by D V Wolfe
“Can you pull up a company directory for Johnson Meredith?” I asked.
Stacks opened a new tab and searched. He scrolled down faces and names under the “Who We Are” tab. “That one,” I said as he scrolled through the administration contacts, “Leannette Shultz, Office Manager.” She was in her early to mid-sixties and had a gray beehive and a scowl.
We all turned to look at Rosetta.
She looked at us all in disbelief. “What? You think I can impersonate her? She’s much older….” When we all just kept looking at her, she crossed her arms. “Fine. I’ll do it. But know that a comeuppance is on it’s way to every one of you. And you’ll never know when I’ll strike.”
“Why do I suddenly feel even more freaked out than I was before?” Stacks muttered.
“Because you know she means it,” I said. “Ok, Rosetta will call and be Leannette, cancel service for tonight, then Stacks and I will go steal a van from Commercial Cleaners.”
“And uniforms,” Tags said. Noah, Stacks, Vince, and Mick all glared at him. “What?” He said, looking around at them. “They’re going to know right away that something is up if we don’t have on uniforms.”
I nodded. “Good point. So we’ll steal uniforms, cleaning supplies and the van, come back here and pick all of you up, get changed, go and park in the parking garage and then wheel our carts through the tunnel and into the building.”
“And then what?” Rosetta asked.
“Then,” I said. “Vince and Mick will secure the doors that go to the tunnel with iron boat chain soaked in saltwater and pad-locked to make sure the baddies don’t try to leave the show early.”
“Hold up,” Noah said. “Won’t the security guard then start to get suspicious if he sees them chaining the doors shut on the camera?”
I grinned at Stacks. “I guess we have to use my idea after all. Can you make a loop of just the empty hallway to the parking garage and have that play on repeat after we enter and we all make it past the camera?”
Stacks thought for a minute. “I can make the loop now and then trigger it to play remotely from my phone. The time stamps will be screwy but as long as the security guard that’s watching the cameras is bored or a nose-picking demon, we should be fine.”
I nodded. “Good enough for me. Ok, we load weapons, salt tape, holy water, and any other fun grab-bag items we can think of into those cleaning cart things, and then we spread out. Noah and Rosetta, I want you two to take the rear doors to the building on the first floor. They’re double doors with windows, like the ones that lead from the tunnel. Stacks, you take the north side door and Tags, you take the south. Vince and Mick, you two will be responsible for the front doors. Salt tape the thresholds and up the sides and then just wait. I want you all to be able to get out if you need to, just in case.”
“And what,” Noah said. “We just leave you to deal with a fuck-ton of demons, on your own?” We were all quiet. That was the idea.
“Well, you’ll all be dealing with the ones on the first floor and any that try to escape. I think we put the holy water in spray bottles so you can spray them in the face if they come at you. Super soakers might be too conspicuous,” I said.
“You’re not planning on making it out of this alive,” Noah said. “Are you?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I don’t want a reset and I’m hoping to limp out of this thing alive, but I know the odds. Not something we need to worry about right now though.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket, “It’s nine. Only three hours until the festivities.” I tossed the phone to Rosetta. “Better make that call.”
24
“Rosetta, you do a pretty good impression of a crypt keeper with a stick up your ass,” I said when she hung up.
“I hope you enjoy watching me eat an entire Huckleberry Buckle in front of you for the rest of your life, Bane.” She muttered. She threw the phone back at me.
“So we’re good?” I asked Rosetta.
“To be honest, as soon as I identified myself, they were incredibly accommodating. They didn’t ask me any questions and they just thanked me for telling them with two-hour notice and said they would make a note in the assignments log for tonight. Finally something went our way,” Rosetta said.
“Well, no time like the present to royally screw that karma. Come on Stacks, let’s go steal a van,” I said.
“What should we be doing in the meantime?” Noah asked.
“Locking and loading,” I said. We emptied all the guns, armaments, salted tape, flasks, hex bags, and odds and ends from all three vehicles onto the workbench.
“You know,” Tags said, starting to sort hex bags and talismans out from loose ammunition, “this looks like a grab bag for one hell of a party.” He opened a shell casings box full of condoms and paused to look up at Vince.
“What?” Vince said. “That’s where I keep them.”
Tags used the barrel of my .45 to push the box to the end of the workbench. “Well you can keep them somewhere else. I don’t think we’ll be needing those.”
I looked over at Stacks who was writing something down from his computer screen. “Come on Stacks, get the lead out. We’ve got a crime to commit.”
