“You realize that if this particular place happens to be their final destination, then we just trapped ourselves, right?” he whispered. “We’d be TARFU.”
This was a valid point, but I wasn’t too concerned. The place had looked unused when we’d briefly checked it out twenty minutes ago. No one had been in here for years. Granted, the door was unlocked, but I still thought the odds were that this particular space wasn’t their target. I swung the heavy door most of the way closed, the same way it had been, leaving just enough of a gap so that I could try to hear what they were doing outside.
A few seconds later, they rounded the corner and started walking in our direction, still talking and joking among themselves. Then, they stopped. I heard the sound of keys jingling about, then the door in the corner space next to us was unlocked and opened.
“They’re next door,” I whispered. “They’re going inside.”
Once they were inside, their voices became muffled, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Through the wall, though, we could hear things being moved and shifted around.
“This is it!” I said with quiet excitement. “This must be their hiding spot.”
The shuffling and scraping sounds went on for twenty minutes or so, then they abruptly stopped. Still listening at the doorway, I listened as they emerged from the space, still jabbering away in Russian. The keys jingling again said they were locking up.
“Hear that? They’re leaving.”
“Good.”
Only they didn’t leave. Instead of the voices and the footsteps fading away, they started getting closer.
“Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh?” Doc whispered. “Uh-oh? They’re coming this way, aren’t they?” I didn’t answer, so he added, “Told ya.”
* * * *
“Dude!” Doc whispered. “Over here!”
I shielded my light with a cupped hand and turned. Doc had found a reasonably well-hidden spot beneath the stairs. Being careful to not trip over anything, I quickly made my way over and ducked in beside him just as the voices outside stopped at our door.
“Ty che, blyad? Which one of you govniuks left the lock off this door?” I recognized the voice immediately: Pavel Laskin.
Suddenly, the door swung wide-open. Doc and I both scrunched down, trying to make ourselves small. We both carry .45 caliber 1911s, and they were drawn at our sides, but if a fistfight down here would have been bad, a gunfight would have been a disaster. The beams of several flashlights swung about the room, probing. Ominously, a red laser dot from a handgun also joined in and danced around the floor and walls.
A few seconds later though, a different voice said, “It’s empty.”
“Of course it’s empty, besslovesnaya oslitsa. What’d you expect?”
After another second, the light from the flashlights vanished as the door swung shut with a loud thump!
We remained in our hiding spaces long enough to make sure they weren’t trying to trick us into thinking they’d left. After several minutes had passed, I got up, shielded my light, and quietly made my way over to the door. I put my ear near the seal and listened. I heard nothing. I crouched down and looked through the small gap under the door, looking for the telltale beam of a flashlight. I waited another five full minutes. There was no light and no sound.
I moved back to the door and gave it a gentle tug. It didn’t move. I pulled again, harder this time, still nothing. I tried a third time, and it still didn’t move. Worse, I think I heard the latch outside rattle when I pulled. It was fully engaged now. Great.
“Dude,” I whispered to Doc. “Good news or bad news.”
“Good news,” Doc replied.
“Okay, good news. I’m pretty sure they’re gone.”
“Bad news?”
“The bad news is that they locked the door behind them. We’re trapped.”
Chapter 12
Doc stepped out of his hiding place, and together, we started trying to figure out how to free ourselves. The first thought, of course, was to simply call Toni and Kenny on our cell phones and have them bring the bolt cutters down, cut the lock off, and let us out. Easy enough. Laskin would wonder what happened to his lock, but that was about it. The problem with that plan was that neither Doc nor I could get a cell signal: no bars to be had.
“Shit!” I whispered. I looked around and shined my light at the stairway. “Let me try up there on the landing.” The wooden stairs were probably built more than one hundred years ago, but they were strong—no creaks, no groans. I reached the landing and now there was one bar (out of five). Better than down below. I tapped the speed dial for Toni’s cell and hit the little orange send button, then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Nothing happened: no dial tone, no ringing, nothing. I tried again and got the same result.
