All the Way Down

by Eric Beetner

  Behind her, Dale whistled long and low, almost like a cat call to a sexy girl on the street.

  Lauren knew she had to get out. She knew she could stay here and think thoughts and wrestle with pros and cons all night if she let herself. But not even one stack of cash would make its way into her pocket, and she wouldn’t allow herself to give any credit to her father for being weak in the face of all this cash. She felt queasy in its presence and no one was standing there offering her any.

  “We gotta go.”

  The spell was broken. Dear God, it was so much. From his perspective on the floor, they were great towers of cash, enough to crush him if they fell. How had he done it, this gunman? Every day working his shift in the presence of the answer to all his problems. It must be like working security inside a genie bottle and never being able to ask for a wish.

  But she was right. They couldn’t stay.

  “Yeah.”

  Dale got to his knees, took a break, and felt Lauren’s hand come under his arm to help him up. They both turned their backs on the money and refused to look behind them as they walked out leaving the door wide open.

  “Wait.” Dale stopped limping and Lauren had to comply or else topple over. “I can’t leave everything behind.”

  Dale broke free and went back inside. Lauren started preparing a lecture on the evils of stealing and how all the money stacked inside the cube was blood money. Besides, they still had to get out and he was sad enough as it was with his half a foot and zombie walk. She didn’t think adding the bulk of a few thousand dollars was a good idea.

  Dale emerged, but his pockets didn’t bulge. He was only marginally heavier, all of it coming from the machine gun slung over his shoulder. He’d slipped a spare clip and his pistol in his belt. Whatever else the building had for him, he was ready. They walked to the stairwell.

  CHAPTER 24

  The tires bumped over reflective dots in the center lane. T veered the car back in line again, but Dahlia could see his eyes were unfocused. He took it slow, which was fine with her. She didn’t need someone who could barely control the car to go speeding and kill them both.

  She’d never had a bullet in her gut, and she didn’t plan to, but some of the reading she’d been doing compared the pain of childbirth to all sorts of things, one of which was being shot. Apparently a woman in upstate New York took part in a study of childbirth experiences and she had once been shot by a hunting rifle accidentally and she claimed the pain to be strikingly similar. Of course, the people writing books about the subject latched on to that quote and rode it into the ground.

  It brought pangs of guilt, but Dahlia couldn’t look at T and his blood-soaked shirt front without thinking that she would never know his pain or the pain of childbirth. But she slapped that selfish thought out of her head. His agony wasn’t a time for her to reflect on the sad turns of her own life.

  “How much farther?”

  He didn’t answer and his one-handed driving style was making her nervous. Dahlia didn’t like to look at him knowing she shot him. Actually discharging a gun into another human being wasn’t something she ever considered through her Dale-mandated firearms classes. Even though the paper targets all had human forms, even though the instructors all emphasized the gravity of the tool in her hand. She’d gone to class to appease her husband, and she vowed never to fire a weapon again. Then today happened.

  “Maybe I should drive and you can give me directions.” She realized now she had nothing to fear from him and no reason to keep the gun trained on him. He wasn’t going anywhere and was about as likely to make a leap for her while she drove as he was to break out in a tap dance.

  “Why don’t you pull over?”

  Though he didn’t answer, T steered the car for the curb so she knew he’d understood. He bumped roughly against the curb and the car bounced and the tires squeaked. It came to a lurching stop after that. T made a weak attempt to put it in park, but his arm wasn’t up to the task.

  Dahlia leaned over and moved the lever into P and unbuckled herself. “Slide over and I’ll drive.”

  She got out and walked around the hood of the car and opened the driver’s door. T had slumped over on the seat, but not moved into the passenger bucket as she’d asked. She nudged him with the gun, not as a threat but because she didn’t want to touch his bloody shirt with her hand.

  He didn’t move. She poked again, still nothing. Great, she thought. Passed out.

  She looked at his body slopped over the center console and didn’t think she could move him as dead weight. She decided it would be easier to pull and went back around to the passenger side and leaned in. She lifted his hands, floppy as dead fish, and tried pulling him over to her side. His hip hung up on the arm rest/storage console and she gave up.

  Dahlia thought of grabbing a leg in hopes that might raise his hip so she could slip him over the obstacle. She reached down and wrapped both hands around his thigh. His jeans were soaked in blood and he squished when she grabbed hold. Immediately she recoiled and drew her hands back. She stopped herself a second before she instinctually wiped her hands on her shirt. Her palms were painted red.

  Nothing to do about it now. She went in for another grab. She got his leg up and his knee over the console. One-fifth of his body down, the heavy bits still to go. She moved his other leg up and set his knees side by side on the console. His torso had shifted around so he sat against the door, his head lolling to the side.

  Dahlia went back around to the driver’s side and pushed. She tried to get low on his back and push up, not just forward. His hips started to move but the more they traveled forward, the more his head and shoulders fell back until she had to put one hand on the back of his neck and one hand in the small of his back, then shove forward with a shoulder like a linebacker in practice with a dummy.

  His body flopped up and over and folded into the passenger seat looking like a pile of dirty laundry.

