Simon Rising

by Brian D Howard

  “I see. Does Michael have a key to this apartment?”

  “That dickface? I didn’t even give him my address! He said we should ‘open our relationship,’ like that was supposed to be a good thing. I told him I’m not interested in threesomes! He told me I could be bi if I wanted. Can you believe that?”

  “Does anyone else have a key?” Nothing so far implicated the ex-boyfriend as a suspect.

  “No. Nobody. I haven’t even made myself a spare yet. I keep meaning to, you know?”

  “Of course.” A quick scan of the spines on the bookshelf revealed a lack of organization. Books seemed arranged more by size than content. Romance novels mixed with horror paperbacks. Textbooks and cookbooks on the bottom shelf, all looking old and faded. Psychology, French, literature, two copies of a poem anthology. The cookbooks were all from a series, each book a different ethnicity. The whole shelf looked neglected.

  A hallway led to a bathroom and one bedroom dominated by a tall bed with rumpled, ugly green and yellow floral bedding. Green and yellow pillows were piled in the corner away from a wood nightstand with a charging cell phone. The walls were plain off-white, drab and bare, with the same tan carpet. A tall dark wood jewelry armoire matched a dresser in the far corner.

  What would Ambrose look for here? He needed clothes and food. Food he had apparently solved. Clothes did not seem like something he would have much luck with here.

  “The police report mentioned a coat missing?”

  “Yeah, it was in the closet.” Wright slid open the louvered door. Organization here contrasted with the bookshelves and kitchen. Pants and skirts together, tops by color and sleeve length. Dresses all at one end. White organizer racks set most of it up for tops above bottoms, with the dresses in their own full-height zone.

  “How did you determine the coat was missing?”

  “I went to figure out my outfit for tomorrow. I always have an empty space between pants and skirts, you know, so I can make sure they’re in the right spot and I don’t have to hunt for them. I hate hunting for the right skirt. But they were smooshed together, and the pants were all spread out. Then I noticed the coat. It’s the only one I have. I had another one, but Douchewaffle gave it to me for my birthday so I GoodWilled it. As it is I should’ve worn it today. It was colder out than I thought.”

  Rachel stood in front of the open closet trying to see it from the eyes of a man in stolen sweats. The woman might be close enough to his build her pants would do in a pinch, maybe one of the pairs of jeans draped over hangers, and some tops might be unisex enough. They certainly could be under a coat.

  “Any idea if any clothes are missing?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing stands out as missing.”

  “And none of the jewelry is missing?”

  “The cops made a big deal about that, but no. Pretty sure it’s all there.”

  What would Ambrose’s impression of the room have been? If he did not take jewelry, why? Maybe he was trying to avoid anyone realizing anything had been taken. Clothes, food, simple things. Nothing valuable. Nothing noteworthy. In that case the dishes were an odd mistake which did not fit.

  “The coat? What does it look like?”

  “It’s black wool, comes to about my knees. Patch pockets on the front. It’s got a belt to tie it. And kinda big buttons. The bottom one is missing, but nobody ever notices that one.”

  Not all that distinctive. Not a bad choice for someone wanting to disappear.

  She thanked Wright for her time and proceded to the other two apartments. Both sets of tenants let her in with some grumbling. She apologized for the lateness and explained why she was there.

  She stood in a teenager’s bedroom where a book bag backpack was missing. The textbooks sat in a heap, but not the bag. Nothing about the room felt connecting when she tried to see it as Ambrose might. She imagined him looking at the things in the room, the baseball trophies, the laundry on the floor, the large poster of a swimsuit model reclining on the hood of a red Ferrari. Would any of those things trigger memories, or just make him depressed he could not remember?

  Car thefts had been early in Ambrose’s career, based on the limited information the police had gathered over the years and put together after his arrest. Perhaps the Ferrari had led him to a train of thought about car thefts. He might loiter around car dealerships trying to remember what kind of cars he liked. That might be worth looking into.

  She looked for differences and similarities, trying to glean why he might have chosen these three. He had probably sheltered nearby overnight. He might have cased the building for part of the morning before entering. He could have picked the locks. She saw no marks of an obvious attempt to pick them, so if he had, he remembered how to do it well.

  She stood on one of the balconies, taking in the unimpressive view. The building across the narrow street was a clone of this one. Parking lots sat to either side. Some bits of skyline poked over the opposing rooftop. Why these three? Why only on the fifth floor? Or were there others and nobody else noticed anything out of place? Police had canvassed the building asking if anyone else saw any indications of an intruder and none had.

  He could have gotten someone to buzz him in. Press enough buttons and someone might. The officers should have asked about that in their canvassing. She texted Thorne to ask him to check in the morning.

  She turned around to open the sliding door to get back inside and stopped short. What if he had not picked locks? She remembered the nanny cam. The grainy video played back against her closed eyelids. Ambrose past left to right, then again right to left.

  “Excuse me, the police had a recording from a nanny cam, was that yours?” she asked the bleary eyed father in the apartment.

  “Um, yeah. Was on the shelf there.”

  Left to right. The balcony on the left, the rest of the apartment on the right. In from the balcony. Back out through the balcony.