I turned to Doc and shook my head. “Ain’t happenin’, man.”
Doc nodded toward the door behind me on the landing. “Why don’t you try the door?”
I turned and looked, then turned back to him. “Sure. Good idea. We’ll just cruise right on into the middle of the fire department. ‘Hi guys, don’t mind us. We were just trespassing downstairs in your basement, hiding out from some drug dealers who also happened to be trespassing in your basement.’”
“We can’t just stay here,” Doc said.
I turned and tried the door. The knob didn’t even wiggle. I pushed against the door, and it was solidly shut.
I turned back to Doc. “I’m not going to knock on it.”
He smiled. “Okay. Then that means we leave through the window.”
I looked down at the windows. There were two, one on either side of the door. At the Lyon Building, all the basements that were occupied had window openings filled in with brick and mortar. Laskin’s basement was the same way—maybe it was some kind of city code or something. Meanwhile, all the unoccupied basements simply had boards nailed into the window frame. This particular space appeared to follow the same protocol, except instead of using planks, someone had just cut a ratty old piece of plywood to the shape of the opening and nailed that in place.
“Give it a kick,” I said.
Doc nodded. Then he delivered a mighty side kick with a loud boom that should have done the trick. It didn’t. Instead, the soft plywood seemed to bend and absorb the blow, but it immediately sprung back and didn’t loosen, not even a little. The noise had been loud enough, though, that if anyone had been anywhere in the areaway, they’d have surely heard us.
We waited several minutes, making certain that no bad guys came to investigate the noise. Fortunately, they must have been gone, because nobody came. I walked over and examined the window. Nothing. “Hit it again.”
He did, and the result was the same. Nothing.
“Shit!” I said. I looked around and saw the boards lying on the ground. “Maybe we could use one of these things as a battering ram.”
Doc leaned down and felt the boards. “This ratty old crap? We won’t be able to hold it tight enough,” he said. “We’ll run it at the plywood, and when it hits, it’ll knock right out of our hands. If you even try to hold it tight, it’ll fill you full of nasty-ass splinters. And even then, it still won’t work. We need to broaden the impact. We’ve got to hit it with our shoulders. Right about here and here.” He pointed to two spots side by side in the middle of the board. “Both of us at the same time.”
I looked at the plywood and at the window frame. In case it actually worked, the window was just wide enough for both of us to make it through. I nodded my head. “You sure about this?”
“No. You got any better ideas? I suppose sooner or later Sylvia or that chick with the Southern accent will wonder where we went. He paused, then added, “Might take a while, though.”
“Alright. Let’s give it a go.”
“Wait a second,” he said, as he reached down and dragged a sawhorse out of the way. “Let me clear a lane.” He moved a couple of other boards to the side. “Okay,” he said, when he was thr
ough. “We go on three.” We lined up and he counted it off. “One … two … three!” We both hurled ourselves at the plywood and turned sideways at the last second so that our shoulders connected instead of our heads. We slammed into the board with a mighty crunch, but nothing happened except that we bounced off. I nearly fell over backward.
I took a deep breath. “Son of a bitch,” I said, standing up straight and rubbing my shoulder. “This thing is really in there.”
“Yeah, but look, though,” Doc said, leaning toward the window frame. “I thought I felt something give. See there? The board’s not comin’ loose, but the whole frame is starting to come apart.”
I looked where Doc was shining his light and saw that he was right. The part of the frame that the plywood was screwed into was separating from the part that was attached to the brick. A big gap had opened up. “You’re right. That’ll work. Let’s hit it again.”
“On three again,” Doc said. Once more we lined up and he counted off. On three, we threw our shoulders against the plywood with everything we had.
We crashed into the board and the frame blew apart. And then we sailed right through the window opening, holding the plywood board beneath us like a magic carpet, right out into the areaway. Then we hit the ground.
