She’s trying to look casual, stopping to look at the construction work that’s still in progress. There are paint chips taped to the walls, and the odd ladder here and there. But then she stops in front of an office and tries the door.
I don’t breathe again until it fails to open. Thank fuck. Maybe now I can get her to leave.
With my head down and my hands jammed casually in my pockets, I start toward her. But as I watch, she pulls something from her pocket. A card. She slips this between the doorjamb and the door, which is never going to work.
The door opens, and a light flickers on inside the office.
Fuck fuck fuck. As a reflex, I look down toward the atrium. My gaze finds Reardon Halsey immediately. He’s staring upward at the third-floor office with the light on.
Then he turns, his girlfriend’s hand in his, and leads her over to the other glass elevator on the opposite side of the atrium.
My heart nearly detonates.
Hugging the wall, I hoof it toward Daphne. I’m able to move quickly for a few seconds. But then the glass elevator opposite me glides into view. So I slow my pace and turn my face away. I also grab a ladder that’s leaning against the wall and carry it the last ten paces to the office door where Daphne disappeared.
“He saw you,” I grunt toward the door that’s ajar. “He’s coming.”
“Shit!” she squeaks. I don’t see her. She’s hidden from view, possibly kneeling behind the desk.
I open up the ladder while my brain whirls.
“Can I walk out right now?” she asks in a trembling voice.
The elevator doors are already open across the atrium, and Halsey and his girl have begun to walk the loop. “No. Stay put.” If she exits now, he’ll easily see her.
And if he’s going to tangle with one of us, it’s going to be me.
I drag the open ladder right in front of the office door. Then I grab a toolbox that’s sitting on the floor, and I climb the damn ladder toward the dropped ceiling. I put the tools on the fold-out shelf. Then I lift my hands, displacing a fiberglass ceiling tile, setting it aside, creating a hole in the ceiling.
Climbing one more step, my head disappears into the blackness above. Looking down, I open the toolbox with hands that somehow aren’t shaking. I choose a heavy pair of wire snips, with sharp, fierce-looking tips.
And I wait.
I don’t know how long it takes for Halsey and his girlfriend to approach. It’s probably only about sixty seconds, but it feels like a year.
It’s long enough for me to conjure up his face from my nightmares. That smirk he made in the dark when I realized I was roped to my own bunk. The shout that caught in my throat because I’d been gagged, too.
He and his pals had pulled off an act of cunning and violence. They’d upended lives. And—with a little help from Paul—I’d picked a hell of a day to remember it.
I’m sweating through my shirt when two pairs of shiny shoes appear at the foot of the ladder. “That’s my office you’re blocking.”
That voice. I feel it like a splash of ice water. Dread curls into my gut. That voice whispered sick things to me in the dark. I’d turned my head away from it. But I couldn’t move. I’d been immobilized.
Oh, God. I grab a joist near my face and hold onto it with a white-knuckled grip. There’s not enough air up here.
“I need you to move,” he says, the sneer only partially concealed behind a thin layer of good breeding.
More memories are drowning me. His sneer. His casual violence toward the plebes.
And now he’s waiting for me to say something. “Give me five to ten,” I grunt. My hands feel ice cold. It’s another stress response—the body reserving blood for the brain and the essential organs.
Breathe, Rickie. Just breathe.
“Could you just step aside now?” he barks. “And did you open my office door?”
“Needed the light,” I growl. “You need the internet to work, right? Your kind always does. But it’s after hours, buddy. I need five to ten.”
By which I mean—I need him to go to prison for five to ten years.
His silence seems to last a week. God knows I’m doing a shit job of looking like an actual maintenance worker. Thank Christ his girlfriend is at his side. He’s less likely to make a scene.