful against demons either. The footsteps were so close I could hear the men breathing now. A surprise attack on them when they came through the doorway. That was my best shot.

  A high, tinny ringing made the footsteps pause.

  “Shit, it’s him again,” one of them said. “Clavius here. Yes, Jesus Christ on a cracker! We’re going! Tell him to stop killing interns! We’ll be back with dinner in a few, just….” There was the sound of the phone flipping shut. “He hung up. We gotta go. He’s started killing the hostages again.” The feet started sprinting away from us. There was the beep of a car being unlocked and then a few moments later, a car starting and roaring down the levels of the parking garage.

  I crept out of the stairwell and peered down at the road. I saw a silver sedan leave the exit from the parking garage and hang a right, burning rubber as they took a corner. Vince and Mick joined me to look down at the street.

  “Well, that was fun,” I said.

  “Man,” Vince said. “If they’d walked in there, we’d be tits up. I brought nada to deal with demons.”

  I nodded. “Same boat, first mate. I thought maybe I could nick one of them in the neck if I threw the petrified Peep from my bag at them.”

  Vince and Mick shook their heads. “Why do you eat that crap?” Vince asked.

  “I have a lighter,” Mick added. “Maybe we could melt it down and make a toxic gas to give ourselves some cover if we need to escape.”

  “Get off my Peeps,” I said, glaring at the two of them. We stared down at the street.

  “How the hell did they cross over here without us seeing them?” Vince asked. “We were staring at the street and the building for like ten minutes before they got over here.”

  “There must be a basement access to the parking garage,” I said. I grinned at them. “We better check it out.”

  Mick groaned. “Only if I get the stale Peep. The only things I have to defend myself with are some pocket lint and a roll of Certs.” We jogged down the stairs, slowing to a creep when we reached the basement level.

  “Ok, Vince, go out there and see what the passage looks like,” I said.

  “Hell no,” Vince said. “You go look.”

  I sighed and stepped out into the hallway. It was a concrete passage under the street. It was dimly lit and the smell of mold clung to the damp walls. At the far end, there was a set of double doors with industrial style handles. I started down the tunnel and I could feel Vince and Mick behind me. I reached the double doors and peered in through the window. The hallway beyond was lit by flickering fluorescents and it was thankfully, deserted.

  “Well, this was definitely worth it. I mean, I love staring into empty hallways that could be filled with red-eyed douchebags at any moment, armed only with a stale Peep, as much as the next guy, but we should be getting the hell out of here,” Mick muttered.

  “Sorry Mick,” I said. “Is the moisture down here starting to give you mange?” He muttered something but I wasn’t paying attention. I was staring at a clipboard hanging on the wall just inside the doors next to the janitorial closet. The yellow and blue form had been filled out with what had to have been a sharpie, luckily in large print.

  Ok. I had a plan. Half of one anyway.

  I turned and saw that Vince and Mick were already back at the parking garage end of the tunnel and peering out at me from the stairwell doorway.

  “We need to do a tourist strut around the block to check out ground level exits and then get back to the rest of the crew,” I said when I joined them back at the stairwell. Vince and Mick didn’t argue.

  We exited the backside of the parking garage onto the next street over, walked two blocks up, and circled the Johnson Meredith building, pretending to tie shoes and check out reflections in store windows. It turned out there were four ground floor exits, one on each side. Only the front door exit facing Washington Street was the standard glass, double doors. The two side doors looked like fire doors: single and solid. The back exit was also double doors, metal but with two small tempered-glass windows at the top.

  When we were finished making the loop, we stopped by a pizza place and picked up two large pizzas of whatever they had ready and jogged down a block to catch the bus.

  “So,” Vince said out of the corner of his mouth to me. “Are we good?” I nodded. “I mean,” he continued. “You know what we’re doing right?” I nodded again. “What I mean is….” I opened the top pizza box he was holding and picked off a piece of pepperoni, trailing some cheese and sauce. I closed the box lid. “You’ve got a...a plan, right?” He asked. I leaned forward and stuck the piece of pepperoni to the end of his nose. Vince glared.

  “I got a plan,” I said. Whether it was a good one, would remain to be seen.

  23

  We made it back to Big Al’s just as the sun was setting.

  “Not much time now,” Vince said, checking his phone. “It’s just after eight.”

  I knocked on the warehouse door. “Turn down service,” I called. “We’ve come to fluff your pillows.”

