by Meg Gardiner
On level four he swung into the garage, checking to see if Swayze’s BMW was there. He didn’t know what she was up to, and he intended to find out. But the only vehicle on four was a dusty pickup with monster tires and a bull bar on the front, parked near a maintenance room. The door to the maintenance room was open, and inside he saw pipes and heavy equipment. He U-turned and went up to the next level.
There was the BMW. He cruised past, feeling the urge to key it, to write something obscene in German along its gleaming flanks. He stared for a moment. No. Swayze would come later. Right now he had to get to a phone and reach Evan. And he didn’t trust anybody in Argent Tower as far as he could throw it. He had to find a pay phone.
He gunned the truck up to level one and across the garage toward the exit at the far end. There was a gas station a couple of blocks up Wilshire, and it had to have a pay phone. He punched it up the exit ramp, clanking over the one-way spikes, and out onto the street. Behind him the bleak office lights of Argent Tower shone in the dusk like clown teeth. He watched the building recede in the rearview mirror, relief growing with every foot it fell behind him.
Mom and I headed back to the desk. Archie was staring at the CCTV monitor, scratching his nose. He picked up a walkie-talkie.
“Atkins? You there?” he said.
A voice fuzzed back. “Ten-four.”
“Where are you? Need you to check out the camera in the garage.”
“Garage? By myself?”
He was probably thinking of the guard lying in ICU because he’d gone down in the parking elevator to look for Coyote. The phone rang on the desk, a light blinking.
“I’m coming down,” blurted the walkie-talkie. “I’m up in the Sky Bistro; give me a minute.”
Archie picked up the phone. “Yeah, Dr. Swayze. Lady to see you here, name of . . .” He looked at Mom.
“Angie Delaney.”
He repeated it and listened. “Yeah, that’s what she says. Angie.” Now he glanced at me. “You Evan?”
I nodded. My radar was pinging louder now. Needles and pins were tingling along my palms.
With a huge thunk, the sound of a big electrical switch being thrown, the lights went out.
34
The lobby went dark and the air-conditioning shut down. Out on Wilshire, headlights streaked by. Protectively Mom took my hand.
The walkie-talkie fuzzed. “Archie, we got a blackout up here.”
“Here too.”
I pointed at Archie. “Call the police.” I pulled Mom away from the desk. “Let’s go.”
The phone at Archie’s desk rang again. He answered it, saying, “Yeah, Dr. Swayze.”
I tugged Mom toward the door.
Archie called out: “Hey. You ain’t going nowhere.”
I pushed the bar to open the side door out to the plaza, but it didn’t budge. Archie had locked it behind us when we came in. I turned. Through shadow I saw that he was still on the phone with Swayze, nodding intently.
“Let us out.”
Emergency lighting kicked on, spot floodlights casting eerie light from corners and high angles in the atrium. The painters’ scaffold reared toward the mezzanine, bony and reptilian. Deep in the bowels of the building a generator whined into action and skeleton power returned. The closed-circuit television monitors swelled back to life. Archie, uplit in the light emanating from the screen, glared like a spooked frog.
He hung up the phone. “Get away from the door.”
My heart was skipping like a record needle. “Let us out, now.”
He came around the desk. “I said, move away from the door.”
He was coming at us. Incredulous, I said, “Nine-one-one. Three numbers. Jesus, do it.”
His eyes had the dead shine of a sledgehammer. “Nobody’s getting out. Security protocol. We lock down, so that way nobody else gets in.”
“What did Swayze tell you?” I said.
“Not to listen to you. That whatever you’re pulling, not to fall for it. Get away from the door.”
“I’m not trying to let Coyote in. Don’t you understand? If the lights and power have been shut down, that means Coyote is already in.”
He grabbed my arm. Mom jumped at him.
“Hands off my daughter.”
She snatched hold of his hand and pinched. Archie howled and let go of me. Mom and I ran.
The gas station was brightly lit, and outside the minimart there was a pay phone. Jesse pulled up next to it.
