by Eric Beetner
“Listen,” she read his name tag. “Mackendrick, can we talk in private?”
He paused, a little wave of excitement passed over his face. He’d become necessary to a DEA case, in his own tiny way. A lobby security guard gets so few chances to be relevant. A keeper of a sign-in sheet that gets filed and then shredded without anyone ever looking at it. A man with his name on his chest for all to see and yet none of the people who walk past him every morning and afternoon know his name. A young man with Brad Pitt-good looks forced to put on a polyester rent-a-cop suit and ergonomic shoes, the most dangerous thing on his utility belt a moderately heavy flashlight.
So did Brad Lite jump at the chance to be in-the-know on the hot case Lucas and the DEA agent were working? You bet he did.
Making it seem like his idea, Sam steered him into the stairwell behind the security desk. She tried hard to disguise her limp. I don’t think he noticed.
I started moving quickly across the tree-lined courtyard. I stepped over another plaque with a supreme court justice quote:
“A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi…has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.”
Thurgood Marshall.
I kept the gun tucked in my waistband, my shirt untucked over it. Quickly entering the lobby of a government building, sight of a recent mass poisoning, with a gun out seemed like a bad idea.
Turns out it didn’t matter.
Sam spoke low and Brad leaned in, ready to finally be on the right side of a need-to-know basis. “Mackendrick, can I trust you?” she said.
“Of course. We’re all on the same team here.” He pointed to the badge on his chest and I wanted to laugh. I’m surprised she didn’t.
Could be she was too busy unfolding the knife. Before he knew what hit him, his throat split open and his precious badge dripped with blood.
I stopped as I reached the bank of glass doors. I turned and moved away from the glass, out of view from the rest of the lobby.
Sam eased Brad’s body down to the floor. No noisy body falls for her. Goes against the plan. And she’d worked a good one. She’d made it inside. Behind enemy lines. Lucas’s office, origin of the email, lay a mere six floors of back stairwell ahead.
And there I stood, trapped on the outside.
BENCH WARMER
If there’s one thing you learn working the drug game—doing stakeouts, undercover ops, waiting for warrants—it’s patience. If you don’t have any, you don’t make it as an agent.
Right then, I didn’t have any.
I knew the smart play said to hang outside, watch on the video screen in my brain and hope for the best. If I entered the lobby there is no way I’d be able to get to the elevators with no ID and a gun in my belt.
So first things first—ditch the gun. Hmmm, seemed like a dumb idea. I’d been working with nothing but dumb ideas for nearly three days now and I wasn’t keen on trying out another one. No, I needed everyone to look the other way. I needed to give them something to look at. Luckily I had something.
Nine times out of ten it would be my tits. Great built-in distractors we’ve got. This situation called for something to take eyes off me. Still, boobs in general are the greatest “hey, don’t look over there, look over here,” distraction ever invented. Another day perhaps.
I went through the glass doors of the lobby with Sam’s feet pounding in my head as she banged up the stairs, passing the third floor as best I could tell. Her footsteps an uneven beat as she limped up to the sixth floor.
I walked up to the security desk. “Can I talk to Mackendrick, please?’
An older black man behind the bank of monitors with Gifford on his name tag looked over his shoulder. “He’s not around right now.”
The other man at the metal detectors held his phone in both hands, typing with his thumbs. Two civilians were the only other people in the lobby and they waited over by a cluster of potted plants, nervously going over documents of some kind.
“Didn’t I just see him go back there with a woman?” I asked.
Gifford turned over his shoulder again to look. The door to the stairwell had closed behind them. It couldn’t have been more then ten feet away, but he seemed disinclined to get up and check for me.
“I think he may have.”
“Can you check for me, please. I need to speak with him.”
“Can I ask what this is regarding?”
“It’s personal,” I said. In my head I screamed: Open the fucking door and find his bloody body already!
Slow as a DMV worker Gifford spun his swivel chair, scooted twice with his feet for the absolute minimum of walking effort and stood up. I eyed the pair of walk-through metal detectors. They stood like two futuristic doorways, plunked down in the marbled lobby of a stately building like monuments to paranoia. So unsubstantial they didn’t feel like they would help anything if the shit really hit the fan, and they wouldn’t. If someone really has a gun or a bomb and wants to do some damage, oh they will do some damage. Metal detectors be damned.
The stairwell door opened and the hit on something. Gifford looked down and then recoiled, the door slamming shut behind him on automatic hinges.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said. The man at the metal detectors perked up.
“What is it?”
“It’s Chad.” (so close)
The man from the metal detectors heard the panic in his coworker’s voice and unmanned his station. Perfect.
I stole a glance at Sam’s view. I saw the stenciled number 6 on the wall as she pushed open the stairwell door to enter Lucas’s floor. Her breathing came heavy and she paused to catch up. She still had an insurmountable lead over me. My best bet would be for the past few days to have put Lucas on high alert and his heightened senses would hear her coming.
Both security guards stood by the door now, each daring the other to open it like some haunted house. Gifford’s stricken look made the new guy very timid about what lay behind the door.