  Sucking wind from the exertion, Dahlia leaned against the car door. Both arms were bloodstained almost up to her elbows. The shoulder where she rammed him home had a smear on it and she forgot herself and pushed a strand of hair out of her face, getting blood on her cheek and temple.

  Lord save her if she got pulled over by a cop anywhere on the rest of her drive.

  Now, about the drive…she couldn’t exactly take directions while he was sleeping it off. She needed smelling salts or a bucket of cold water to splash him with. With neither of these at her disposal, she thought of pain. A jolt could bring him back around. It was cruel, but after all, this was the guy who started it by breaking into her house uninvited that morning. He killed Mrs. Joosten and shot at those other people, not to mention breaking that boy’s nose and slashing the other one on the arm.

  He deserved what he got, she told herself.

  Poking a finger in his bullet wound ought to do the trick. But rooting around in an open gash wasn’t exactly something she wanted to do. Like poking him before, she decided to use the end of the gun.

  Dahlia sat down in the driver seat and cringed. The sticky blood he’d been stewing in as it dripped from his gut was warm on the seat and she could feel her pants soaking through. No other place to sit while driving the car, though, so she shut the unpleasant feeling out of her mind.

  The seat squished as she leaned over and pushed the barrel of the gun into the hole in T’s shirt. He didn’t flinch. The pain hadn’t roused him. She pushed harder. Nothing.

  She pulled the gun back, a half inch of the barrel stained with blood. She’d pushed hard enough, deep enough, but nothing could bring him back to consciousness. Then Dahlia had a thought.

  She reached over and put two fingers on his neck, below his jawbone, and felt for a pulse. Nothing pushed back at her fingertips. His skin did not jump under her touch. He was clammy and growing cold. Dead.

  Shit, thought Dahlia. What do I do now?

  CHAPTER 25

  The sounds could have been
them coming back. The crazy one-time employee and that bitch who shot a hole in his hand. Tat stayed quiet as he listened to someone moving in his home.

  He tried to picture the inside of the closet and think if anything in his vicinity could be used as a weapon. All he could feel in the pitch black was the coats around him. An idea passed, but he silently cursed himself for his Mommie Dearest-level rule of no wire hangers. Something about them spoke of people who couldn’t afford better. He hadn’t even seen the movie, but if he did, he’d have been on Joan Crawford’s side on that issue.

  Whoever was outside didn’t speak and it sounded like only one set of footsteps. What if Dale had called in the troops? Was the first of a SWAT tactical team soft-shoeing around his home? And what did that mean for the rest of the compound?

  Tat worked hard to create his world and mold it to his own design. He wanted a place he’d never have to leave. A place that held everything he could possibly need. Headquarters, bunker, dormitory. He loved James Bond films and always wanted a supervillain lair. He knew it was silly—massive encampments carved out of active volcanoes or uncharted islands housing moon-melting death rays, but he admired the ambition of the bad guys. When chance came to have his own, he took it.

  Something about the industrial wasteland look of the unfinished complex appealed to him. He knew cartel leaders in Central America who still lived in hovels, practically, out of fear of being detected. Tat thought they were fools. He admired the brash drug lords who built thirty-thousand-square-foot villas in the jungles of Mexico, a hundred miles from the nearest town.

  He got the property for a song. He’d been saving his money, hoarding it was more like, for years. A cash payment put through by one of his shell corporations set up by one of his team of crack accountants was accepted without counter offer. For every new floor and new idea Tat came up with, he hired a new contractor. No one person knew the extent to which he’d altered and designed this building from the inside out.

  He’d built a stronghold but somehow the parasites always got in, and now one of them was walking around outside his closet.

  Tat felt with the back of his skull to an empty hanger and considered if he would be able to lift it down. A wooden coat hanger that he couldn’t bend into a sharp eye-poker, but which still had a large hook good for gouging out eyes, catching in cheeks, tearing at jugular veins. Everything in the world is a weapon if you use it like one. His first attempt at lifting his arm caused a riot of pain shooting from his shoulder.

  The slow shuffling footsteps got closer. The thin rope of light at the bottom of the door dimmed in one corner, then dark breaks in the line of light walked from one end to the other as feet outside passed by. Tat shifted his body to follow the shadows. A coat, loosened by his shifting back, fell and the rustle of sound made the feet outside come to a halt.

  Tat tried to adjust himself and get his body in a position to leap if the door opened. He tried again to reach for the hanger and got his arm as high as his hip before the pain of dislocation stopped it there.

  The feet crept back to the closet and stopped, two black interruptions in the line of light. He heard the doorknob turn.

  Light spilled in and blinded Tat as his eyes struggled to adjust. The moment of disorientation threw off any attack he may have made. As his eyes adjusted to compensate for the new burst of light he saw his own mother, Esmerelda, standing before him.

  “Momma?”

  She saw the dark maroon blood stains on her boy. “Oh, baby boy, what have they done to you?”

  “Momma, how did you…?”

  “Never you mind that now. You got intruders. You got trouble.”

  Don’t I know it, thought Tat. But I got something else. A second chance.

  CHAPTER 26

  Two visits from his wife in one day wasn’t normal for Mayor O’Brien, but this wasn’t a normal day.

