by Rob Byrnes
“What was that?”
Nick appeared, with a smile on his face that expressed how much he was enjoying being the small, wiry young guy, and therefore the only one of them who didn’t find the transom an insurmountable obstacle.
“Grant says you should start handing equipment to me through the transom while he goes and finds a handcart.”
Chase thought about that. “Still doesn’t answer the question about how I get out of here.”
Nick turned and conferred with Grant before continuing. “He says he’ll figure that out.”
Chase leaned against June Forteene’s desk and said, mostly to himself, but maybe also to God if He existed, “Perfect. Just perfect.”
Over the next half hour, in the downtime when he wasn’t climbing up on the desk he’d pushed in front of the door in order to hand Nick a computer or monitor or stray cell phone or whatever else he could find, Chase used the last computer in the office to search June’s files. He was afraid it’d be almost impossible to log into her computer, but she’d helpfully left her Rolodex open to a card that could only be her password: REAGANGIRL. Chase was more a Clinton man, but appreciated her devotion.
He found a few copies of Austin Peebles’s dick pic stored on the hard drive and in some network folders, then followed one of her bookmarks to an Internet file storage site and found a few more. He carefully deleted each one, and then deleted them again from the trash directories. Finally, he spent another twenty minutes carefully inspecting his work, going back and forth until he was as confident as possible—which was closer to 90 percent than 100 percent, but it was the best anyone who wasn’t June Forteene could shoot for—that he’d done what needed to be done.
One thing bothered him, though. Based on her bookmarks and a careful review of various passwords and web addresses she tried to hide in her Rolodex, June didn’t seem to have a secure site on the Internet to store files. That didn’t seem right.
Then again, maybe she’d never needed one. Her thoughts were immediately accessible to the world when she blogged. It was reasonable to think that Austin Peebles’s cock shot was the first top-secret file she’d ever stumbled upon.
“Grant wants to know what’s taking so long,” said Nick, once again propped in the transom.
“Tell him I’m updating my Facebook status.” With that, he pulled the power cord from the outlet and walked June’s computer and monitor over to the desk, climbed up, and passed them through the window to Nick. “These are the last pieces. Now…how am I supposed to get out of here?”
He waited a minute while Nick handed off the merchandise to Grant on the other side of the transom and relayed the question, and then Nick was back in the opening.
“He wants to know if you’re absolutely sure you can’t fit through the transom.”
“Tell him I’m more than absolutely sure. And ask him, if he’s so limber, how come he’s not climbing up to the transom to tell me himself?”
“Hey,” said Nick, with the same tiny shrug, one he could carry off while his legs dangled a half-body length above the floor. “Don’t get angry at me. I’m just the messenger.”
“Then tell the guy who I’m angry with to figure a way for me to get out of this fuckin’ office.”
Another minute passed before the young man returned. “Grant says you should give us a ten-minute head start to get the equipment out of here, then open the door and run like hell.”
“That’s the plan?” Chase didn’t like it.
Nick smiled. “That’s his plan. We’ll wait for you at Forty-sixth and Ninth, outside that Thai place.”
Chase wanted to ask which one—there were approximately seventeen Thai restaurants near the intersection of West Forty-sixth Street and Ninth Avenue—but Nick disappeared again and the next noise Chase heard was the sound of a very heavy handcart being wheeled away.
He waited ten minutes, and—when it was time—moved the desk away from the door, took a deep calming breath, and prepared to sprint.
Chase turned the handle and yanked. The door gave maybe a quarter-inch before it stopped and he heard what sounded like dead bolts clicking. When he looked into the narrow gap between the door and frame, he saw that, sure enough, two shiny dead bolts now held the door firmly in place. He was pretty certain those locks hadn’t been locked earlier.
Grant and Nick were gone and Chase was locked inside a fifth-floor office he’d just burgled. With a drugged young man in a red sweater vest sprawled across the floor. And no doubt in one or two or twenty nearby locations, an alarm was now ringing.
He regarded none of that as good.
People called Joseph Enright “Captain” in recognition of his former careers as a Virginia state trooper and chief of security at the Virginia Cathedral of Love, which—unlike the state police—was not an official state institution, but was as close as any private institution had managed to get.
But the mega-church fell on hard times—mega-churches tended to do that when their pastors were charged with several dozen state and federal felonies—and Captain Enright needed a source of income. Fortunately he had skills, foremost among them that he considered himself a top-notch security consultant.
How he ended up living in Manhattan was another story, and one Captain Enright didn’t talk about. Some thought that maybe he was more involved with whatever had happened at the Virginia Cathedral of Love than he wanted people to know. Others thought he might be chasing a dream. And there were even people who suspected Enright enjoyed the relative anonymity afforded in a huge metropolis because he was hiding from darker secrets than any of them could ever guess.
One thing people seldom considered was that he moved to New York because it was where the money was, and people who had constant concerns about security—from terrorists to street thugs—were often all too willing to part with that money.
Enright had heard all the rumors but did nothing to dismiss them or stop their spread. He even encouraged some of the shadier ones. In his line of work, a little mystery was usually a good thing. The G. Gordon Liddy rumor? Bullshit! Would he stop it? Never!
