Shadow of Betrayal

by Brett Battles

  He found the soft spot on the wall again, then grabbed hold of the two-by-four with both hands and arced it back until it almost touched the other side of the corridor.

  “What’s that?” Orlando asked, her voice hushed.

  Quinn paused, his battering ram suspended in the air, ready to smash into the wall. It took him a second before he heard it. Something shuffling along the floor.

  Footsteps. And heading in their direction. But not in their hallway, in one intersecting it.

  “Nate,” Quinn whispered. “What’s your position?”

  “I’m nearing the top of the ladder,” Nate said. There was a pause. “Please don’t tell me you want me to go back down.”

  “No. Just hold your position when you reach the top.”

  “Copy that.”

  Orlando doused both of the lights, plunging the hallway into complete darkness. Careful not to make any unnecessary noise, Quinn lowered the two-by-four to the floor, then pulled out his SIG. Beside him, he could hear Orlando freeing her own weapon.

  Once armed, they stood rock still as the steps grew closer. There was a muffled thud like someone bumping into a distant wall, then the steps were suddenly in the same hallway as they were.

  Quinn raised his gun in the direction of the noise, then whispered, “Now.”

  Orlando flipped on one of the flashlights.

  “Shit! What the hell?”

  Caught at the very far end of the flashlight beam’s reach was a man. He appeared to be about the same height as Quinn, but that was about all the detail they could make out. A moment after being lit up, he was gone, running down the corridor away from Quinn and Orlando.

  “Hey!” Quinn yelled. “Stop!”

  But the man’s pace only increased.

  “Dammit,” Quinn said. Both he and Orlando started running at once. “Nate. There’s a hostile in the building. He’s heading your way.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Not sure if he’s armed, so be careful.”

  “You want me to take him out?”

  “No,” Quinn said. “Just… try to stop him, or at least scare him back in our direction.”

  “Copy,” Nate said. “I hear him. Hold on.” Quinn could hear Nate breathing. “He’s just around the corner.”

  “Be careful,” Quinn said.

  “Stop right the—”

  Nate’s command was interrupted by a loud smack, and the sound of something rubbing against the microphone.

  “Dammit!” Nate yelled.

  Quinn increased his speed, sprinting toward the intersection with the hallway Nate was in.

  “What’s happening?” Quinn asked. “Are you all right?”

  “The asshole just head-butted me in the cheek.”

  “Where is he now?”

  There was silence for a second.

  “He’s … ah … on the ground.” Nate paused again. “I think I knocked him out.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  THE UNCONSCIOUS MAN COULD HAVE BEEN ANYWHERE from twenty-five to his early forties. His face, weathered and wrinkled prematurely, had been beaten into a shape he hadn’t been born with. But though his clothes were old and thin in some spots, they were clean. And he obviously cared about his appearance enough to tuck his shirt in, comb his hair, and take a shower once in a while.

  Not quite a street bum, not quite part of society, either. The guy probably existed somewhere in between.

  His face also sported a new addition, a large red spot in the middle of his forehead, the remnant of his collision with Nate. Quinn knew it would turn into a bruise before long.

  “Smells like he’s been drinking,” Nate said.

  Quinn had noticed it, too, a faint hint of alcohol, not like the guy had been sucking anything down in the past hour, but within the last several. Sour, like beer.

  “Here.” Quinn held his gun out to Nate.

  He grabbed it and aimed it at the man on the ground.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” Nate asked.

  “Kind of hard to tell at the moment,” Quinn said. “But at least we know one thing.”

  “What?” Nate asked.

  “We know that hard head of yours is good for something,” Quinn said, a small smile on his face.

  “Ha. Ha. Hilarious.” There was a red spot on his cheek that was a near match to the spot on the unconscious man’s forehead. Nate raised his hand and began rubbing it. “Hurts like hell.” His hand stopped in mid-motion. “Damn. I think one of my teeth is loose.”

  Quinn knelt down and searched the man. The only things the guy had been armed with were an old black plastic comb and a set of ten keys. Definitely not a street person. They’d have no need for keys.

  Quinn put his hand on the man’s cheek, then rocked the man’s head back and forth.

  “Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”

  Not even a twitch. Quinn raised his hand a few inches, then slapped it down on the man’s cheek, not too hard, just enough so that it would sting.

  “Wake up,” he repeated. “Come on.”

  A low groan started in the man’s chest, then escaped through his mouth. A moment of nothing, then another groan, and another. Finally, he started to move his head in a slow circle on his own.

  Quinn kept his hand on the man’s cheek, his thumb wrapped around the bottom of the guy’s chin. All of a sudden, the man’s eyelids squeezed together as a grimace of pain shot across his face. One of his hands reached up and touched his injured forehead.

  He grunted, then all of a sudden he froze. Reluctantly, as if it was the last thing he wanted to do, his eyelids parted.

  “Oh, God. Please. I’m sorry,” he said, his voice clipped and nervous. “Just leave me alone. I ain’t got nothing.”

  “What’s your name?” Quinn asked.

  “No,” the man said. “You don’t need that. Just let me go, okay? Do whatever you want. I don’t give a shit.”