During our short flight, Doc had shifted, and he ended up landing on top of me. In that moment, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about what Peyton Manning must have felt like when Bobby Wagner nailed him on the five-yard line a few days ago. It hurts! So much that I literally couldn’t breathe, let alone move. I mean, I tried to take a breath, and it felt like I landed on a spike that went right through my chest. As soon as I started to inhale, my lungs caught and sent a sharp pain up my spine. I had to stop. I tried again and got the same result. Talk about scary! I started to get a little panicked, but then I found that if I took a tiny, shallow breath, I could do so without the pain. So I did it a whole bunch of times. At least I was alive, but I was certain I’d cracked a rib. Surprisingly, within a minute or two, the pain diminished, and my normal lung function returned. Still, Doc’s weight on top of me made it hard to breathe.
“Dude,” I sputtered. “Get off me.” I tried to push myself up, but I was pinned. “Doc!” I said again. “Move your ass!”
Doc groaned and rolled to his left. “Oh-h-h-h shit, that hurt.”
“Hurt you? You landed on top of me. I couldn’t breathe.”
“Well, let me tell you, you make a shitty cushion, dude.”
“Thanks.” Slowly, the pain in my chest subsided, and I was able to take a full breath. I gathered my wits, lifted my head, and looked around. My light was by my side, shining back toward the gaping hole in the window we’d just crashed through. Doc had dropped his light when he flew through the window. His was lying in the dirt to his left, the beam skewed at a crazy angle in front of us. I noticed it reflecting off something shiny a foot or so in front of me. I reached for it and brought it closer.
Whoa! “Dude—look at this.”
“What?”
“Look!” I handed it to him. “I think it’s a gold nugget—a big one.”
Doc took it from me and examined it. He turned it over, then said, “Where’d it come from?”
“Right over here …” I reached up and started to brush the chalky dirt aside with my hand and, immediately, I found two more nuggets, same size as the first one. “Holy crap! Look at this!”
Enthusiastic now, I scooped more dirt away and then, without warning, the two-foot embankment that had formed against the street-wall footer crumbled away, right on top of us.
I immediately shut my eyes to keep out the dirt and dust that was cascading around me.
“Sorry ’bout that,” I said when it stopped. “You alright?”
I turned to look at Doc, and he started laughing.
“What?”
“You should see yourself,” he said. “You’re covered in that foo-foo dust shit. You look like one of them geisha dolls with the white faces.”
“Thanks, man. I’m okay, too.”
I turned back forward. Doc’s light had gotten partly buried under a few inches of dirt, so I reached down and grabbed mine. I kicked the beam to high and pointed it ahead, eager to see if we’d uncovered any more gold nuggets.
That’s when I saw two eyes staring back at me. Or, more correctly, the dark eye sockets of a human skull, looking right through me.
Chapter 13
Two hours after Doc and I staggered back to Sylvia Lyon’s and called the police, the areaway in front of the empty shop we’d been trapped in looked like a cross between a crime scene and an archaeology dig. A joint team of CSI Unit technicians and King County Medical Examiners systematically worked the scene inside an area they cordoned off. Bright floodlights bathed the whole area in more light than it had seen in 120 years. Four technicians worked with small trowels and paintbrushes. The dirt was dry and soft, and they quickly progressed. Soon, they were able to determine the likely position of the body and outline an area where they believed the rest of the skeletal remains were buried. They dug carefully. Anything that came out of the ground—dirt, stones, whatever—was immediately placed into a fine sieve and carefully sorted by two techs with the ubiquitous blue rubber gloves and little paintbrushes that they used to carefully sweep the dirt away. The work was very thorough, but also very slow and tedious. Despite the early progress, at the rate they were moving, it was going to take hours.
“It’s not like finding an intact body,” Miguel said as we stood by and watched. “They come in their own package, so to speak. I’m sure to these guys, a fresh body is a lot easier. Skeletal remains are different, all scattered about and whatnot.” Miguel had been my third call after Doc and I reached Sylvia’s, after the 9-1-1 call reporting the body and then my call to Toni. He’d joined us about thirty minutes later.
