The Kill Wire

by Nichole Christoff

  “Bet she loved that,” Mr. Goatee replied.

  I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him, the beep of the bar code scanner, and the scuff of cardboard as he and his compatriot began offloading boxes. I squinted at the shadows shifting across the van’s ceiling, tried to suss out the rhyme or reason of their unloading process. If they plowed directly from the back of the cargo area to the front of the vehicle, they’d find me sooner rather than later between crates and against the cab.

  But the men moved in reverse order, unloading the document boxes from the last stop first. I heard the rattle of their hand-drawn trolley as they wheeled them away. And when the men’s companionable voices retreated, I wriggled out of my cardboard castle. I crept toward the vehicle’s tailgate to take a look around.

  As I’d surmised, we’d driven into some kind of structure. Straight through a rolling overhead door, in fact, and into the enormous bay of a gigantic warehouse. Corrugated steel and concrete met my eye everywhere I looked.

  Along one side of the space, behind reinforced windows trimmed with long louvered blinds, a woman in a short gray skirt sashayed through a wood-paneled office, making notations on an electronic tablet while a man in shirtsleeves and tie flipped through a thick black binder at his desk. In the opposite direction, four more vans, identical to the one where I’d stowed away, had lined up next to mine. The back doors of the second one down stood wide. A dolly waited at its bumper. And draped over the dolly’s handles hung the gray jacket and red baseball cap of a hapless DocuDefense employee.

  I hopped to the ground, scampered between my van and the next. In the back of the open vehicle, men’s voices rumbled. Avoiding the woman’s line of sight and the men altogether, I edged toward the coat and hat.

  In an instant, the garments were in my hands. I beat a hasty retreat, and by the time I stepped from the cover of the vans’ front ends, I already had the clothes on. The jacket, worn over my own, still had to be three sizes too big for me. The name Gary had been embroidered on its chest, and that didn’t fit me at all. Likewise, even with my thick ponytail stuffed beneath it, the cap sat too low on my brow. The gloves I pulled from Gary’s pockets swallowed my hands. But I wasn’t wearing this getup for looks. On the contrary, the gloves would prevent me from leaving my fingerprints on the solid surfaces inside this facility, and the red hat and gray coat would register as absolutely normal if I walked through others’ periphery—and that would enable me to move around the warehouse without drawing unwanted attention.

  At least, that was the idea.

  Putting that idea into action, of course, was something else altogether.

  Like I had a destination in mind, I walked purposefully through the loading bay and into the biggest warehouse I’d ever seen. The building was like a beehive with four levels. And the far end of this level opened onto four corridors. The corridors were honeycombed with more overhead doors. Behind those rolling doors, I suspected storage units housed column after column of document boxes, shuttled here by the vans in the loading bay.

  Hundreds of such vans could store their cargo on this level alone. But at the end of each corridor a freight elevator rose through the structure. When I glanced skyward, I spotted a metal staircase zigzagging between the ground floor and the spare, steel bannisters of levels above. Each level appeared identical to this one. And together, they offered endless storage possibilities.

  In short, I could spend years here—searching and searching—and never find the Ribisi files.

  But even given these odds, I wasn’t willing to back down.

  With a light step, I took to the stairs, careful to keep my boots from ringing on the openwork treads. I circled the perimeter of the second floor to scope out the situation. The various cubicles, I noted, bore bar codes that probably corresponded to the client’s account and specific document boxes, and every unit was locked tight with a low-tech padlock. Time and bolt-cutters would grant me access to each one. But I didn’t have either.

  To make matters worse, I didn’t have a partner. DocuDefense employees, apparently, always worked as a two-person crew, scanning those bar codes and stacking those packing crates on shelves inside the storage units. I avoided plenty of these teams as I made my sweep.

  I took to the stairwell. And that’s when I heard Mr. Goatee and his chatty companion. They were one floor above me.

  I topped the stairs, rounded a corner, and nearly ran into Baby’s boyfriend’s behind. I reversed course at the last second and narrowly avoided the collision. Not that he and Mr. Goatee noticed. They were too busy scanning and stacking the boxes they’d collected from that deep loading dock.

