(1995) Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  “Sounds good.”

  “You can describe things to me and ask, once you’re there.”

  “I missed that last bit,” Dart said, finally arriving at the bottom of the stairs. Ginny repeated herself. “Okay,” Dart said, cowering from the time pressure. “I’m on the basement level. What room am I looking for?”

  “Data Processing,” Ginny replied.

  Dart reevaluated his situation. There were, at the very minimum, three guards after him. Proctor, and anyone accompanying him, had to be thrown into the mix. That made four or more after him. They had lost track of him. With Proctor running things, Dart felt certain they would do the smart thing: conduct a floor-by-floor search. At the same time, at least one guard would watch the computer, monitoring the system to see if Dart attempted to use a security card to gain access anywhere. This person would guide the search team.

  The voice of the lookout scratched into Dart’s ear like fingernails down a blackboard. “They’re taking their time, but they’re working their way down. I’m showing them at the second floor.”

  By going to the basement level he had, in all likelihood, trapped himself.

  He ran down the hall where, instead of the cryptic color system, the doors actually carried titles. Several were marked SERVICE PERSONNEL ONLY. Another read FOOD SERVICES. He passed two bathrooms. Something marked HIGH VOLTAGE DO NOT ENTER.

  Dart turned right down a long corridor. The basement was a rabbit warren. He passed a door marked TECHNICAL SERVICES.

  “Ginny?” he said into the air.

  “Right here.” She spoke into his ear.

  “I’m looking at Technical Services. Haven’t seen anything like Data Processing.”

  “Basement level?”

  “Right.”

  “Security?”

  “You bet,” Dart confirmed, wondering how he could get inside.

  “Check the crack below the door,” Ginny advised. “The gap at the bottom of the door. Cold air sinks,” he said. “The computer room will be real cold.”

  Dart dropped to his knees and poked his fingers through. “You got it. Real cold.”

  “Let’s give it a try,” she said.

  Dart stood back up, his knees killing him. He stared at the door in confusion. It was a heavy steel door, and it was locked. He pulled his gun out of his holster. It was all he could think of.

  “Whatever you do,” Ginny said, as if standing there, “don’t break that door down.”

  “I have to,” Dart replied.

  “You can’t. Same reason we can’t have your bad boys breaking in,” she said, referring to the ERT team. “That kind of illegal access will cause the mainframe to suspend. The only person able to undo that is the SYSOP himself.”

  “Shit,” Dart replied. He glanced up: acoustic panels. “Hold on,” Dart said.

  “You need a security card,” Ginny advised. “It’s the only way. Trust me.”

  “Maybe not,” Dart corrected, heading back down the hallway toward the bathrooms that he had passed.

  The lookout interrupted and said, “They’re descending fire stairs, north and south, approaching level one.”

  Dart pushed into the mens room and flicked on the light. He glanced up: acoustical panels hung in a suspended frame. He ran back into the hallway, down to the intersection of the other corridor and made a mental note of distance and angle. He returned to the bathroom, pulled himself up onto the sink’s countertop, and pushed up on the panel. It moved out of his way.

  “I’m going for it,” Dart announced.

  “Going for what?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Securing a hand-hold on a pipe within the area above the suspended ceiling, Dart hooked a foot over the stall partition and pulled himself up and through. The dead space occupied an area about four feet high—above Dart was the support structure for the first floor; below, the suspended ceiling through which he had just entered. The area was claustrophobic and vast; hallway ceiling fixtures threw enough light around for Dart to see a series of black plastic plumbing pipes and heavy steel sprinkler pipes that were suspended from the overhead I-beams. He took the time to replace the acoustic panel he had come through to hide the way he had come. He hoped the security team would pass up the men’s room and continue their search elsewhere on another level.

  The flimsy false ceiling, supported by strands of twisted wire, was not strong enough to hold him. Dart, flat on his stomach, distributed his weight between a plumbing pipe, where he hooked his left leg, and a fire sprinkler holding his right, his fingers groping for purchase on the overhead I-beams. If he slipped and fell, he would crash down into whatever room and unseen hazards lay below.