He had a bunch of change in the cup holder, enough, he hoped, to call Evan in China Lake. His second call would have to be to the LAPD. He figured he was in trouble up to his armpits. Leaving a murder scene, at the lair of a serial killer—the cops must be going nuts, and he bet everything that Swayze hadn’t called and squared things up for him. He glanced over his shoulder at the office tower. Finding out what her game was, that was item number three tonight.
He stopped still, coins shining in his palm. Argent Tower had gone completely dark.
He started the truck and pulled up to the front of the minimart, pounding the horn. Inside, the clerk stared out from behind the counter, frowning. He waved to her but she shook her head. She wasn’t allowed to come out. He grabbed the disabled placard and held it up so she could see and kept waving to her. Finally, reluctantly, she stepped out from behind the counter and opened the door.
“Call the police,” he said.
He was still trying to explain to her even as he pulled away, screeching out into traffic, thinking of that big dusty pickup with the bull bar parked next to the maintenance room down in the garage. Horns honked around him. He gunned the truck back toward Argent Tower.
We ran into the gloom, past the desk, and across the soaring lobby.
“There’s a back door. I saw it on the TV monitor.” I glanced at Mom. “What did you do to Archie to make him let go?”
“Pressure point. Takes down the meanest unruly drunks, so be glad for stormtrooper stewardesses.”
We turned down a hallway and found ourselves confronted with locked double doors. We turned back. Archie stood in the center of the lobby, waiting for us. I veered past one bank of elevators, aiming for the mezzanine stairs.
The elevators pinged and the doors opened. I skidded to a stop, heart bouncing. A uniformed security guard stepped out, walkie-talkie in hand.
Archie shouted, “Grab them.”
Simultaneously Mom and I blurted, “Assholes.”
The guard was a scrawny guy with fuzz for a mustache. His face pinched and he stalked toward us. Mom pawed through her purse.
“I’ll Mace you,” she said.
I yanked her off in another direction, toward the stairs that led down to the garage. Slamming the bar on the door, I pulled her into the stairwell. Ice-hot emergency spotlights turned the walls white.
We burst out of the stairway one flight down on level one. The garage was empty. Forty yards away, the entrance ramp led out onto Wilshire. We hurried toward it.
“We have to get to a phone. We can’t just leave Jesse here, and if . . .” Catch in my throat. “If he’s hurt bad . . .”
A grinding noise obscured my voice. My eyes bugged.
“Oh, no. Mom, run.”
Up at the top of the entrance ramp, a metal grate was cranking down. We ran. And damn, my mother was in good shape. She pumped her arms, sprinting beside me. The grate clattered farther down, six feet from the ground, five, four.
“Shit,” she yelled.
She lunged toward it, bunching herself to dive and roll for freedom.
“Mom, no!”
We weren’t going to make it. I grabbed her arm, pulling her up short. The grate hit the ground. She sank her fingers into the mesh and tried to haul it back up.
“Dammit.”
She shook it, hot with frustration, and threw her purse to the ground. I looked around. The exit ramp, a hundred yards back at the other side of the garage, was still open. The mesh grate was just beginning to crank down, much more slowly
than this one had. I pulled on Mom’s arm.
“Come on.”
“No.” She resisted. “Look.”
Out on Wilshire a horn honked. “Evan.”
It was Jesse. The truck was in the middle of the street and he was leaning out the window waving. How the hell he got there I had no idea, but the First Cavalry, the Seventh Fleet, or even the Four Freaking Horsemen of the Apocalypse couldn’t have looked more welcome.
I pointed, yelling, “The exit.”
He accelerated away, tires squealing, heading around the corner for the side street. Mom grabbed her purse and we turned and ran. Icy light and shadow slid over us. Above the elevator the security camera glared. I gave it the finger. With both hands.
At the exit ramp the grate continued cranking down. We were about eighty yards away. Ten, twelve seconds if we sprinted like crazy.
“Faster,” I said.
