Deadly Interest

by Julie Hyzy

  “Owen, please,” David said, as though addressing a mischievous child, “your temper’s gotten us into enough trouble here. Let’s handle this the smart way for a change, shall we?” I could see his face, half-blue, half-obscured when he turned to me. “Alex,” he said, in the same soothing voice he’d used so many times since we’d met. “Are you all right?”

  My heart leapt at his words—an instinctive response as my emotions reacted, holding fast to my last shred of hope. “We’re okay,” I said, wary. I could hear fear in my voice; I had no doubt he could, too. “What are you doing here?”

  “Everything’s gotten screwed up,” he said. “I have to protect my assets.” He moved closer, further into the light, as nonchalant as ever. It was his manner that chilled me most. “And to make sure nothing happens to you, of course.” He smiled. “Yet.”

  All thoughts of a happy ending crashed through my brain with a soulful clang sounding like a death knell. Maya and I stood close to one another, arms touching. I couldn’t tell which one of us shook more.

  Owen’s breathing had returned to almost normal. With his head up now, he glared our direction, then threw a glance at David. “Now what?”

  “Let me think on this,” he answered. “We have to plan well so it won’t come back on us.”

  With the look of suddenly remembering a critical piece of information, Owen’s body jerked. “The guard guy downstairs in the garage,” he said. “That Jared guy. He knows I’m up here.”

  David made a sound of weary displeasure. “Taken care of,” he said.

  The implication of his words exploded in my brain.

  Like a kid in trouble trying for an attaboy, Owen lifted his chin Maya’s direction, “I got her cell phone, like you told me.” Pointing to me, he added, “She didn’t have one.”

  David rolled his eyes. “No wonder everything has blown up. You just can’t do anything right, can you?”

  “Hey, I checked. I emptied their purses, see? It wasn’t there.”

  David moved toward the pile of purse debris on the nearby desk. From the light hitting him from the side, I could see him work his jaw. “Damn it, Owen. This is just another loose end you created. How do we explain their belongings dropped all over the place here?” He turned then, and I couldn’t see his face, but I heard his hiss of frustration.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Owen said, sullen. “But I had to make sure she didn’t have a phone.”

  Turning back to face us, David made a tsking sound. “Of course she has one.”

  Shit.

  “Maya,” David said, still calm. “If you’d be so kind, would you please locate Alex’s cell phone. I believe you’ll find it in her back pocket.”

  When she didn’t move, his voice deepened. “Maya. Now please.”

  She whispered that she was sorry as she pulled my phone out by its tiny antenna.

  “Now toss it to Owen, would you?”

  I took a small measure of pride in the fact that he winced when he caught it. David collected both phones from him and nodded. “You see, Alex,” he said, “I really did pay attention to everything you told me. Everything. From your pride in your sister’s musical prowess, to where you like to keep your phone.”

  I bit my lip. He’d conned me good.

  “We can kill them right here,” Owen said, making an unsteady return to his feet. “Make it look like Maya was about to be exposed, and so she killed her. Then turned the gun on herself.” His eyes were like mad things trapped in a frozen pond. “With records in her purse, it’ll look like she knew she was caught.”

  David nodded slowly, walking toward him. “Actually, my thoughts were running along the same lines,” he said.

  He raised his arm so quickly, I didn’t even see the gun in his hand until the flash exploded next to Owen’s temple. He crumpled to the floor, the dark blood running out of the side of his head, forming a puddle on the carpet. I winced instinctively at the loud noise, my body turned away, my hands flew to my ears.

  David looked down at him and smiled wistfully. He goddamn smiled. The sound of the shot rang in my head, echoing and strong. I could barely hear, but somehow I caught his words. “For the good of the firm, old chum.”

  I didn’t wait. I grabbed Maya’s sleeve and dragged her after me, back into the maze of the office. We ran through a lattice-work of those folding six-foot portable wall separators, my breath coming in ragged gasps.