  That meant they’d open the storage unit for the U.S. Attorney’s Office next. If I waited, they’d lead me right to it. But getting into the cubicle would be another matter.

  Taking first things first, I backtracked to the stairwell; feigned interest in the instructions posted beneath the pull for the fire alarm, a hardwired gadget designed to alert the fire department directly; and bided my time. But this proved to be the worst possible place to hang out. Because a man who could’ve given the Incredible Hulk a run for his money lumbered down the stairs to speak to me.

  “Hey, you got any Tylenol on you?” he asked, frowning at my black-and-blue eye. “My back’s killing me.”

  I removed a glove, reached into my pants pocket to withdraw Dr. Ekhardt’s envelope, and shook two Motrin into the man’s palm.

  “Knock yourself out,” I said.

  The guy smiled in relief.

  “Thanks…” His eye searched out the name embroidered on my coat. “Uh…Gary? I appreciate it.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I replied.

  And I hoped his subconscious would follow that directive. But the Hulk frowned as he continued down the steel stairwell. And I wondered if I’d be allowed to continue my little reconnaissance operation—or if he was on his way to blow the whistle.

  Marc wouldn’t be thrilled if I got arrested, but he’d get over it. Barrett, on the other hand, might not. Without even trying, I remembered his profound disappointment when I’d run afoul of local law enforcement in Mississippi—and had had to put in an appearance in the PD’s interview room with my lawyer by my side. For a good cause, I’d done what I’d thought was necessary. And that including breaking the law.

  Now here I was, in DocuDefense, breaking the law again. So what kind of person did that make me? I didn’t want to know the answer.

  I shoved the thought aside as Baby’s main man and Mr. Goatee appeared two stories below me, pushing their trolley across the loading bay floor to their van. They scanned the bar codes on the boxes from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, loaded them up, and hauled them to the elevator. And when they disembarked on the top floor, I jogged up the stairs to shadow them.

  In the last corridor, I found them stacking those boxes on racks in the largest storage unit I’d seen yet. Labeled on the jamb with the code 649137-USAO-00000, the space had to be for the U.S. Attorney’s Colorado Springs branch office—and it could’ve swallowed up Marc’s makeshift apartment at Hearth’n’Home with room to spare. And the place was packed from floor to high ceiling with cardboard crates.

  Faced with so many files, my heart sank. I had no idea where I’d even begin to look for documents detailing Lucy Ribisi’s new life. But I had a more immediate problem. I had to get into the unit first. Of course, human nature had helped me so far. And after all I’d seen here at DocuDefense, I was positive it wouldn’t be long until it helped me again.

  We human beings like to think we’re at the top of the food chain, but we still fall prey now and then. Sometimes, we’re targets of cunning. Other times, we’re victims of circumstance. One particular situation can catch us every time. Sadly, we tend to walk into that situation ourselves.

  It’s called a false sense of security.

  And from all I’d seen, the men and women at DocuDefense certainly suffered from it.

  Thanks to the gated, chain-link fenc
e outside, DocuDefense’s drivers didn’t sweat leaving their vans standing open in the company’s enclosed loading bay. And since Gary worked in plain sight of the head honcho’s window, he didn’t bother to keep close tabs on his uniform. Not even the Incredible Hulk had reported me to his manager. They all believed in the security of their environment because they’d all been taught to believe in it. By their very actions, however, they made it unsecure.

  So, it came as no surprise to me that when Baby’s fella and Mr. Goatee went to fetch the second load of paperwork they’d hauled from Kelly McKenna’s office, they closed the overhead door to 649137-USAO-00000 and left it unlocked. But why shouldn’t they? Within DocuDefense’s perimeter, there were no threats to their clients’ secrecy.

  Unless, of course, you counted me.

