Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,41
come down so easy on the brake so she wasn’t thrown against the steering wheel.
In her mind’s eye, she could see a map of the neighborhood where she was heading, Harrison Avenue in Boston’s South End. As of a year ago, at any rate, the upper floors of industrial buildings there had been turned into warrens of artists’ studios and galleries. She’d opted for a route through city streets, though the highway would have been faster. She wanted to take it easy her first time back on the road.
The sun was setting as she crawled up Dorchester Avenue, a storefront-lined street of long shadows that ran into Boston from the south-stick into an ice-cream bar. The street widened at major intersections, then narrowed again to a single lane each way in between.
A car behind her beeped. She’d have beeped herself. The needle on the speedometer hovered at twenty.
She accelerated to the thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit, still too slow for Boston drivers. She turned off the main street and wound through increasingly dense urban neighborhoods where the crush of cars and pedestrians made her feel more anonymous, invisible even.
The number 2497, the Harrison Avenue address that PWNED had given her, was hand-painted across a purely functional steel door to a five-story brick industrial building with oversize, multipaned windows. In front was metered parking, all of the spaces occupied.
Diana double-parked in front, waiting in a pool of light under a streetlight as traffic streamed past. She found her cell phone and called PWNED.
“Hello?” She recognized PWNED’s soft, breathy voice.
“I’m out front,” Diana said.
There was a whirring sound on the line. Then: “Can you see me? I’m up on the fourth floor.”
Looking up through the windshield, against the dark sky, she saw a hand waving from an upper-floor window. “Yup, I see you.”
“Look, there’s a car pulling out on the other side of the street, two buildings down. Bang a U-ey.”
Diana shifted into gear and signaled a left turn.
“Hurry,” PWNED said, “before someone else grabs it. I’ll meet you downstairs. The lobby’s a bit basic. Don’t freak out.”
Chapter Eighteen
When there was a break in traffic, Diana made a U-turn and got over just in time to slip into the space that a van had just pulled out of. At least she still remembered how to parallel park.
She turned the car off, set the emergency brake, and sat there for a few moments, taking in the buildings that surrounded her, imagining that she was angling the view on her computer screen. She picked up Daniel’s walking stick from the floor of the car, anchoring her senses on its familiar feel.
Get out of the car. She tapped her fingers on the stick, as if on a keyboard, typing the command /out.
Diana grabbed her backpack and laptop case and waited, watching her side mirror as cars came from behind and passed her. She opened the door and got out. Slammed it shut and clicked the remote before crossing the street and walking back up the block to the building entrance.
Up close, she could see shadows of graffiti beneath the gray paint on the steel door. A piece of cardboard had been slipped into the doorjamb where the latch would have engaged. Diana pushed and the heavy door swung open.
A naked lightbulb—the spiral-shaped energy-efficient kind—hung from the ceiling, casting a dull glow over a cramped interior. The walls looked battered, like someone had used them for target practice, and the floor was covered with small square ceramic tiles that had once been white. Diana breathed in. She smelled pine cleaner over urine.
Across the adjacent wall was a massive sliding door to what looked like a freight elevator. Opposite that was a door with a little window in it. She pulled that door a crack. Just beyond was a broad concrete stairway going up.
Clank. Diana whirled around. There was a hum and then a breeze inside the vestibule, as if someone had opened a window. The elevator was in motion.
Diana knew it had to be PWNED, doing what she said she’d do—coming down to meet her. But as the hum grew louder, Diana felt as if the space she was in was compressing.
She darted through the door and into the stairwell. It seemed to take forever for the door to drift shut. She watched through the little window.
The humming stopped. Another clank and a scree announced the elevator’s arrival. A rectangle of light fell on the floor of the vestibule—the elevator’s door had slid open.