  Rosetta yanked the door open. “It’s about damn time.”

  “Well you look like your pillows have already been fluffed,” I said, pushing past her.

  I looked around the room. Stacks and Noah were looking at something on Stacks’ computer sitting on the workbench. Vials, stakes, and jugs of water sat on the bench next to them. Tags was sitting on an oil drum next to the rolling chair from the office that Rosetta must have just vacated. He was reading the monk’s book with granny glasses perched on the end of his nose. As soon as Vince came in carrying the pizza boxes, everyone looked up.

  “Finally,” Noah groaned.

  “Stacks,” I said. “Can you get online?”

  Stacks nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been using my hotspot to double-check some stuff, why?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t that use your cell phone and send out a signal as to where you are?”

  Stacks nodded. “But it shouldn’t matter. If they look up the number, it’ll just say Mona Lotta is hanging out in Big Al’s.” We all just looked at him.

  “Mona Lotta?” I asked. Stacks’ ears were turning red now.

  “What?” He said. “It was the only name I could think of when I was registering it.”

  “I don’t want to know why,” I said. “Is the signal here strong enough for you to be able to do some hacking?”

  Stacks shrugged. “Might be. What are we hacking?”

  “The security camera system at the Johnson Meredith building.” Stacks folded the piece of pizza he was holding and stuffed it in his mouth. He wiped his hands on his shirt, giving Scooby a fresh marinara mustache, and crossed back to his laptop.

  “This is good,” Noah said. “So we can like, spy on them, right?”

  I nodded. “Added perk. I mostly want to make sure they can’t see us coming.”

  Stacks opened some software on his desktop and then some internet windows and started clicking away. I turned to look at Noah who was now on his third piece of pizza. “How’d things go with the padre?” Noah started to talk with his mouth full but glanced over at Rosetta and stopped.

  “No problem,” Rosetta said. She crossed to me and handed me a business card. “Father Milligan sends his best wishes. It seems he was a hunter himself, back in the day.”

  I flipped the card over and saw he had written a cell phone number and “Good Hunting” on the back. “That was friendly of him. Did you two tell him what we were doing?” I asked, hoping there wasn’t another liability out there we had to think about.

  Rosetta wiped her mouth primly with a napkin she must have pulled from her purse, and said, “We just told him we were going toe-to-toe with some demons.”

  I nodded. “Good. No need to take out a full-page ad over it,” I looked at Rosetta. “Did you get to spit in something?”

  She g
rinned and nodded. Tags chuckled behind me. “Rosetta hocked a loogie into that elixir. Made it probably thicker than it needed to be but it should coat nicely now.” We ate in silence for a minute.

  “Ok,” Rosetta said once she’d finished one slice and was reaching for another. “What’s the plan?”

  Everyone turned to look at me. They all looked bone-tired and resigned to whatever was going to happen in the next few hours. I just hoped I didn’t get us all killed.

  “Well the building is right downtown so casualties are a definite door prize for these assholes. We found a pretty good lookout spot across the street in the parking garage. It has a tunnel that goes under the street into the basement of the building.” A thought occurred to me and I looked over at Stacks. “Hey Stacks, you think you could hack into the city and pull up blueprints for the building?”

  “The blueprints,” Stacks said. “From the city planning office.”

  I nodded. “Well, yeah, if that’s where they are.”

  “I dunno, Bane,” Stacks said without looking up. “You think I’d look good in horizontal stripes?”

  “But you’re already hacking into a security system.”

  “Owned by a private security firm, not by the government. If this goes tits up and they haul me off for it, legal aid can probably get me five years or less for computer trespass.”

  “But you hack FBI files and government documents all the time,” I said.

  “From home,” Stacks said. “Where I have encryption and equipment that isn’t a measly hot spot wi-fi connection. If I even poke the government’s electric fence around their firewalls without encryption, I may as well learn how to make pot roast out of cigarettes to serve to my inmate husband for the next fifty to life.”

  “Ok, skip the blueprints, and the dramatics while we’re at it,” I said. I tore the lid off the pizza box and dug around on the workbench, coming up with a woodworker’s flat pencil that miraculously still had a blunt tip on it. I did a rough sketch of the building and the parking garage. “Besides the tunnel entrance, there are four doors on the first floor for entering and exiting. One, on each side. I say we all take one vehicle, park in the far side of the parking garage on the lowest level possible, go down the tunnel, and take the building from the bottom floor up so they can’t escape.”