  “Alex,” I heard David’s smooth voice calling after me. “Don’t run. We can talk this out. I promise.”

  I pulled Maya into one of the sections and forced her into a crouch. Her dark eyes jumped everywhere at once. Everywhere but at me. Her breaths came out in panicked whooshes. I thought she might hyperventilate.

  “We’re dead,” she said. “He’ll kill us both.”

  “How can we get out of here?” I asked, shaking her out of her stupor. A sudden crash to my far left made me jerk, but we both managed to keep from yelping aloud. Metal against wood, against plastic, thudding then, to the floor. Several of the nearby portable sections shook, and I knew David must be systematically kicking them over. It would only be a matter of time before he found us.

  I thought of Lucy. What would she do without me? I shook Maya again when another crash sounded. Closer this time.

  “There’s got to be a way out of here.” I shook her hard. “Think.”

  “Alex,” his smooth voice continued, “you know, I really believed you’d come to me if you uncovered any irregularities. We had a bond, you and I. I trusted you.” He heaved a sigh, slammed the cubicle next to us to the ground.

  We had to move. Now.

  “I’m terribly disappointed in you.”

  Leaping like startled rabbits, we made it one cubicle over, just in time to hear his foot slam against the wall we’d just abandoned. He must have been getting tired because he kicked again, but this time, nothing fell.

  “I had such hopes for us, Alex. I thought we could make beautiful music together.” He chuckled. Moved nearer.

  “It’s not too late. I’m willing to . . . negotiate.” I could hear him taking deep breaths. He was winded. “Owen killed Evelyn Vicks. You know that now. But, I didn’t know about it until he told me. He was stupid. Out of control. Now, I have to come in and clean up his mess. But we can still escape. Together. All we need are a couple of fall guys.”

  I tried estimate how close he was by his voice. We scurried. Like rats, I thought. Trapped rats.

  “Owen already set things up for Maya to take the fall,” his silky smooth tone continued. “She deserves it, too, believe me. Just call out where you are, and you and I can be on our way to the Cayman Islands to drink rum tonics on the beach for the rest of our lives.”

  Yeah, right, I thought.

  I heard him grunt with effort, and then another crash. More partitions toppled.

  “Listen to me, both of you,” he said, his voice taking on a harsher tone. “You’re smart girls. Think. Think hard. You can’t get out of this alive. Not unless I let you.”

  We’d sidled up to a wide pillar, and I fought an exclamation of pain as I bumped against metal. David might have heard the sound of my hitting it, but I thought not. I looked at the mounted item, close-up. A fire extinguisher.

  I lifted it from its hook, released the safety pin, and held the nozzle in my right hand, the tubing leading from the nozzle to the can I held in my left.

  I kept close attention to his positioning, using the elevator corridor as the twelve on a clock to keep my bearings. We were at about the four, moving counter-clockwise around the maze of desks. He followed us, moving the same direction. I placed him at about the eight, maybe the nine. A few more steps around, he’d be behind us and we’d have our only chance to run.

  He must have come to the same conclusion, at the same moment, because he stopped kicking the cubicle and I heard quick footsteps head toward the corridor.

  We didn’t wait. We didn’t think.

  We ran.

&n
bsp; In the darkness, with all the strewn rubble from his kicking tantrum, he must have misgauged a step. I heard, rather than saw him trip, but not fall.

  “Go,” I shouted to Maya, then turned and aimed the nozzle at the open doorway we’d just left. David appeared and I sprayed him, directly in the face.

  His hands flew up to his eyes in a futile effort to protect them from the onslaught of chemicals. I’d gotten him straight in the face. He bent over, coughing, retching. Some wafted my way and I tasted the chalky, yellow bitterness of the powdered spray, even as I turned to run.

  Maya hadn’t moved from behind me, so I threw the heavy fire extinguishing can aside and grabbed a handful of her leather jacket as I made for the wall buttons that would be our salvation.