  “Say, do you ever lock the patio door,”

  “Lock it? No. Why bother? Up here?”

  That made sense. She could follow up in the morning, but she was willing to bet Thorne a box of donuts the other two tenants would say the same thing. She looked down from the balcony. It did not look like a reasonable climb for a fifty-two-year-old who had been in bed for the past weeks. He didn’t just fly up. The city had seen weird things...but, no. The building across the street had a metal fire escape at the end. Yes, this one did, too.

  She thanked the father, apologizing once again, and trudged back downstairs. With something to reach with the pull-down last ladder of the fire escape could be reachable. From there to one balcony looked plausible. Balcony to balcony looked more plausible across than vertically. Second floor people were more likely to lock patio doors, she suspected. Fifth floor? More complacent. She stared up the past the iron grate fire escape landings.

  Somewhere nearby he had sheltered for the rest of the night. He had watched the building until deciding enough people had left for work. He used something to pull down the fire escape then climbed up. Maybe he used the same thing for stability or balance moving from balcony to balcony. Back down would be simple enough.

  Two directions from here. What might have caught his eye from here? The flashlight from her glove compartment shone on a discarded beer bottle and some other assorted litter. Bicycles chained to patio railings and sliding door handles. A child’s tricycle left outside tipped over. Lidded garbage carts lined up in rows. Both directions looked similar: crossing streets bigger and busier than the alley between the buildings. He might as well have flipped a coin and gone either direction. Nothing useful there. For the moment, however, a profile began to flesh itself out in her mind. She would sleep on it and see where she was in the morning.

  CHAPTER 13 – THE WAREHOUSE STORE

  Steven stood on the graveled roof of a warehouse store. For the area he was in, it seemed like the safest bet. He needed diapers. There were pharmacies which would have them, and a twenty-four-hour grocery store would. B
ut the pharmacies nestled in among other buildings with more combined security. The grocery store would never be empty. A box of diapers was just too bulky to shoplift and the pocket of change was not enough. So he needed somewhere he could sneak into with weaker security.

  He was supposed to be some kind of criminal mastermind. How much must he have stolen from six banks? Was there any point in denying it? Until he could prove something, it made sense to just go ahead and believe what everyone made seem pretty true. He had orchestrated bank robberies. But that was who he had been. Not who he was. He could decide who he was, couldn’t he? Right now he was someone who needed to steal goddamned diapers.

  “How the mighty fall....”

  The warehouse store had the advantage of being its own building. That meant no adjacent businesses with their own security. There was a fast food place at the far end of the parking lot, but only the drive-through was open this late at night, and none of its cameras viewed this far. Even if there did, they would be too low resolution to capture enough detail at this distance to matter. Up on the rooftop was safe.

  Cameras watched the entrance and the loading dock, but none along the two side walls. With no windows or doors on either side wall why bother with cameras to watch blank walls? What business planner would consider security against someone levitating up the wall to the roof? It was a strange city getting stranger all the time. But not strange enough for anyone to design things around the idea people might fly.

  Up here it was quiet, and he was alone. He spent too much of the day wandering around while also trying to stay out of sight or be inconspicuous. He wanted to move to a different part of the city, but where? The change he had he could use for bus fare a few times, but he knew the busses would have cameras in them, and he did not know how extensive a surveillance net the FBI agent set up. Better safe than sorry.

  So he spent most of the day as just another backpack-toting homeless man. He looked the part, with unwashed hair and clothes that did not fit right. He had wondered how many people judged him, and wondered about how different his new existence was from his criminal-mastermind life.

  The lawyer mentioned a small apartment, so he had not lived in some grand, spacious penthouse with panoramic views of the city skyline he could see in the background while he played at some grand piano. But perhaps he dressed in nice suits, drove an expensive car—something classy, he liked to imagine. He did not think he had been the sports car type. Probably nothing showy or flashy, he supposed, but something nice. Perhaps he filled his life with small luxuries. Now his idea of luxury seemed to include soap and deodorant and hoping no one around him could tell whether his damned diaper needed changing.

  The rooftop was away from all of that. There were just skylights, heating and air conditioning units, some ventilation and exhaust outlets, a sprawling urban skyline, and a half-overcast sky. He liked the few stars not obscured by clouds or overpowered by the lights of the city. With no moon he would have liked more light, but there was enough to navigate by. The building was large with a flat roof; it was not as if he were in danger of accidentally falling off the edge.

  He peered down through a skylight into the building’s dim interior. Rows of long tables offered up what looked like clothes in stacks. He doubted this was the type of store past-him shopped in. But it would suit his immediate needs.

  He investigated several skylights before he found a hinged one over a row of warehouse shelves stacked with boxes. A latch inside locked it securely closed. Normal people would have no way of opening it short of smashing the skylight. Checking the perimeter of it looking for indications of an alarm connected turned up nothing. If only he had a flashlight to see better. He could look for one down there; the store might have them.

  Well, this is probably easier than it would have been before. He focused on the latch and moved it. The lack of handholds on the skylight, only intended to be opened from underneath, posed no problem. It rose obediently to his telekinesis and a support strut held it open.