I had to move and risk them seeing me. I doubted they would both ever be behind the door fully anyhow. I stepped up to the metal detectors, pulled the gun from behind my back and threw it in the air, lofting it high up toward the sixteen foot ceilings of the lobby, well over the rectangle door shapes of the metal detectors. Good thing I’m not a terrorist—this half of me anyway—because making it inside came way too easy.
I caught my gun like an outfielder. Don’t ask for names, I’m not a baseball gal. Daddy’s biggest disappointment. What did he want from me, it’s fucking boring. And when you’re a girl all they let you play is softball anyway. What a slap in the tits. Could you get a more in-your-face example of the world thinking girls are weaker. Here, honey, let me take that nasty ball away from you. You need to play with a soft ball. And if you’re having your period, you can sit on the bench.
But, now is not the time for that. Sorry.
I hit the elevator button as I stuffed the gun back in my waistband. Upstairs Sam walked through the yellow-taped office space. Nothing had been moved. Dozens of taped outlines of bodies decorated the carpet. Chairs remained overturned, soda cans spilled. She moved slow across the littered battlefield advancing toward Lucas’s office.
My elevator arrived. I got on and pushed six. Then waited. Whoever invented the elevator had no sense of urgency.
Sam reached the hallway outside Lucas’s office. I shut my eyes and held my breath. She moved slowly forward and as she came around the door frame we both saw his office stood empty, his computer gone. I exhaled.
She moved into his office as I started going up. She pushed around some papers but the computer was gone, not merely hidden away. The eight by eight room offered no place to hide anything much bigger than an envelope.
2nd floor. 3rd floor.
She looked at the phone on his desk. The digital d
isplay listed several options. Speaker phone, conference call, page all. A small paper tab listed the extension number—686—and then the letters FWD.
We both got it at the same time. Forward. Shit. Lucas and his compulsive organization. She snatched up the phone as I passed the fourth floor. She hit a button and another extension number came up—145.
Again, we both got it together. I quickly slapped the 5 button as we reached the stop. The elevator caught and slowed. The doors opened. I got out, turned and pulled the emergency stop. The elevator gaped with doors open, not moving. I turned for the stairs.
I knew where to find Lucas.
STAIR MASTER
I headed down—for the basement. The records room and case file study area. Lucas loved it down there. Said it reminded him of law school. Also a good place to hide out when you’re office is a sealed crime scene.
Speaking of…
“Can I help you?” The voice startled me and Sam. For a second I paused on the steps, thinking someone was in the stairwell with me. Then I let Sam’s view overlay mine and I saw the security guard in the doorway to Lucas’s office. A tall black man, athletic, one hand on the gun perched on his hip. I couldn’t read his name tag from how she looked at him.
“Mr. Royston has relocated to the basement, right?”
Told you she knew.
“You can’t be up here, ma’am. This area is cordoned off.”
“Sorry. Thank you.” She went to leave the office. The guard stopped her.
“Did you sign in? Can I see some ID?”
The sound was hard to hear with my feet pounding in the concrete stairwell and the image came out all shaky from my own bobbing head as I took the steps fast and spun around the tight turns of the stairs. I saw enough.
Sam moved damn fast with that knife. She brought it up quick and caught him under his chin. The blade stuffed into him and he leaned back, taking her with him as she gripped the knife fiercely. His hand reached for his gun. She took her hands off the knife and slapped at his arm, getting two bloody palms around his wrist as he tried to muscle the gun out of his holster. The knife stuck out from under his chin, the point going straight up, splitting his tongue and sticking firmly in the roof of his mouth. He drooled blood from the jaws he could not shut.
She pushed against his gun arm and rammed him against the door jamb again. He gargled out a yell and thrashed side to side like a beached shark.
I nearly slipped and had to slow down, partly to catch my breath and partly because what I saw though her eyes disturbed me to the point it made running hard.
She clamped down a hand over the gun then lifted her other hand up and yanked down hard on the knife. A spew of blood came out of his mouth as he tipped forward once the knife came out. He let loose a ragged scream and the way he leaned and spewed blood he looked like a drunk at the end of a very long night.
His night really was almost at an end.
She thrust forward with the knife and caught his neck as he tilted forward, stabbing the blade down between his collarbone. She pulled it back out and swung down to catch him in the back of the neck. I felt the muscles in my arm tense and release with each stab.
When the knife dug into the thick muscles and clustered nerves of his neck, the guard took a dive for the floor. The electricity had been cut. Lights out.
I resumed my run. I felt my head go hot. She looked in, saw the stairwell, the downward slope of the stairs. She knew where I was headed and knew I’d get there first.
We’d see if that did me or Lucas any good.
COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE.
The case files library is basically exactly what you’d expect from the name. Banished to the basement it’s where files go to die, or at least wait until some law school interns spend the next hundred years scanning all the papers into a hard drive…that no one will ever look at.