Stacks tore the sheet off he’d been writing on and stuffed it in his pocket. We climbed into Lucy and Vince and Mick pulled the sliding bay doors open for us. We rolled across the lot with no headlights and in total darkness once Vince and Mick closed the bay doors behind us. We were quiet as we felt our way to the road.
“Which direction?” I asked.
“Take a right,” Stacks said with a sigh.
“I know this isn’t your favorite activity,” I said as I muscled Lucy into a tight right and we sped away from the warehouse.
“That’s an understatement,” Stacks said. “Bane, you ever wonder what you’ll do once you hit that magic number and you don’t have to hunt anymore? I mean with the time you have left.” The last sentence came out much quieter. I highly doubted that there would be much time to do anything between when I hit the magic number and when my time was up. At this point, I would be thankful if I hit the magic number at all. I dug around my brain and came up with what I’d told Joel all those months ago while we laid in bed on the California coast, watching the sun come up.
“I think I’ll build a shack on a beach. Go surfing every day, and cook whatever I catch over a fire every night,” I said.
Stacks nodded. “That sounds good.” We wound our way through the streets and at a stoplight a thought occurred to me.
“Stacks, why do you do this? I’ve never really asked you. I mean you went to Cal Tech. You’re off the charts smart. Well, book smart.”
“Hey,” Stacks said. “I’ve got street smarts.”
“The bouncer at Wimpy’s?”
Stacks glared at me. “Had to bring that up, didn’t you?”
“My point is, why do you do it? You could be living some apple pie life, working for a computer company, have a family, adopt a thousand cats, have cobra fights in your backyard, whatever. Why did you jump with both feet into the biggest shitstorm-dumpster-fire of a career you could find?”
“When I was a kid,” Stacks said. “Turn left here. When I was a kid, my mom disappeared. They found her body in the woods. I was twelve. She was in a coven and they’d turned on her. That was my first glimpse at what goes on behind the curtain. And once I knew there was so much more out there, I couldn’t go back to pretending the world was safe or not on the brink of ending daily. I just, I knew too much. I had to fight. I had to learn. You can’t go back to sleep after you learn what’s really going on, you know. Not ever.”
We were quiet as we turned down Montgomery. The hollow plastic sign was lit internally and the molded plastic was yellowed and cracked at the corners, but it still declared this to be the location of Commercial Cleaners Limited. A small fleet of white paneled vans with the Commercial Cleaners logo lined the parking lot behind a chain-link fence. The gate was open and a small side lot fo
r employees was about half-full.
“Lucy is going to stick out like a sore thumb in there,” I said, surveying the ten-year-old Nissans and Chevy sedans. There was one newer truck parked along the back but Lucy was an antique and usually drew attention when she was exposed. We sped up and I pulled into the driveway of an old roundtop shed at the back of an otherwise empty lot, a block down from the building. I opened the glove box and pulled out my back up lock picking set. This was faster than bobby pins. I could feel Stacks’ disapproval.
“Bane, are we really going to do this?”
“Dammit Stacks, I’m a good lockpicker.”
“No you’re not, Bane. You suck at lockpicking. You don’t have the touch. Remember that old lady’s house in Springfield? When you broke your pick off in her lock and then she just had to sit on her front porch all dejected while her ice cream from the supermarket melted and the locksmith changed her deadbolt out?”
“Ok, now we’re even. I can’t believe you brought up Springfield. I had arthritis, ok? Picking is hard when your knuckles are the same size as your wrist,” I spat.
Stacks rolled his eyes. “Just leave the picking to me, ok? You do...lookout.”
I sighed and kicked Lucy’s door open. We crept along the sidewalk back to the lot and through the open gate to the van parked closest to the street. We peered in the windows. The keys were hanging from the ignition. Stacks tried the passenger side door. It was locked. We moved around behind the van to the driver’s side. There was a keypad on the door.
“Of course,” Stacks said. “That would be too easy.”
“They have keypads on cars now?” I asked.
Stacks rolled his eyes. “I know you’re not wearing the old man’s carcass anymore, but you still sound like him.”
Stacks flipped his multi-tool open and slid his knife blade under the rubber of the keypad, prying it away slightly from the van door. He glanced up at me. “This is going to take some time. Why don’t you find some way to entertain yourself?”
I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered into the van, twisting to try to see into the back. I could see one of those laundry cart things, and mounted to the inside of the van panels were brooms, mops, and dustpans. Stacks swore next to me. I turned to look at him.
“Something the matter?” I asked.
Stacks gave me a shove. “You’re kind of in the way.” Apparently, in my attempt to see inside the van I’d shoved him away from the keypad.