There was little mystery about one aspect of his character, though. Captain Joseph Enright was a slave to his political convictions. When he wasn’t working—and sometimes when he was—he did little but listen to conservative radio hosts. He didn’t need validation for his beliefs—he’d held them since the days pre-dating talk radio—but it was always nice to have new ammunition in his arsenal. Through the radio shows, he discovered right-wing bloggers. And the rest fell into place.
When the Times Square Mosque was first proposed—let the mayor and cowardly power elite of the city argue that the mosque was on Eleventh Avenue and almost a mile from Times Square; that was just their mollycoddling rhetoric—the blogger June Forteene was the first and loudest voice to stir the opposition. Enright attended one of her rallies in the heart of Times Square and was immediately struck by her bravery…so struck by it that he feared for her safety. With her office strategically positioned on Eighth Avenue—equidistant between Times Square and the Times Square Mosque—he believed June’s stance had placed her in danger.
And so he offered to do something he’d never done before. He gave away his professional services for free.
Now the offices of June Forteene Enterprises had state-of-the-art security. If anyone tried to get in without entering the code, backup dead bolts would click into place and an alarm would go off at Enright’s home office. If someone attacked during working hours, she or her staff could press a panic button and an alarm would go off at Enright’s home office. He was even designing her a safe room, and in return he asked for nothing but her personal safety, and maybe an occasional free mention on her blog. He’d once checked out her blog ad prices after the Times Square Mosque issue made her popular and—whew!—better to get a free plug than pay.
June hadn’t needed an alarm to go off to know Enright had given her a good deal and as much peace of mind as anyone had in a crazy city full
of wild-eyed granola-chomping liberals, angry blacks, illegal Guatemalans, militant married homosexuals, godless Muslims, knife-wielding Puerto Ricans, Italian and Russian and Chinese mobsters, inscrutable Hasidim, surly teenagers, the chronically homeless, homeless advocates, and aggressive stroller moms from the Upper West Side and Park Slope.
Ironically, for all that peace of mind, when the alarm first sounded that night Captain Joseph Enright thought the noise was coming from the TV.
It took almost a full minute before he realized the sound was a real alarm. And, checking the panel in his home office, he saw that someone had tried the door at June Forteene Enterprises.
Enright holstered a pistol and prepared to go to work.
Chase was getting too old for this.
Once he made peace with the fact he was locked in and alone, he shoved the desk back in front of the door—figuring if push came to shove it’d buy him another fifteen seconds before the inevitable arrest—and tried the windows. The sheer drop to the ground wasn’t inviting. Then there was the furniture, but it was one thing to hide from Red Sweater Vest, and quite another to hide from the cops or private security or whoever would inevitably show up. The ceiling…No, there was no drop ceiling; it was just flat plaster and pipes.
That left the transom.
The fucking transom.
The opening would have been a tight squeeze for Nick Donovan had he gone all the way through instead of just hanging there, showing off his relative youth and limberness. Chase was taller, thicker, and quite a bit older. There was no way he was going to make it through that small window.
But there were also no other options.
Chase took a deep breath and committed to the only possible escape route he could imagine, as unlikely as it was.
Captain Joseph Enright lived a short five-minute cab ride from June Forteene’s office. Although—since it took him five minutes to hail a cab before starting that ride—he was actually ten minutes out. He wanted to be the first man on the scene, so his plan was to wait until he was a few blocks from his destination before calling 911 to report the attempted break-in.
The cab was getting close. He had tapped the 9 and a 1 on his phone’s keypad when the driver slammed on the brakes. Enright looked out the front windshield and saw two clowns trying to cross mid-block with a handcart overloaded with computers and accessories that kept slipping off and crashing to the asphalt. It would have been funny if they weren’t causing him an inexcusable delay.
“Thees peeples,” said the exasperated driver.
“I hear ya, Omar,” said Enright. The driver’s name wasn’t Omar; it was just something he called everyone who looked like they were born in a place where everyone didn’t look Nordic. “Hit the horn.”
“Beg pardon, there ees fine to honk.”
“If they catch you, I’ll pay it.”
Thus unburdened, the cabdriver happily laid on the horn, and the clowns—shocked at the sudden noise—knocked another computer off the cart.
“Idiots,” Enright muttered.
There was a full-length mirror propped against one wall in the office, and Chase paused—very briefly—to admire his reflection. For his age, the stomach was fairly flat and the body was fairly taut. Sure, everything had been flatter and tauter once, but he was holding it together for a guy in his mid-forties.
He could notice these things because he was standing in a pair of gray—“dove gray,” the box had said—boxer-briefs and nothing else, having tossed the rest of his clothes—pants, shirt, shoes, even socks—over the transom. There had been a moment when he wondered if he’d made a mistake, but the clothes were already gone and there was no turning back. And if he was going to make it through that tiny opening, he couldn’t risk that anything would get snagged…or add as much as an extra millimeter of girth to an already impossibly tight fit.
Chase climbed onto the desk one last time and grasped the frame of the transom, straining his biceps as he hauled his body toward the window.