I think Miguel was probably right. I had a short course in forensics at Fort Leonard Wood in conjunction with my initial MP training where they’d taught us mostly introductory stuff—methods, procedures, crime scene management—don’t step here, don’t touch there. Later, I went to Quantico for advanced training, and I got a look at the kind of things the FBI could do. I was impressed—I find it fascinating what a trained expert can discern by studying an old crime scene. The dead really do talk. You’ve just got to know how to listen.
“Hey,” I said to Doc. “You okay?”
He was standing motionless, watching the techs as the skeletal remains emerged bit by bit from the dirt.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
I watched him a moment longer. “It wasn’t them, you know. The Tuar-Tums.”
He turned and looked at me without speaking.
“It wasn’t the Tuar-Tums,” I said again. “There’s a perfectly good explanation for this.”
He looked at me for another second, then turned back to the scene. “You don’t know that.”
* * * *
Fifteen minutes later, Steve arrived. “Got it, boss!” he said, as he walked down the areaway waving a paper. He was accompanied by a man wearing a police vest. The two slowed and edged their way carefully along a “safe” pathway beside the cordoned-off area.
“Doesn’t look much like a warrant,” Miguel said, before Steve reached us.
“That’s because it isn’t.” He reached us and handed Miguel the paper. “It’s better. I was thinking that maybe we can get in and out of the space without Laskin ever knowing we were there. He’ll know about the body here, of course. And that might make him curious or even piss him off, but if we can check out the space Danny found without him knowing about it, we keep our options open, right?”
“Yeah. Good thinking. But how do we do that without a warrant?”
Steve smiled. “Simple. Laskin doesn’t lease this space. Duh.” He turned and nodded toward the space on the corner where we’d heard Laskin and his boys stomping about. “If he’s the tenant, no way he gives permission, and then we need a warrant and he knows abou
t it and all that shit. But since he’s not, all I need is the building owner’s permission. So I found out who the building owner is and called him instead. I explained what was going on. Nice guy. He said this space had been empty for like eighty years—ever since the fire department moved in. No one’s supposed to be in there. He was happy to have us take a look. Faxed his written permission to go inside in like thirty seconds.”
Miguel finished reading the fax and looked at Steve. “Again, good thinking.” Then he turned to me. “Okay, guys. Let’s see what those idiots were up to.”
We walked the few steps over to the padlocked space. Miguel turned to Steve. “Hit it,” followed a second later by, “Where’s the bolt cutters?”
Steve smiled and pointed at the man accompanying him. “He’s the bolt cutter.”
The man stuck his hand out toward Miguel. “Good afternoon, Lieutenant. I’m Carlos Vega, SPD Crime Lab. Steve asked me to come open up the lock.”
Miguel shook hands and then looked at Steve again.
“Think about it, boss,” he said. “We don’t want to cut the lock. Carlos is going to pick it. Then I’ve got a couple of guys coming to fix this window that Danny busted through.”
Miguel smiled. “You know, I don’t care what people say—you’re a pretty smart guy.”
Steve nodded. “Damn right.”
“Okay, Carlos. Let’s see what you got.”
Less than two minutes later, the lock made a click and sprang open. Carlos took the lock off and handed it to Miguel. “There you go, sir. Careful not to lock it until you close up.”
“Thanks,” Miguel said, looking a little awed. He turned to us as Carlos walked away. “I thought padlocks were supposed to be reasonably secure. It would have taken me longer than that to find the key.” He shook his head and pulled the door open. I followed him in as Steve and Doc rounded out the rear. I shined my light from one corner of the room to the other. For a moment, we were all completely speechless: the room was empty. Not just no boards, no pipes, no garbage lying around—even the dirt had been swept away. It was pristine.
M.D. Grayson - Danny Logan 05 - Blue Molly Page 11