  Tags came to stand next to me. “So how are we going to stop them from leaving?”

  “Yeah,” Noah said, reaching for a fourth piece of pizza. “And won’t they swarm us once they realize who we are and why we’re there?”

  “And how are we planning on subduing them?” Vince asked.

  “And once we have the peons subdued, then what?” Mick added.

  “Obviously you’re all going to have questions,” I said, trying not to shout. “But if you’ll let me finish, I can explain about the magic dust and the clown car and the Barbie doll.” That shut them up. “Thank you.” I looked over at Stacks, who was staring at a black and white camera feed on his screen, flipping between views. “That didn’t take long,” I said, moving to stand next to him.

  Stacks shrugged. “Johnson Meredith uses ProTecht, basically the Sesame Street version of security companies. They use an open-source software platform at their base that is just ‘baby-time frolics’ easy to hack into and the firewalls they put up are…”

  I clapped him on the back. “That’s awesome. So you’re in. Are you able to control recording and make a loop of playback that their security guard can watch on repeat for eternity?”

  Stacks started flipping back through the screens. “Probably, but Bane, I don’t think they’re that stupid. If I do all empty hallways on repeat, they’re going to know something is up. I mean unless they sent the third-string, ‘C’ team up there to watch the cameras.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past Hell,” I said. “Are you able to pull up the camera feed that oversees the tunnel hallway that goes to the parking garage?”

  Stacks clicked through some screens and found a camera pointed down a long white hallway that ended in two double doors with windows. The space beyond the doors was dark.

  “I think this is it,” Stacks said. “The camera is labeled, Parking Garage Exit.” We all watched the screen for a couple of minutes. No one came or went.

  I nodded. “Well that’s the first ray of sunshine on this parade in a long time.”

  They all turned to look at me. “Stacks,” I said. “Do a search for Commercial Cleaners Limited here in St. Louis.”

  Stacks closed his eyes and rested his head in his hands. “Please tell me you aren’t planning a Chattanooga.”

  “I didn’t say anything about Chattanooga. I asked you to search for Commercial Cleaners Limited in St. Louis,” I said.

  “What’s a Chattanooga?” Noah asked Rosetta behind me.

  “It’s how she lost her suture needle,” Rosetta told him.

  I turned to her. “It is not,” I turned back to watch Stacks. “It’s the reason I was banned from the Chattanooga Shopping Center.”

  Stacks snorted. “What was left of it.” Stacks tapped a few keys and the screen filled with a yellow and blue banner.

  “Where are they located?” I asked Stacks.

  He read down the page. “Over on Montgomery Street in Old North St. Louis. Actually not too far from here.”

  I looked. “Bebop and Rocksteady,” I said to Vince and Mick. “You two look around and find some iron boat chain and either a quick link or a padlock, something to close it with. At least three feet of it.”

  “Be-what?” Vince asked.

  Mick rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask.”

  Tags spoke up. “Hold up Bane, maybe you should fill in the blanks for us so we’re all on the same page.”

  I nodded. “Sorry, I’m still new at this ‘having help on a hunt’ thing. Step one, now that we have access to their security system, we’ll have it up to monitor what they’re doing. Stacks is right though, if we make loops of all empty hallways, they’re going to be suspicious and if we just plow in there as we are, we’re going to be dead. So instead, we need to ride a Trojan horse in there.”

  Mick opened his mouth to speak and Vince rolled his eyes. “Not an actual horse, Mick. It’s a synonym.”

  “Metaphor,” Noah said.

  “What did you call me?” Vince asked with a growl. His bulldog head was starting to reform, distorting his human face. Noah shrank back behind Rosetta.

  “Moving on,” I said. “I saw the Commercial Cleaners logo on a clipboard on the wall by the janitor’s closet in the basement. They clean on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights. Being as this is a Tuesday,” I looked at Rosetta. “It is Tuesday, isn’t it?” She nodded and I continued. “As this is Tuesday, we come in as the Commercial Cleaners, tonight.”

  “Won’t they be showing up too, creating more hostages for these mother-suckers?” Rosetta asked.

  “Not if we call and pretend to be someone on the account, canceling service for tonight,” Stacks said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “And then Stacks and I do a little light car theft…” Stacks groaned. “It won’t be so bad,” I said to him. “If we get caught, just tell them I was blackmailing you for the snake pit you threw me in with the Feds.”

  Stacks sighed. “Fine. Who is going to call them?”