We closed on the ramp. I heard the truck coming. Headlights swelled, the brakes screeched, and it swerved into sight, the back end sliding around, rubber smoking off the tires.
Mom was breathing hard. “Christ, does he always drive like that?”
The truck held at the top of the ramp, blocked by one-way spikes and a sign warning of severe tire damage. Through the glare of the headlights I saw the grate coming down.
We were too far away.
“No,” Mom said. “No.”
For another second the pickup idled outside, and then Jesse gunned it down the ramp. I yanked Mom out of the way.
He hit the spikes and the tires blew. The wheel rims shrieked against the concrete, sparks jumping red, and he slammed on the brakes, skidding down, approaching the grate.
Mom gaped. “What’s he doing? He’ll never get out again.”
He knew. The truck slewed, slowing, the hood and roof sliding under the grate. The noise was ridiculous. The cargo bed slid under the grate and the truck shuddered to a stop. The grate cranked down and hit the tailgate.
And kept cranking. Metal groaned and the back end of the truck began crunching down. Mom and I ran toward it.
Jesse opened his door. “Come on.”
The grate labored down. The back end of the truck moaned under the pressure. The taillights shattered. The latches for the tailgate gave way, it sprang open, and the grate thunked down onto it and kept cranking. The front end of the truck seesawed up. The grate clunked and groaned and, with one last shriek, finally stopped.
The tailgate was bent out of shape, the shocks, tires, and rims shot. The grate had stopped a bit more than a foot off the ground. Jesse hung in the driver’s doorway.
“My insurance agent’s going to kill me,” he said.
Running to the door, I threw my arms around him. “Jesus, this is reason number ninety-nine. Are you okay?”
He braced himself to keep from sliding out of the door. “Fine.”
“I got your text. What happened? How bad are you hurt?”
“I’m not hurt. And I didn’t send you a text.”
We stared at each other. He exhaled.
“Swayze took my phone.”
“Shit.”
“And the gun.” His eyes were hot, his voice urgent. “Coyote’s here. Her truck’s parked outside the maintenance room down on level four.”
Slowly, with dread, we all looked back into the garage.
He lowered his voice. “You have to get out. Swayze used the text messages to draw you here. And she used you to draw Coyote here.”
Mom’s voice dropped to a growl. “The bitch. The lying, shit-eating bitch. She’s the one who outsourced Coyote’s killing spree, isn’t she? And now she wants to get rid of you.”
“And then maybe get rid of Coyote,” Jesse said. “All clean and quiet, here in this empty skyscraper. She may have a cleanup crew on standby, waiting to sanitize it afterward.”
We looked at the grate. There was room for us to slither under it, but there was no way to get the frame of the wheelchair out.
“I’m not leaving you,” I said.
He shook his head. “You have to get yourself and the kid the hell away from here.”
Mom raked her fingers into her hair, looking up the ramp. “If Coyote’s definitely the one who shut down the power, she may have done it so that people would evacuate. She could be waiting for you outside.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “I think she’s going to be up at Primacon.”
Faintly, through layers of concrete, we heard police sirens.
“Thank God,” I said.
Mom put a hand on my arm. “I’ll go up to the lobby and get the cops down here.”
“Not alone,” I said.
She pawed through her purse and handed me a canister of Mace. “If anybody tries to touch you, press this button. They’ll grab their eyes and shriek like little girls.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got pepper spray. And a lighter.” She peered into the bag. “And a screwdriver.”
“Mom.”
“Also a Nutri-Grain bar, but I wouldn’t rely on that.”
“How did you get all that on the plane?”
“Checked it on the tarmac for storage in the hold. You didn’t notice; you were too busy arguing with Eva Braun.” She squeezed my arm. “I’ll stand by the front windows and get their attention. It’s the safest way.”
She looked at Jesse. I knew what she was thinking. The cops were going to storm in with guns drawn, and they didn’t just think Jesse had trashed an apartment; they thought he was Coyote’s accomplice. One of us needed to talk to them and try to convince them he wasn’t dangerous. The LAPD wasn’t known for its bashfulness in apprehending suspects.