  My feet moved slow-motion, my left hand reached, like a Stretch Armstrong toy I remembered from my childhood, for the button that would open the waiting elevator doors.

  It opened. Thank God.

  We were inside before the doors fully spread, pressing the “close” button with four frantic hands. I heard Maya pray aloud, and I listened for movement from the corridor.

  The doors weren’t closing.

  Because we hadn’t picked a floor.

  “Down,” I shouted, pressing the button for the ground floor.

  Whatever computer controlled the system gave us an indifferent click-reply, and ever so slowly, the doors slid shut. We stood, motionless, panting, not making any other sound—willing the golden panels to close. Now. To keep us alive.

  Five inches.

  Two inches.

  Fingers thrust through the rubber linings, grabbing for Maya’s coat. She jumped backward, fell to the floor, sobbing, eyes wild.

  For a time-stopping second, I thought the doors, having encountered resistance, would make the faithful response and open again.

  They didn’t.

  His fingers must not have hit the safety mechanism sufficiently, because the flexing digits yanked back just a fraction of a second before the elevator locked itself and made ready to begin its downward trek. I heaved a sick-to-my-stomach groan and, nearly blanking out from shock, dropped to lean against the inner wall. My mind flashed back to fourth grade when a boy I liked told me about a man who’d been decapitated by a set of elevator doors and how the body had danced around for long minutes before it finally died. Back then I’d believed that those door edges were sharp enough to chop through a man’s neck. Right now, I wished to God those buggers had sliced David’s hand right off.

  Relief rushed through my body; there was no way he could beat us down by taking the stairs. I allowed myself to breathe again.

  But our elevator stopped again, almost immediately. Maya pushed to her feet.

  I stared out the glass walls for a split-second, trying to impel us to move by sheer force of will. The ground below remained immobile. The button we’d hit and lit up had gone dark now. I reached for the floor buttons, pressing “one” again and again, hoping to kick the computer into gear. Nothing.

  I pressed “two, three, four.”

  We weren’t going anywhere.

  Maya stood transfixed, her eyes on the digital readout that indicated our floor. It was dark, too. As though the elevator system had been shut off completely.

  “How?”

  Maya blinked, shaking her head. “There’s a control box on every floor.”

  “Shit,” I said, then thought to ask, “Does it control all the elevators, or just this one?”

  Maya blinked in concentration, looked up when the answer came to her. “All of them,” she said. “If we’re stuck, he can’t use any of the others.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to make sense of our situation, trying to see how we could possibly survive.

  Movement caught my eye, and I turned. Through the glass walls that faced the atrium a half-floor above us now, I could see David heading away from our position, back into the loan department. “What do we do?” I asked Maya.

  She shook her head.

  I tore open the brass control box inside, hoping to find some master command that would allow us to start moving again. There it was. A bulls-eye shaped keyhole, surrounded in red. White letters telling me that this was what we needed.

  I grabbed Maya’s arm. “You still have that key?”

  Her face crumpled; she shook her head. She pointed back toward the loan department. “In my purse.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  David was back in less than a minute. He strode past the windows on his way to our glass prison, looking neither right nor left. A man on a mission. He held something long and shiny in his hand, like a pointer from a business meeting.

  It dawned on me what he needed it for.

  Every set of elevator doors had a small hole just above eye-level. In the event of an emergency, poking a long straight object inside would open the doors automatically. He’d have us then.

  I looked up.

  These fancy elevators had plastic-square dropped ceiling tiles. I jumped, pushing them aside with my hand, until I spotted the escape hatch, exactly where I thought it would be. “Boost me,” I said to Maya.

  With a stricken look on her face, she complied, wrapping her hands together and pushing my planted foot upward. We worked well together, Maya and I, and some auto-pilot part of my brain processed that nugget even as my fingers skimmed the square, knocking the small door off-center.

  “One more time,” I said.