  Lori swept in to the office before his secretary had finished announcing her on the intercom. O’Brien could tell she was tense and thought to offer her a drink, but he knew he’d pour himself another and he couldn’t afford to get any softer around the edges than he already was.

  “Is there any news?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  She paced. “Can’t you call someone? You’re the damn mayor after all.”

  “If I want them to let me do my job, I need to let them do theirs. The police chief is handling it, Lori. I know it’s hard.”

  He had no idea how he was keeping it together. To talk of Lauren’s rescue as if he hadn’t stacked the deck against it. Even if this lone ranger they sent in managed to get her out, a long shot at best, O’Brien had just sent a man out to make sure his daughter never got more than a few steps out of that building.

  Lori stopped pacing. “I’m sorry, Michael. About earlier.” As she spoke, she straightened her spine, letting him know this wasn’t a knee-crawling act of contrition, but a mature adult coming to another to apologize and leave the door open for his apology in return.

  “I’m sorry too. It’s been…” He exhaled, exhausted. “A hell of a day.”

  Lori went to her husband, wrapped her arms around him in a show of intimacy they hadn’t shared in a long time. “Oh, Michael. Our little girl. Our baby girl.”

  She began crying and O’Brien wondered if she’d hadn’t had a few drinks of her own since she saw him last. Lori had been known to take two or three martinis with lunch when she met with rotary clubs or auxiliary groups of one stripe or another. Doing her first lady duties and trying to enjoy herself while doing them.

  The unexpected moment of vulnerability confused O’Brien at first. He hugged her back but didn’t know what to do with the sobbing woman in his arms. He’d spent the past fifteen years of their marriage wondering what it was she wanted to hear from him and usually getting it wrong. And when he got it wrong, brother, look out. This was a delicate situation beyond most he’d been through with her. Sometimes all it took to set her against him was choosing the wrong place to go for dinner. This was their daughter, their only child.

  As he pondered what to say, he gripped harder to her. She responded in kind and soon they were clinging to each other for strength and being held up by the other the way a real married couple does. But for him, it was the realization of what he’d done.

  Removed from Lewis’ stark revelations about the consequences to his career, O’Brien saw again the girl behind the threat to his office. Lauren, who at age five had presented her father with a homemade construction paper crown knighting him the World’s Greatest Dad. Lauren, who came to him for scraped knees, lost teeth, and bad dreams. And his words, his embrace, healed the pain and scared away the demons. His daughter who trusted him at one point. Such unconditional devotion in her eyes as she trusted that he would be there at the end of the school day, he would be there to walk her down the aisle someday, he would be there to listen when her heart got broken.

  And now a man named Roy was on his way to shoot her.

  Lori’s sobs slowed and she settled in to a calm embrace with her husband. He had no idea what she could be thinking. Perhaps her mind was fully occupied by Lauren and the fears and unknowns of her situation. Or perhaps she was as baffled by their sudden reconnection in the face of tragedy as he was. But O’Brien knew exactly how he felt. A sureness that wasn’t in the room when Lewis and Roy were here. He knew wholeheartedly. He’d changed his mind.

  4TH FLOOR

  The money called to them from one floor above. There had been so much it was like it had its own gravitational pull. But Dale and Lauren dutifully ignored the siren’s call. Dale added another item to the list of things Chief Schuster had better damn well appreciate when this is all over.

  Dale reached the landing for the fourth floor first. They moved cautiously, but with intent. The first floor, lobby, and exit were so tantalizingly close now.

  “We need to stop here.”

  Dale froze in his tracks, unable to believe what he hea
rd from Lauren. It had to be someone else, right? He turned to her and she looked at him expectantly and with a little apology behind her eyes.

  “Did you say stop?”

  “Yeah.” Lauren shrugged. “This is Tyler’s floor. The offices. Accounting and all that stuff. I need to see him.”

  “For your story.”

  Lauren wouldn’t meet Dale’s eyes. “Yes.”

  “You’re still worried about the damn story? You don’t have enough?”

  “I’m missing the smoking gun on my dad. I know Tyler will have access to the right file or account or something to show a direct link between Tat and the mayor’s office.”

  Dale took a longing look down the stairs. Four short flights and they were out. He didn’t have time to argue with her. The sound of the door opening filled the stairwell. They were going whether Dale liked it or not. He and Lauren stepped slowly into the fourth floor. He saw offices, desks, floor lamps, potted palms. All the trappings of a completely average office suite. Business-attired workers hummed around with the mid-morning laziness of typical office drones. It all looked like an artist’s rendering of exactly what this building had been designed for. Dale looked back at Lauren.

  She spoke low, the two of them huddled against the doorway relatively out of sight. “Tat’s running a business after all.”

  “Yeah, but…this is so normal.”

  “These are the front businesses. This is all legit.”

  “Well, talk to Tyler and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Okay, I just have to find him.”

  “You don’t know where his office is even?”

  “We’ve only been seeing each other a few weeks.”

  Dale rolled his eyes. Seeing each other was code for using him, and Dale knew it. “Does this guy even know why you’re here?”

  She ignored him. “He’ll help me.”