I think there used to be a librarian, but she died and no one ever thought to replace her, or maybe no one else wanted the job. Spending your days in a windowless basement surrounded by the molding case files of criminals and miscreants? Who wouldn’t want that job?
I banged out of the stairwell into the florescent lit hallway. The tile flooring hadn’t been changed since the 50s and there were two white porcelain drinking fountains mounted on the wall. Indents in the layers of faded mint paint made me think there used to be signs mounted above. One for Whites and one for Coloreds, perhaps? Yeah, the place was out of date.
Heavy double doors kept the records safe and sound from fire. The one time I came down here with Lucas I remarked that it would be a great place to sneak away for noontime sex and he told me I wasn’t the first person to think of it. After my sprint down the stairs, I’d come prepared, heavy breathing already.
The trick here would be finding Lucas without two things happening: Sam seeing exactly where I found him and him thinking I’m her and shooting me or hitting me or something else painful. I doubted he started carrying a gun, but if anything would drive him to it, this day would.
I pushed open the doors and they squeaked haunted house loud. Warm, stale air greeted me and I felt the same shudder you feel when you enter an old person’s home. The kind of place where someone’s been getting nothing but meals on wheels for ten years and the laundry never gets done. I whisper/yelled for him. “Lucas? It’s me.”
Me could be either of us. She could be lying. Why couldn’t she be a good evil twin and speak with an accent or something?
In front of me stood rows of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. Banker’s boxes with case file numbers filled every inch of shelving. They disappeared in front of me to a vanishing point and spread out on either side of me. I felt the way I did when I got lost in a corn maze at ten years old. Spaced throughout the stacks were heavy wood tables, placed there so you wouldn’t have to carry the boxes too far to get what you needed out of them. I bet that’s where the people did their nooners. On top, under, didn’t matter. The place felt more mausoleum than library.
I picked a direction and started walking. I kept my eyes down on the floor, trying to catch as much as I could in my periphery without letting her see anything telling. The hot spot in my head burned again. I tried to force her out the way she gave me the bounce earlier, but she seemed determined. I gave her nothing, even put my hands up like horse blinders on the sides of my temples.
“Lucas,” I repeated every few feet, hoping to scare him out of the stacks like a mouse.
Deeper and deeper I went in to the maze, expecting to see skeletons from law clerks who hadn’t made it out. Behind me I heard the double doors open. Sam had arrived.
I crouched lower and picked up the pace. I saw some of the boxes on the bottom row deep into the maze. The dates on them were from the 1970s. I listened hard for signs of Lucas, and for her footsteps. I heard nothing. I stopped moving, closed my eyes and didn’t make any effort to see what she saw. Only concentrated on the sound.
A background buzzing of the florescent tubes, the slow movement of warm recycled air, the only thing keeping us alive down there even though it did nothing to alleviate the stuffiness. No signs of life. Everything electronic and inert.
I’d nearly forgotten that’s exactly what I’d been looking for.
The lights overhead all sounded the same, the air moved all around me from no discernible direction. The other high hum came from a single source. A tiny fan on the back of a computer, working overtime in the stagnant air.
I kept my eyes down, seeing nothing but my shoes on outdated tile from the Eisenhower era. I let the sound guide me. I shifted to a full-on whisper.
“Lucas. Lucas.”
I came to the end of a row of shelves, the boxes gone yellow with age. Lucas had a nest of wires and a mini replica of his upstairs office built on top of a functional post-war slab-of-oak reading table. I thought fire hazard when I saw all his equipment plugged into a single two-prong wall socket with extensions and plug trees daisy chain
ed together.
Lucas sat still, as if maybe I wouldn’t see him. I looked up. I had no choice. She would see but she couldn’t know where in the stacks we were.
The look in his eyes frightened me. He didn’t know if I had come to save him or kill him. He honestly didn’t know who stood before him.
“Lucas, it’s me,” I said in my calmest voice.
He sucked in a breath to say something, but held it in.
“She’s here too,” I said. “We need to go.”
He didn’t move. “My sister?” he asked.
“At the hospital. She’s going to be okay,” I said. Guess my brain found it okay to lie these days. I might have wanted to believe it, but wouldn’t swear to it on anyone’s life.
“And you’re…?” he squinted his eyes, trying to look deeper into me. To decide if I could be trusted. If I was the one he used to love.
“It’s me,” I said.
I heard a footfall behind me. I didn’t have time for Lucas to make an impossible decision. I stepped forward to the table. He backed away a single step. It broke my heart.
“Get down. She’s coming.” I put a hand on his arm and pulled him down with me under the table. The thick wood would serve us well in an earthquake or a tornado. Against the unnatural disaster I called Sam? Not a chance. We needed to get out, to loop around this crazy corn maze and beat her out of here.
“Can you get us out of here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, but the look in his eye still waited for a knife in his back.
“Can you lead me if I close my eyes? She’ll see if I don’t.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” I put my hand over his. His skin pressed into mine, cold and clammy. The tiny hairs all stood on end. Something about me touching him, though, he softened. The small act of kindness gave him peace. Lucas exhaled and a thick cloud of stress went with it.