“When we come upstairs,” I said, “I want to see Archie and Atkins pepper-sprayed and squealing like beauty queens.”
“On the slightest pretext.”
The siren got louder. “Hurry.”
She ran to the stairwell. Jesse began snapping the wheels on the chair frame. He looked stark and sounded exhausted.
“What was that about?”
“LAPD has a warrant on you. You’d better start thinking about how you’re going to surrender yourself.”
“I was afraid that’s what you meant. How screwed am I?” He tossed his hair out of his eyes, watching my face. “Shit.”
“Don’t worry; we’ll make it go away.” I put my hand on his cheek. “You’ve also got me, and I’m a lot harder to get rid of.”
His gaze was grateful, melancholy, and deeply worried. He pulled me in and hugged me.
“Thank you for showing up,” he said.
For a moment I almost let everything go. I felt tears and grief and gratitude beginning to well. He didn’t know what had happened in China Lake, and all I wanted to do was stay wrapped in his arms and tell him. But once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. I straightened.
“Ditto,” I said.
He pulled the chair close, boosted himself on board, and spun around, exhaling. He put the tire iron on his lap. It and the Mace weren’t the best of weapons, but better than nothing. We crossed the garage to the elevator.
His voice was quiet. “Never thought I’d say this. It’s great to be in this wheelchair.”
I hit the call button and put my hand on his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t feel how shaky I was. The elevator hummed. The call light flicked off and the doors pinged open.
He stared. I clutched his shoulder and covered my mouth with my free hand, willing myself not to scream out loud. I had to keep the shrieking in my head.
Inside the elevator, plumes of blood were sprayed across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Collapsed on the floor, dead from a slash across the throat, lay Archie.
35
Breathless, I reached the top of the stairs. The door led out to the lobby. I gritted my teeth and eased it open a crack.
The lights were flickering as though damaged. It looked like lightning had broken loose inside the atrium. I crept out into shadow. If I could get past the elevator and around
the corner, I’d be able to see the desk, the front windows, and the street. And please, God, let me see Mom waiting for me. My heels racked on the marble floor. I took off my shoes and padded barefoot, hearing every step, every breath.
The parking elevator dinged and the door gaped open. Archie’s exsanguinated body glistened at me. The gash through his throat looked like a red grin. I turned away. Ahead I saw only the lightning flicker. I saw no candy-colored police lights, heard no sirens.
I approached the corner. Peered around.
The lobby was empty.
The crazed lighting and streaking headlights out on the boulevard turned the scene into a sci-fi set. And—oh, no. Out at the curb sat an LAPD black-and-white. I ran across the lobby to the doors. They were still locked. I slammed a fist against one of the plate-glass windows. The cop was getting back in the car and closing the door. He couldn’t hear me. I looked around. The potted plants were all king-sized, too big to lift.
The desk. I sprinted around it and grabbed Archie’s chair.
I froze. Stuffed under the counter was the scrawny security guard, Atkins. His eyes were crossed and his lips were blue. His tongue was oozing from between them. His head lay at an angle like a sock puppet. And beyond being dead, he was undressed. His uniform shirt and pants and hat were gone; he was lying there in his briefs. Pulling the chair behind me on its casters, I ran back to the windows. The police car was still there, but now its headlights were on.
With an almighty roar I swung the chair into the air and flung it at the plate-glass window. I turned my back and shielded my face with my arms.
Thud.
The chair bounced off the glass and clattered to the marble. I gaped. There was no more than a pea-sized crack in the glass. The nonbreakable, tough-as-hell, stupid goddamned new UltraGlas. I was kicking and beating on the window, watching the patrol car signal and pull out into traffic and cruise away out of sight down Wilshire.
“No. No.”
I leaned my head against the glass, straightened, and spun around. Turning my back on this building was as stupid an act as I could imagine. I ran to the desk, leaned over, and grabbed the phone.