  This time my fingers strove for purchase over the edge of the open hatch, and I got it. Exerting muscles I didn’t know I owned and pushing those harmful thoughts about my lack of upper body strength out of my head, I pulled myself through, using my right elbow as leverage. Once I had my left elbow pulled up and set, I shimmied upward with relative ease, working around vertical metal struts on the elevator car’s roof. Thank God we were both slim, I thought.

  The moment I made it to my knees, I reached back for Maya’s outstretched hand, pulling. No luck.

  We both heard the sound of metal against metal as the poker David used tried to find the doors’ release level. I laid flat on my stomach, giving me the best control I could muster. “Come on,” I said.

  We locked hands, and she pressed a foot against the sidewall railing. It was enough, and once she’d gotten her torso through the opening, I grabbed her by her waist and hauled her the rest of the way in.

  I looked around. We hadn’t dropped far at all. I could see only the very top couple of inches of the tenth-floor doors, where, from the sound of things, David Dewars was having difficulty opening them.

  I hate elevator shafts. I’ve always hated them. Looking upward in an elevator shaft terrifies me. As a little kid I’d visited a building on State Street with cage elevators that were open everywhere—side-to-side, up and down. I’d buried my head in my mother’s stomach and didn’t move till my dad gathered me in his arms and carried me out. As an adult, I recognized my irrational fear as a phobia. I lived with it—believing that such an oddball phobia wouldn’t ever seriously impact my life.

  Now, my life depended on me beating it.

  I came through the small opening with nothing but survival on my mind. As I stood, in the worst of my nightmares, I froze. I wouldn’t look up. I couldn’t.

  But there was no way to go down.

  Maya pointed at the wall near the doors. “A ladder.”

  Panic manifested itself in a cold flush that seared through my body, making my heart hurt from its pounding, making my eyes see bright lights.

  We heard a thud.

  Those top two inches showed the tenth-floor doors wide open.

  And David was inside the elevator.

  “Go,” Maya said, pushing me toward the ladder.

  I followed her, working too many things in my brain at one time. I told myself not to look up. I repeated it like a mantra, hitting the words over and over as my feet clanged the stacked rungs. Maya stopped at the eleventh-floor doors, reaching.

  She tried to force the panels
open, but her center of gravity was off, and the doors wouldn’t budge. Another memory flashed in my mind. Forcing open the windows in Mrs. Vicks’ house during that storm, because she’d been locked out. This was how everything had started. If I hadn’t helped her that night, I wouldn’t be here now.

  With a start, I realized that life moments were playing before my eyes.

  I clenched them shut even as I put one hand above the other, climbing upward into the sum of all my fears. I couldn’t let my childhood terrors be what stopped me now. I couldn’t let David win that easily.

  Looking down, I saw his head crown the opening. He’d be on top of the car any moment now.

  We had enough light from the glass shaft surrounding us, but that meant that David would be able to see us just as easily as we could see him.

  I looked up.

  I thought my heart would explode from the sight of the dreadful abyss above me. I knew it only extended about two floors above us, but the panic attack had begun. My heart went into a long series of palpitations and my breath came out in fast pants. I would not lose control. I couldn’t. I didn’t have my father to carry me to safety. I had to do it myself.

  I did the only thing I could do at that point. I closed my mind to all but the feel of cold steel rungs in my hand and the muscles in my legs propelling me upward. I forced myself to envision blinders and from then on, I saw nothing else but the path up the ladder.

  “Look,” I said, my voice barely audible. I pointed to another door, immediately above the end of the ladder, just after “twelve,” the top floor doors. “Where does that lead?”

  She and I moved faster as David made a telltale whump below. He’d hoisted himself onto the car’s roof, and would surely be on his feet in a moment.

  Maya’s face told me she didn’t know.

  “Go,” I said.

  She did.

  I watched her grab the set-in handle and thrust forward with all her might, the hatch opening with rusty, shrill shrieks. She toppled outward. I didn’t know where, but I couldn’t wait to get there.