  “What’s your name?” Quinn repeated.

  The man looked at Quinn for a second, licked his lips, then said, “Al.”

  “Al what?”

  More hesitation. “Al Barker.”

  “Okay, Al Barker. What are you doing here?”

  “I live here,” Al said as if it should have been obvious.

  “No one lives here,” Quinn said.

  Al’s gaze flicked beyond Quinn at Nate and Orlando. “Do you have to shine that thing in my eyes?”

  The beam of Orlando’s flashlight moved off the man’s face and onto his chest.

  “Better?” she said.

  “Shit, man, you guys got guns!” Al had apparently just noticed the pistols in Orlando’s and Nate’s hands. “What the hell are you pointing guns at me for?”

  Quinn squeezed Al’s chin and turned it to the right. “Over here, Al,” Quinn said. “What are you doing here?”

  Al glanced back at Orlando and Nate, then refocused on Quinn. “I told you. I live here.”

  “The building’s empty, Al.”

  “You don’t have to keep saying my name.”

  “I just want to make sure you know I’m talking to you.”

  “I know you’re talking to me,” Al said. “And I do live here. The owner pays me to stay in one of the rooms upstairs. A couple hundred bucks a month, and I get the place for free.”

  “So you’re the caretaker,” Quinn said.

  “I guess. Yeah, sure. The caretaker.”

  “So if you’re the caretaker, where have you been all day?”

  “I was upstairs … listening to the radio … building’s got no electricity, so no TV.”

  “You were upstairs all day?”

  “Sure.”

  Quinn stared at him for a moment. “Al, where were you today?”

  “I was he—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Quinn cut him off.

  Al licked his lips again. “I left, okay? Went for a walk.”

  “All evening?”

  “Yeah. Okay? All evening,” Al said. />
  “Why did you leave?”

  “I can go out when I want,” he said defensively. “I don’t have to be here all the time. Mr. Monroe told me that when he let me live here.”

  “Who’s Mr. Monroe?”

  “He owns the building.”

  “Why did you leave today, Al? Did you hear something you didn’t want to? Then decided it was better to find something else to do?”

  The caretaker’s pause was all the confirmation Quinn needed.

  “Tell me the truth, or I’ll have my friend here, the one you hit with your head, shoot you someplace that won’t kill you, not right away, but it’ll hurt like hell.”

  Al took another look at Nate. The sight must have been enough to convince him.

  “I heard her come in, okay?” he said.

  “Her?” Quinn asked.

  “A woman. It was around sunset.”

  “How do you know it was a woman if you only heard her?”

  “I, eh, snuck downstairs. Sometimes we get kids in here. You know, try to trash the place. If I surprise them, it scares the hell out of them, and they leave. So I come down to do the same thing, okay? Only when I come down to the basement and peek around the corner, it’s not kids. It’s a woman. And she looks like she ain’t here to trash the place. But she got that door open, you know? That door you’re not supposed to go through. I was going to warn her, but she was already stepping inside. Then … boom.”

  “How did you know you weren’t supposed to go through that door?”

  “Shit. I don’t know … I just know it, okay?”

  “Not okay, Al. How did you know?”

  Al closed his eyes. “Goddammit,” he said under his breath.

  “Al.” The sharp tone of Quinn’s voice brought the man back into the here and now.

  “He told me, all right? He told me about the room.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Monroe,” Al said. “Who else?”

  “What exactly did Mr. Monroe tell you about the room?” Quinn asked.

  “That it was dangerous. You’d die if you went in there.”

  “So you never tried to see for yourself?”

  “Hell no,” the man said. “He made it very clear if you went in there, you wouldn’t come out. He was right, too. Jesus, what a mess.”

  “And you didn’t stay around to see if she might need any help?” Quinn asked.

  “A fall like that, I figured she was dead. Didn’t want to be here when the cops came and found her.”

  “So you left.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d you go?” Quinn asked.

  Al hesitated.

  “You went to a bar, didn’t you?”

  Al moved his gaze away from Quinn, then nodded. “I needed a drink, you know?”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Mr. Monroe is not going to be happy about this,” Al said. “I was going to get the hell out of here, then I passed the bar, and decided getting drunk would be a first good step.”

  “You don’t seem drunk.”

  Al licked his lips like he wished there was a bottle nearby. “I stopped after three.”

  “Why?”

  “Got to thinking about that woman.”

  “You felt guilty and decided to come back and check on her?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Or did you decide you wanted to see if she had anything valuable on her you could hock?”

  Al pushed himself up on his elbows, his head shaking side to side. “No. That wasn’t it. Like you said before. I wanted to make sure she was all right. I may be kind of on a downswing, you know, but I ain’t a thief. Never been a thief.”

  “So what happened when you came back?” Quinn asked.

  “You hear me? I’m not a thief.”

  “I heard you. Tell me what you found when you returned.”

  Al bit his lower lip, then took a deep breath. “I… I could tell someone else had been here. There were lots of footprints in the hallway. They weren’t there before. When I looked down into the room, I didn’t see the woman anywhere. Figured someone had come and gotten her.”