  The moment the men boarded the freight elevator at the end of the hallway, I got my rear in gear, heaved the storage unit’s rolling door skyward, and shoved it down once I was on the wrong side of it. Light from the corridor spilled over the top of corrugated walls, creating a kind of moonlight effect that highlighted riveted metal racks, crammed with file boxes, which reached for the ceiling at least sixteen feet above me. Instinct nudged me to seek out the darkest, dustiest corner. There, I scooted the lowest boxes to the lip of their shelving, wriggled into the cold crevice behind them, and settled in to wait.

  And I didn’t have to wait long.

  Chapter 18

  The zinging ring of a bell reverberated through the building like an electric current, vibrating through the shelf where I lay and signaling the end of the workday. All around me, I could hear DocuDefense’s employees boost the rest of their boxes onto their shelves, close up each storage unit with the screech of rolling overhead doors, lock up every cubicle, and head out. And when the tramp of footfalls and whir of the elevators’ cables faded—and the thin stream of light edging the top of the walls flickered from white to pale blue for the night—I knew I was blissfully alone.

  I crawled from my hiding place to knock the dust and dirt off my trousers and Gary’s jacket. The crux of the wall behind the bottom shelf had smelled like insecticide, and it was little wonder. My knees and the heels of my gloved hands had crunched across things that sounded an awful lot like cockroach carapaces.

  Relatively bug free, I fished my cellphone from my pocket and fired it up to find that Barrett had called me during the course of the afternoon. He’d left a voicemail message for me. Marc had done the same—twenty-three times.

  But both men would have to wait.

  Because given the circumstances, I didn’t think Elena could.

  Marc had said Elena hadn’t merely been on the team who’d prosecuted the infamous Maximillian Ribisi. Her legal brain had actually worked out the deal that had enabled Ribisi’s wife, Lucy, to testify against him and send him to prison. In exchange, Lucy and her daughter had been granted new identities and new lives. But if Marley’s story about a chance encounter in the Miner’s Pick was even partly true, Lucy’s involvement with Elena apparently hadn’t ended after Ribisi’s trial. As a result, Elena might not be on the run because she’d burned one of her Adderall contacts. Rather, Elena might be in danger because someone else had seen her and Lucy together. And if that someone had reported as much to Ribisi, he might be looking to avenge himself on the women he believed had exposed him and ruined his life, even as he sat in jail.

  To protect Elena, and spare Cody serious consequences, I needed to find her.

  But with every lead a dead end, finding Elena might mean finding Lucy first.

  Phone in hand, I used its glow to scour the shelves for boxes with documents dating back seven years to Ribisi’s trial. In the cavernous storage unit, the hunt took thirty-seven minutes. At last, on a shelf well above my head, I found eight boxes chock-full of files about the case.

  I grabbed the first one, dragged it from its resting place. It hit the concrete floor with a puff of dust that made me cough. Fumbling through the folders wearing Gary’s heavy gloves was no easy task, but I did it—and learned absolutely nothing about Lucy Ribisi’s new life, only her old one.

  According to the transcript of the prosecutor’s opening statement, Lucy Ribisi, born Lucinda Ann Hoffman, had hit the bricks at the age of sixteen, leaving her small town and extended family when her uncles decreed her to be the next bride of the leader of their religious sect. Two months later, she turned up in Las Vegas, where, by lying about her age, she secured a waitressing job at a seedy bar far, far from the glittering Strip. But little Lucy Hoffman didn’t leave well enough alone. She had goals. She enrolled in the local high school, attended classes on most days after serving liquor and loaded potato skins half the night, and through her own tenacity, she managed to graduate by the hair of her chinny chin chin.

  With her high school diploma in her hot little hands, and after filling in for the bar’s drunken short-order cook more times than she could count, Lucy realized she had a knack with pots and pans. She sought out a commercial cooking class at the local community college and leveraged that to get a better job as a demi chef at one of the better-known casinos. By the time her twentieth birthday dawned, she’d earned her associate’s degree, blossomed in the kitchen of a Vegas celebrity chef, and begun saving her pennies so she could open her own restaurant one day.

  And then she met Maximillian Ribisi.