  He floated down through the hole, turning himself about to survey the area for cameras. The dimness meant poor conditions to look for them, but he did not see any in obvious places along the ceiling. He lowered himself to the floor. He was getting better at that.

  Office supplies dominated the immediate area. He thought he could bypass those until he saw bulk packs of batteries, and next to those, flashlights. The flashlights, of course, only came in three-packs. One was all he needed, but this was not the kind of store for that. He considered the space in his little backpack and decided the whole pack was too space-inefficient.

  It took more concentrating than other kinds of motion before the two halves of the clamshell plastic popped open with a quick series of snapping noises. Manipulating different parts of the same object in opposite directions was more complicated. When he selected the right pack of batteries—and he certainly did not need all thirty-two of them—he knew what to do to open it. This one popped open a little more easily.

  He had not paid as much attention to the orientation of it, however, and discovered thirty-two falling objects were more than he could grab with his mind at once. He caught about a dozen and the rest bounced around at his feet as the two plastic halves clattered on the cement floor.

  He regarded the batteries floating in front of him and realized he had not dropped the flashlight which still hovered off to his side. Pride swelled at catching as many as he did, and on reflex at that. He marveled for a moment how well he was adapting to this new power of his, that his brain was already used to it enough to use it for reflexive or instinctual actions.

  He filled the flashlight with batteries and let the rest of them drop to the floor. One made a particularly loud clang as it bounced against the industrial metal shelving. He looked around before remembering no one was around to hear the noise. It helped him to relax when no sirens sounded in reaction to the noise; no guard called out, “What was that?”

  He moved out into the middle of the store, shining the flashlight ahead of him. More and more he felt certain this was not the kind of store he shopped at. He did wonder whether this was his first time in one. The variety of merchandise seemed odd to him, but that did not seem like a lot to base a guess on.

  He decided to hold the flashlight in his hand. He should practice doing things normally and this seemed like a good place to practice where no one would notice details he might get wrong.

  There were long tables of books, and tables of clothes, in the middle of the cavernous expanse. Multiple rows of large televisions preceded a section of what looked like playground equipment. He stepped past a row of gas barbecue grills and wondered if he had owned one. Perhaps there was a grill on a balcony at the little apartment. Then again, he supposed, maybe most of his dinners were delivered or takeout. Maybe he disliked cooking and ate at restaurants a lot.

  All of that was the past, he reminded himself, shoving the thoughts away. He had the present to tend to.

  He found a section of camping goods. Tents suspended from the ceiling displayed over bagged sleeping bags. Compact green propane grills stood on display and did not really seem like camping to him. He considered a sleeping bag for a moment, but camping on a rooftop did not seem like a viable long-term solution. No, he would need cash for a place to stay.

  There were glass display cases filled with watches and jewelry. The cases would be easy enough to smash open, but then he would have to deal with pawning the jewelry for cash. Doing that in multiple small transactions to avoid or reduce suspicion seemed like more effort than it was worth. He passed them by along with laptop computers and a display of smartphones and tablets. It was not liek he had a credit card to establish a mobile data plan with, and for the moment even battery charging was not an option.

  He found diapers along with other paper and dry goods at the start of the food section. He grabbed an eighty-count box and tucked it under his arm. The motion itself had certainly not looked natural, he was sure. The box was too bi
g for the backpack. A nine-hundred-count carton of wipes was considerably too big, so he ripped the box open and put two of the hundred-count packages into his pack.

  That covered one necessity, he told himself as he moved toward the food section. At the start of it he noticed can openers and added one to his pack. Those came singly, he noted. There was no option for bulk packs of those. “How many can openers would one kitchen need?” he scoffed.

  He ignored the freezer and refrigerated aisles. Boxed convenience food might be handy to the daytime customers of the bulk store, but even once he found some kind of motel room or something he could get into in the short term, he could not be sure of having a microwave to heat things in, let alone a freezer to keep any of it in.

  He did grab a box of canned baked beans, which took up the rest of his pack. He rearranged it until it zipped closed. Most of the food section seemed worthless to him until he had a kitchen to work with. Once he did, perhaps he would come back and load up a cart. Maybe he would even pretend to push the cart the way everyone else did, or maybe it would just follow him around obediently like a big dog.

  As he left one aisle of bulk rice and sugar and flour he saw red and blue lights flashing towards the front door. He swore, knowing immediately what it was. He clicked off the flashlight and maneuvered it into a side pocket of the backpack.

  He hurried in an awkward loping run back towards his still-open skylight. Rapid footsteps and what might have been radio chatter echoed as he lifted himself up to the ceiling. Once over the shelves he glimpsed four policemen waving flashlight beams around. None of them shined their lights up high enough to catch him. Nobody looks up. He left the skylight open, not wanting to risk making a noise to draw their attention upwards.

  The cars were all at the front of the store. He moved to the back and lowered himself down before walking away into the night. He cursed and flung small stones on the pavement near the loading docks in random directions away from him. He must have tripped some kind of alarm. Something he did not see, something he missed or overlooked. “So much for the criminal mastermind,” he berated himself as he reached a sidewalk and walked on trying to look casual.