Enright, still having only dialed 9-1, held his finger over that final “1” and ordered the cabbie to blast his horn again.
The good news, Chase supposed, was that his body was now more out than in. What was left inside was mostly just bare legs, kicking in the air and trying to find traction.
What was outside was his entire upper body and the top half of his bare buttocks.
It was what was stuck in the middle that was the problem.
That is where those dove gray boxer-briefs had snagged on the frame, half-exposing his ass and leaving him dangling upside down over the hallway floor. He tried rocking, but nothing came loose. He tried lunging, but nothing gave.
And this, Chase thought, as blood rushed to his head and made him think the situation was sort of funny, is how my criminal career will end: upside down with my ass half-exposed and dangling out of a…
Then there was the sound of ripping cotton-polyester blend and Chase didn’t have time to finish the thought before his taut—and now naked—body plummeted seven feet to the very hard floor.
Enright charged through the lobby and pressed the elevator call button. He was frustrated, but at least he’d beat the NYPD to the scene of the crime.
When the doors opened, he stepped aside to let a limping man hobble out before boarding. He thought the guy looked too young to be in such rough shape, but then again this wasn’t a pretty city and it especially wasn’t a pretty block.
Enright pushed the button for five.
Chase LaMarca, mostly clothed except for the boxer-briefs he’d had to leave behind, stumbled onto the sidewalk, propped his ass on a fire hydrant, and rued the day he chose a life of crime. It would have been too easy to blame Grant Lambert, but…well, yes, it was Grant’s fault, now that he thought about it.
It had been eighteen years since they both decided on the same night to break into the Groc-O-Rama where Chase worked and—before the next morning dawned—began the relationship that soon made them partners in life and crime. For Chase, the Groc-O-Rama job was only going to be a one-time thing, a way to compensate himself for a lousy job and a worse boss. For Grant, this sort of thing was a career.
To the extent Grant had drawn him in for almost two decades, Chase thought it was fair to lay the blame for this latest debacle at his feet. Grant had turned him into a professional criminal. He thought briefly about how the Church had pushed the concept of free will, but he didn’t like that thought, so he pushed it away and continued to blame everything on Grant Lambert.
He could have done more blaming while he free-willed his sore body to not be so sore, but that’s when Chase caught a glimpse of flickering blue and red lights approaching up Eighth Avenue. The lights were roughly four blocks away; he figured he had about thirty seconds before they pulled up in front of him.
He also figured a middle-aged guy who’d just taken a nasty headfirst, seven-feet fall would look sort of obvious staggering away from the scene of the crime. For that matter, he’d also look obvious propped against the fire hydrant, especially if anyone cared to ask him about missing underwear.
Chase looked around for an escape route.
Captain Enright punched in the security code and tried to open the office door. The dead bolts retracted, but it was blocked. He put his shoulder into it and finally felt movement.
The lights were still on inside the office—on the entire damn floor, for that matter—and as the door slowly opened he saw he was fighting a very heavy desk. An old-school but clever way to block the entrance, he thought, putting his shoulder to the door and shoving with just a bit more force.
Once he’d moved it enough to squeeze through the threshold he took a step inside and stopped. A young man’s body was sprawled across the floor.
Enright checked for a pulse. Reassured he wasn’t dealing with a stiff, he finally called June Forteene.
His call went to voice mail.
“Miss Forteene, this is Enright. It looks like there’s been a break-in at your offi
ce. I can’t say for sure, but this appears to be drug-related, based on the junkie passed out on your floor. Please call me back so we can ascertain if anything is missing.”
He clicked off as a half dozen of New York’s Finest swarmed out of the elevator.
“Who’re you?” asked the first cop who’d managed to squeeze through the door, his hand hovering near his holster.
The captain puffed out his chest. “Enright. I’m the guy who called you.”
Cop One was wary, and that was before he saw the man in the red sweater vest eating industrial carpeting. His eyes shifted back and forth between the alive guy and the maybe-not-alive guy before he decided the alive guy was the one he’d rather deal with. There was less paperwork involved with alive guys.
“Got ID, Enright?”
Enright did and presented it.
Cop Two had now shoved his way through the narrow entrance into the office. He took a glance at Edward Hepplewhite and asked, “Who’s the deceased?”
Enright puffed up again. “He’s not deceased. I got a pulse. Figure he’s a junkie. I saw another one get off the elevator when I arrived. This building must be crawling with them, like it’s a shooting gallery or something.”
“You say you saw another junkie?” asked Cop One, still eyeing Enright’s credentials.
“Affirmative. Limping like a sick old man.”
“Well, was he?”
Enright scoffed. “Nah, he was around forty years of age. White; brown hair with highlights—”
Cop One interrupted. “Kind of old for highlights.”
“True.” Enright got himself back on track. “Five-nine, five-ten, something like that. But stumbling like an old man at forty, well, that’s what drugs’ll do to you.”
Cop Three had now entered the office. He rubbed his nose and gave out a little half laugh. “If you say so.” Then he rubbed his nose again and let out a cackle. Enright thought the cop was being ironic; he wasn’t.