  At first, Ribisi seemed like the other highfalutin high rollers Lucy and the chef’s staff often catered to. But when the big man himself fell in love with the delicate sauce on his ravioli, and sent his compliments to the chef, the chef ended up reluctantly admitting that Lucy had whipped up the dish. And after Ribisi invited her to share a glass of wine with him at his table, a helicopter ride over Hoover Dam the next day, and a trip to Paris the day after that, Lucy fell in love with him in return.

  At the time, had Lucy known Ribisi was one of the bad guys? That he was a world-class criminal from an East Coast crime family? Or that he was the most brutal of the batch? The prosecutor’s opening statement had skimmed over the possibility. And I was willing to give Lucy the benefit of the doubt.

  As the trial—and my snooping through the case documents—progressed, Lucy’s name grew harder to find. She’d cut her deal with Elena, supplied evidence as she’d sworn to do, and seemingly faded from the record. I pawed through six more boxes looking for her, to no avail. Fed up and frustrated, I finally came across something curious in the last box. I latched onto it, not because of what it said, but because of what it didn’t say.

  Heavily redacted, with wide bands of black ink blotting out names and places, a scant memo to then-AUSA Sam Brewer from a U.S. marshal named Tyler Douglas noted that two subjects in protective custody had been transferred the day after Max Ribisi’s sentencing. And that no further communications would be forthcoming. Those subjects, I figured, had to be Lucy Ribisi and her five-year-old daughter.

  Gleefully, I punched up Marc’s number.

  He answered on the first ring.

  “Damn it, Jamie, I’ve been worried sick—”

  “Then I’ll take your temperature when I see you. Where are you now?”

  “I’m parked between some tae kwon do studio and a stonemason’s workshop roughly across the road from you. We’re in a light-industrial complex on the edge of the city. Or didn’t you know that?”

  Scholars could fill volumes with what I didn’t know.

  But I’d found a lead on Lucy, and that was all that mattered.

  “How far,” I asked Marc, “are you from my location?”

  “Out the main gate, turn left. I’m just south of your warehouse.”

  “Great. When you hear a commotion, don’t come to me. I’ll come to you.”

  “What kind of commotion? What are you going to do?”

  “You’ll know it when you hear it.”

  I hung up on Marc before he could argue, photographed the memo with my phone, and shoved the document back into its box. With weary arms, I hefted all eight car
dboard crates onto their shelf. If anyone checked out this storage unit, a careful eye would easily see I’d ransacked these boxes and none of the others, but I didn’t need to make it simple for whoever might come to call by leaving them in the middle of the floor.

  With the light of my phone to guide me, I crossed quickly to the overhead door. Baby’s main man and Mr. Goatee had rolled it closed—and unfortunately, they’d locked it. That left me with just one alternative.

  Squinting into the semidarkness above me, I could make out the spigots of the warehouse’s sprinkler system. Every few feet, the heads protruded through the fiberglass tiles of a drop ceiling. I targeted the sprinkler head closest to the door, and moving to the metal shelving near it, I grabbed the crossed reinforcement bars shoring up its end.

  And then I began to climb.

  Clinging to the highest shelf with a fearsome grip, I reached up with one hand and pushed against a tile. It lifted in its suspension track, revealing a pair of pipes that fed the sprinklers. Running in tandem, like Christmas lights in a parallel circuit, the pipes would supply water to every sprinkler head on this level—even if one got damaged or proved defective. For me, however, these tandem pipes would provide an evacuation route. Because shimmying through the crawl space above them would carry me past the corrugated wall and out of the locked storage unit.

  Straining, I manage to grab one of the pipes firmly. I gave it a shake. The thing had enough flex to bow.

  “Not good,” I told myself.

  If the pipe couldn’t support my weight—and if I fell from the ceiling to crash to the concrete floor sixteen feet below—I could break bones or rupture organs. Either way, I’d probably spill enough blood to set me back several pints. And being all alone in this facility at this hour, I could die before anyone opened the overhead door again.

  But the pipes were only a foot apart.

  If I treated them like monkey bars on the playground—and divided my body weight between them—I just might have a chance.