  The parallel pipes were his only support, and he had to stay with them despite the fact that they appeared to follow the direction of the hallway—east, west—rather than the angle that Dart had projected to reach the computer room. He crawled carefully, all the while attempting to maintain his bearings. The pipes and conduit were suspended by metal plumber’s “tape” and lengths of wire, requiring Dart to pause and navigate around them, reaching around each obstruction, taking hold of one pipe and shifting his weight onto the opposing one.

  Dart suddenly realized he heard only static in his left ear. Either the radio had gone dead or the combination of the sublevel basement and the abundance of metal was causing interference. If he wasn’t hearing them, then they weren’t hearing him. He had to hurry. If the command van lost track of him for too long they would order the ERT team to hit the building, and according to Ginny such unauthorized entry would shut down the mainframe, rendering it inaccessible, the files lost.

  A series of lights came on, immediately to Dart’s left, blinding him. At the same time, he heard the frantic footfalls of people running immediately below him—close enough to touch. Dart remained still as two men stopped directly beneath him, and he recognized the tension-filled voice of Terry Proctor.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Proctor said, out of breath.

  “Maybe he can get inside the rooms without the system knowing it,” the man with him suggested.

  There was a long pause. Dart could feel Proctor thinking, putting himself in Dart’s position. Proctor said, “We stay with the plan: All rooms that aren’t secure get a thorough search.”

  Dart heard the men separate. The guard said to Proctor, “Where are you going? There’s nothing down that way.”

  “I need to do something,” Proctor said. “Just do your fucking job,” he chastised.

  Rent-a-cops, Dart thought, with equal disdain.

  As far as Joe could tell, the guard headed back down toward the bathrooms while Proctor hurried up the corridor. The noise level in the tight space was amazing; despite their name, the acoustic panels did little to muffle any of the sounds. When the guard entered the men’s room, twenty feet behind Dart, every sound could be heard. The man stopped to urinate, and Dart could hear him work his zipper fly. He banged the stall door open. A moment later he was inspecting the women’s room. Not long after, Dart heard the clatter of brooms and mops and knew the guard was in a custodial closet. The detective used the cover of this noise to continue. With the hallway lights ablaze, he could see throughout the tight crawl space, and he plotted which pairs of pipes might support him en route to the computer room.

  “… just guard it,” he heard Proctor say somewhere off ahead of him.

  “I’m good at finding people,” a deep voice replied. “This is a waste of my talents.”

  “Listen, Alverez, if you had any talent, we wouldn’t be here,” Proctor objected.

  “You gonna insult me,” the man objected, “and I won’t do the business for you.”

  “Do not fuck with me. Get in there and stay there. If and when we need your talents, I’ll send someone for you.”

  “He won’t talk, and he won’t walk,” the other man said. “I owe this fucker.”

  Dart felt a chill pass through him. Alverez, the man Zeller had wanted to avoid, wa
s guarding the computer room.

  Alverez continued. “Make it look like he took a tumble down some stairs. No problem.”

  “Down, Rambo,” Proctor said disparagingly. “Just guard the fucking room.”

  “Ain’t no problem.”

  “And you don’t leave for any reason,” Proctor added.

  Dart heard a door open and thump shut. It seemed twenty to thirty feet to his right. The computer room. He studied the pipes to see how to make it over there, then he plotted a course straight ahead ten feet that connected with a single sprinkler pipe he would use to take him over the room. Minutes later, he crossed over to that single pipe. He put his butt on it, his feet out in front of him, hands overhead on an I-beam and, lying back, scooted himself forward a few inches at a time.

  Alverez, he was thinking, hearing Zeller’s voice: A guy hired to break my knees.

  Without thought, Dart automatically reached down to pat the weapon that Haite had issued him, to make sure it was still there. In the process, he lost his balance, his left hand slipping off the I-beam. He reached out instinctively to block his fall and punched his right hand through an acoustical panel as his left hand saved him. He froze, dangling.