“I didn’t see any uniforms inside,” I said. Stacks turned his back to me, blocking me out of the area he was working on with the keypad.
“Well maybe you should go find some,” Stacks hissed. He had his cell phone out and the flashlight turned on. He’d managed to pull the wiring from behind the keypad out to look at it.
“What? No car alarm on these things?” I asked.
Stacks froze. “Oh shit.” He looked in the window and stared around the cab. He seemed to relax a bit. “Maybe with the keypads and the fence they figured that was good enough. They didn’t plan on two crazy s.o.b.s taking a cleaning van to go joy-riding in.”
“They will after tonight,” I said. “So I guess us doing this is actually doing them a favor. Now they know they need to add car alarms. Look at us, serving our community.”
“Not to mention the time and community service we’ll be doing once we’re caught,” Stacks muttered.
I moved around the van and ducked between two more as headlights from one of the returning cleaning vans turned into the lot and slowed down to park in a spot near the front office. Shit. Had they seen Stacks?
I moved back around to see Stacks working on prying the rubber cover off again.
“I was able to hide in time,” Stacks said. “I don’t think they made us.” I moved back towards the sound of laughter and slamming doors.
A tall, thin girl and a balding older guy had just climbed out of the van, wearing uniforms. The girl carried a clipboard and the guy stopped to pull a bag of what I assumed were dirty towels out of the back.
“Did you see his face?” The girl was laughing. “Nothing like getting caught doinking your secretary by the cleaning crew.”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “I especially liked it when you said his wife had called the front security desk, asking to speak to him.”
“I think he crapped his pants,” she said. They reached the office front door and the guy opened it for her. What I could see from the open door was a single person behind the desk reading a magazine. He looked up when they entered and smiled.
“Hey Manny,” The girl said. “Wanna hear something juicy about The Holt Building?”
The older guy closed the door behind them, muffling the girl’s voice. I stood still and listened for any other sounds. The rest of the lot was quiet, so I moved in a wide circle around the building, just out of the reach of the floodlights attached to the building’s roof. The building was small, probably just the front office room, a bathroom, and one more room at the back. The back of the building was dark. I stopped to think. Crap. No way in. I hoped there were uniforms inside. If they ordered them or bought them somewhere else, we were screwed.
“C’mon universe,” I whispered. “Please don’t hose us on this.”
A door on the back of the building opened and light from inside poured out onto the dark lot.
The tall girl emerged, wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. Not her uniform. I took a chance.
I jogged up to the door and grabbed the handle. She jumped away from me and stared.
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said in my best Valley Girl voice. “I totally spaced and forgot my uniform tonight and I have to be to my site in like, ten minutes.” I looked past her into the room which held three racks of uniforms and a huge cabinet I assumed was where they kept all the economy-sized bottles of cleaning supplies.
“Oh, um…,” she looked over her shoulder. “You should talk to...”
“Oh, I already cleared it with Manny,” I said. “I don’t wanna give him the wrong idea about me, I mean, I really need this job.” The girl nodded in understanding.
“Well have a good night!” She called over her shoulder as she headed out into the lot, keys in hand. I moved inside the back door and started grabbing uniforms off the rack. They looked like they’d been arranged by size at some point in the distant past. The uniforms consisted of yellow and blue bowling type shirts and elastic-waisted blue pants. The elastic probably made it easier to rip them off when they spilled something toxic on their crotches.
There was a strong possibility that the older guy would be coming through the door to the backroom at any moment. I grabbed three huge uniforms and four small ones, stuffed them into a garbage bag that had been lying on a counter, and then hauled ass out the back door. I ran straight into the darkness and felt my chin make contact with someone’s side-view mirror. I stumbled around and behind the big Ram truck, just as the back door opened again and the older guy came out. He pointed a remote and the Ram truck blinked its lights. Of course the Ram was his. I crept one car over as quickly and quietly as I could and squatted down, waiting for him to get in his truck. I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket, the high pitched ring echoing out across the dark pavement. In the quiet lot, it felt like a screaming kid was in my pants. I heard the older guy pause, probably looking around in the darkness, searching for the source of the noise. He started down the narrow strip of gravel between his truck and the Toyota I was hiding behind. What was my best chance? Throw the bag of uniforms at him and run? I started inching to my right as quietly as I could while my phone continued to buzz in my pocket. I knew if I reached for it, the rustling of the stupid garbage bag would give me away. He was at the nose of the Toyota when a country twang filled the air and he reached for his pocket.