  “So you decided then it was okay to stay? Your boss is still going to find out about the mess.”

  “I know that! I went back upstairs to pack my things. I was sitting around wondering if I could stay the night or should just leave. That’s when I heard you all down here.”

  Quinn stood. “You can get up, but I wouldn’t move around much.”

  Quinn nodded toward Orlando and Nate, then made the shape of a gun with his fingers, and moved his thumb back and forth a couple of times like he was shooting. The look in Al’s eyes told him the caretaker was going to be very cooperative.

  Quinn moved down the hallway so that he was out of Al’s earshot, then pulled out his phone and called Peter.

  “Find anything?” Peter said.

  “Your agent was a woman,” Quinn said.

  “I never told you otherwise.”

  Quinn was silent for a moment. “She was looking in the wrong room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Quinn described the door Orlando found.

  “You think you can get in without tripping any explosives?”

  “There might be a way. But people will know someone’s been there. I won’t be able to cover it up.”

  Peter didn’t even hesitate. “Do it.”

  “Fine,” Quinn said. “Then what would you like me to do with the eyewitness?”

  “What eyewitness?” Peter asked, surprised.

  Quinn smiled to himself. Didn’t expect that, did you, Peter? “Says his name is Al Barker. Said he saw your agent go into the room just before the explosion.”

  “He was there?”

  “Says he left right after.”

  “Describe him.”

  Quinn gave him a quick snapshot of Al’s vitals.

  The tone of Peter’s voice changed from one of surprise and concern to one of controlled anger. “Hold him there. I’m sending someone to pick him up.”

  “All right,” Quinn said. “You can probably get a description of this Monroe guy out of him, but I doubt much more.”

  “Find anything else I should know about?”

  “No. That’s it.”

  Peter hung up.

  “Please,” Al said. “Don’t open it. We’ll die like that lady did.”

  They’d brought Al and Nate with them when they returned to the other doorway. Once Al saw where they were going, he’d tried to stop walking. But Nate’s gun in his back was enough of a prod to keep him moving forward.

  “Do you know what’s behind this?” Quinn asked the caretaker.

  “No,” Al said. “Always been locked. You should leave it that way.”

  “I’m planning on it.”

  Quinn picked up the two-by-four he’d left on the floor earlier.

  “Move him back a few feet,” Quinn said.

  His apprentice nodded, then pulled Al out of Quinn’s swing zone.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Al asked.

  Quinn held on to the middle of the two-by-four with one hand, and wrapped the other hand around the end pointed away from the wall. He pulled it back high behind his head, then swung it forward. Like a battering ram, the two-by-four smashed into the soft spot of the wall.

  There was a loud crack as the plaster and the wooden slats beneath it shattered under the force of the blow.

  “Hey! Stop it,” Al said. “Mr. Monroe is going to be pissed.”

  “According to you, Mr. Monroe is already pissed,” Quinn said. He pulled the two-by-four back, raising it high again. “What’s behind the door?”

  “I don’t know! I swear!”

  Quinn drove the board into the wall again.

  “Ah, man,” Al said. “No one’s supposed to go in there.”

  “What’s inside, Al?”

  Al’s shoulders slumped. “You might as well finish it. I don’t know.”

 
Instead of taking another large swing, Quinn began punching his ram into the wall, over and over, until there was a hole approximately two feet in diameter passing all the way into the room beyond. It was just big enough to stick his head through. He set the board on the ground, then held out his hand to Orlando. She gave him one of the flashlights.

  Letting the light lead the way, he leaned in.

  At first it didn’t look much different from the room Peter’s agent had nearly died in. The notable exception was the floor. Though it was lower than the level of floor in the hallway, it was only by a couple feet, not twenty.

  The wall across the room from the hole appeared to be made of concrete. The exterior wall, he guessed.

  The wall to his right was closest to his position, about five feet away. It appeared to be constructed of the same material as the wall he’d busted through: slats and plaster. Long ago, someone had painted a red stripe at waist level along the entire side, but it was faded now. Given a few more years, it might not even be noticeable.

  Stacked along the far side to the left were several cardboard boxes. Judging from the water stains on the sides and the way they sagged into each other, they appeared to have been there a long time.

  Nothing obvious caught his attention. Certainly nothing that would have warranted locking the door. Perhaps it was another red herring. Perhaps the whole building was nothing but something to throw Peter’s people off the track of whatever it was they were working on.

  Quinn moved the light all the way to the left so he could get a look at the door. He scanned up and down twice, then pulled back out of the hole and straightened up.

  “Anything?” Orlando asked.

  “The door’s wired,” he said. “There’s a block of something on the floor with some wires leading from it and running up the jamb.”

  “So what are they trying to hide?” she asked.

  “Good question. There’re some old boxes stacked against the wall, but that’s about it. And even those don’t look promising.”

  Quinn thought for a moment, then picked up the two-by-four again.

  “This mean we’re going in?” Orlando said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not going in there,” Al said, not hiding an ounce of his fear.

  “Watch him,” Quinn said to Nate, then looked at Al. “Don’t worry. You’re not going anywhere. I want you on the floor right now. Hands behind your back.”