  “Billy?” he heard a voice call out. “Hey, Billy? That you?”

  Footsteps coming toward him.

  Dart was looking down onto a set of plastic recycling bins, just on the other side of the wall from the corridor. He gently fingered the broken piece of panel that hung like a flap and drew it back up silently, partially patching his error.

  The footsteps went past him. “Billy?” the voice called out again, growing more distant. He heard a walkie-talkie belch as this man complained, “Whoever’s up on one is making too much fucking noise. Keep it down up there.” A second later a heavy door thumped shut and Dart imagined that this man had left the basement. For good? Dart wondered. Or to get some backup?

  He pulled himself back up and continued down the pipe, his butt sore, his fingers cramping. Each of the iron clamps and supports that hung the sprinkler system from the I-beams presented Dart with an obstacle around which he had to maneuver. Five minutes later, he was directly over the computer room, the only sounds the scraping shoes of Alverez as he paced, a bulldog confined to his pen.

  All at once, the space went dark again—the basement hallway lights had timed out and had turned themselves off. The only light came in cones and shafts as it escaped the computer room below from holes created to carry conduit and computer and telephone cables. Dart allowed time for his eyes to adjust and then edged forward toward the nearest peephole.

  The pipe shifted in a way that Dart had not experienced, a subtle movement that he didn’t understand until he heard a regular ticking sound. He sourced that sound and discovered a leak directly beneath him—a pipe joint had failed under his weight. The sprinkler water dripped like the ticking of a clock. In a moment it would seep through the panel and begin dripping into the room where Alverez paced. Dart reached down and ran his hand along the underside of the pipe, smearing the leaking water, and briefly stopping the drip.

  With his hand still on the pipe, he craned himself down to get a look through the peephole, the escaping light flooding his face.

  It was no use: He couldn’t control the leak.

  Drip … drip … drip … It started up again.

  Through the hole in the ceiling panel, he could make out a pair of large boxes the size of small refrigerators, and the corner edge of a desk. Directly below him was vinyl tile flooring. As he was peering down through the hole, he saw the first drop of water, like a small jewel, cascade from the ceiling to the floor, where it exploded.

  Another. And another.

  Dart worked his hand on the pipe furiously, to try to stop it, but the break was worse, the flow greater. The cold water seeped through his fingers and down to the room below.

  Ironically, Alverez came over to inspect the leak. It was as if Dart had issued the man an invitation. And in a heartbeat, Dart understood what had to happen. There was no time to plan, to organize, to waste. Zeller would have called this a hot spot—an instant in time that demands reaction, not thought or consideration, one of those opportunities that comes around only once, and to think about it is to lose it.

  Alverez stepped beneath the leak.

  Joe Dart let go his grip, and jumped.

  CHAPTER 44

  Alverez looked up toward the ceiling.

  Dart understood intuitively that this moment of surprise was, and would be, his only advantage over an ape like this. He anticipated his landing, the gun coming out of the holster, and firing into the man’s legs if necessary.

  He landed on his bad ankle.

  The room swirled in a thick blue haze as nausea erupted inside him. He lost his balance and went down onto his back.

  Alverez stood there, fighting to get pieces of acoustical tile out of his eyes.

  Dart glanced over and saw a bank of computer equipment. He searched for the gear that Ginny had described. Plain vanillia box … He didn’t see what she had described to him. A good deal of the equipment was down an aisle behind the bank of keyboards.

  Between Dart and that aisle stood Alverez.

  Dart dared not use his gun, for that would alert Proctor—if his fall through the ceiling had not already done so—and, more important, bring the ERT team through the door, locking up the computer.

  Alverez was big and stocky, and yet lightning quick. He attacked Dart as a boxer would, cagey and shifting side to side, light on his feet, ready to tangle. Enjoying this.

  Dart came to his feet, woozy. Despite his reasoning, he reached for his gun and brought it out aimed at the man’s huge thighs.

  “Better make it count,” the man said, grinning, “‘cause I’m going to take it away from you.’”

  He faked to his right—Dart pivoting to follow—and then cut left so quickly that Dart never saw him coming. One second Dart was holding the gun, not wanting to fire it; the next, the weapon was skidding across the vinyl floor and Dart’s wrist felt extremely hot and limp.

  Alverez body-punched Dart low and on the side, below the ribs, stinging a kidney and buckling the detective over in agony.

  Dart swung his bad foot wildly and connected the instep with the side of Alverez’s knee, as if pushing a door shut. He heard something snap, and the thug’s eyes went wide, and Dart kicked the same spot again, and Alverez leaned away like a tree from the wind. And then he grimaced, showing off his brown, ugly teeth like a mean dog.

  His arms were apelike, unexpectedly long for such a compact body. He punched out at Dart, ramming a ball of hard knuckles into the center of his chest, stunning his diaphragm and stealing his breath.

  Dart staggered back and smacked into a desk, knowing instantly that to allow himself to be pinned by a gorilla like Alverez was the end—the man would pick him to pieces, breaking bones and taking him apart like a turkey carcass after the feast. Dart’s right hand wouldn’t respond—it flapped at the end of his arm like a rag; he couldn’t feel it at all. His left landed painfully on something cool and hard, and Dart seized it and lashed out at Alverez who, preparing to step closer and finish Dart, mistakenly anticipated Dart’s attempt to come from his right. The detective smashed the stapler into the man’s jaw like a set of brass knuckles, breaking the joint and leaving the man looking like a Halloween mask, his jaw grotesquely distorted.

  Buying himself a moment, Dart flung himself off the desk and hobbled awkwardly around the bank of keyboards and monitors, and down the aisle. There, not ten feet away, its red lights flashing, was the exact box that Ginny had described.

  A couple of minutes, he remembered Ginny saying.

  Fat chance, Dart thought, wondering if he could even buy himself thirty seconds.

  He placed his weight onto his bad ankle, fell down, and reached out with his broken wrist, crying out loudly with the impact.

  They heard that, he thought.

  Alverez spun around, his broken jaw preve
nting any perverse grin, his nose bleeding profusely, his eyes damp and seething with fury.

  Dart had never seen that look, but it had been described dozens of times, and it registered into his core that Alverez would either kill him or change him forever. This was a hot spot, a defining moment.

  Alverez charged like a wrecking ball—but the wrecking ball owned a switchblade.

  The knife sank into Dart’s left shoulder. Alverez removed it just as quickly with a sickening sucking sound and lowered it again, but Dart rolled hard. The switchblade punched the floor, broke the springed hinge, and folded up on the man’s fingers, slicing all four to the bone. Alverez roared, released the knife, and had to shake his hand to break the blade from its grip. Blood flew like water from a hose.

  Dart lunged for the communications box. A vertical row of red lights … The button marked MASTER was at the bottom of the device. Alverez growled. Dart punched the red button, and it immediately changed to green.

  The system was on-line.

  Alverez crawled across the floor.

  The gun! Dart realized as Alverez reached for it.

  Dart kicked out and caught the man’s jaw with the toe of his shoe. A loud crack filled the room, like a gunshot, and Alverez slumped to the floor, his wounded hand bleeding badly. He was down, but not finished.

  Dart rolled painfully to his left; the button remained green. Perhaps twenty seconds had passed; it felt to Dart like half an hour. He fished for his handcuffs and got one end around the wrist of Alverez’s bleeding hand and, dragging the man across the floor, the other to the foot of a giant piece of computer machinery.

  Dart heard the chaos out in the hall, reacting to it before he gave it any thought. He dove for the bloody gun and took hold of it just as the door swung open.

  “Freeze!” one of the three uniformed guards shouted excitedly, training a weapon on Dart.

  Dart, lying on his back, held his weapon with his left hand, aiming toward the man but knowing he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. “Police,” Dart said, attempting authority.