Elevator Pitch (UK)

by Linwood Barclay

  He pats the boy’s shoulder as he stands back up. But he isn’t done doling out advice for the grief-stricken young man.

  “We all have setbacks in life, but we move on. If there’s something you want in life, you go after it, no matter how hard it is, or how long it takes.”

  These are the words Chris will always remember.

  Seventy

  The mayor screamed, a ragged cry of pain and grief and disbelief.

  “Glover!”

  The name resounded through the glass-enclosed space. The crowd, transfixed in horror, suffered a brief, collective bout of heart failure, not quite accepting what they had just seen. It was all too impossible to believe. One moment, Glover was there, and a moment later, he wasn’t.

  The mayor’s son had barely had a chance to utter a scream of his own, and his plunge down the shaft took so long that no one heard a thing when he hit bottom.

  Headley started pushing his way through the crowd toward Chris Vallins, a wild, murderous look in his eyes. But from somewhere, Vallins had produced a gun, and he was pointing it straight at the mayor.

  “Stop, Richard,” he said. Utterly calm, utterly cold.

  Headley halted, a few feet away from Barbara. A second earlier, he’d looked ready to kill Vallins, but now the enormity, the sheer horror, of what had just happened was overtaking him. The mayor was on the verge of weeping, but was too stunned, too overwhelmed, to actually cry.

  “Go ahead, let it out,” Vallins said, keeping his gun trained on Headley while he crouched down and reached back with his free hand for an open backpack that was propped against the short stretch of wall between two open elevator doors. He stood slowly, hefting the backpack over one shoulder while holding the gun in his opposite hand.

  A tear escaped Headley’s right eye and ran down his cheek as he stared incredulously at Vallins.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it?” Chris said. “It hurts a lot.”

  “Why … why did you …”

  “You really don’t remember, do you? You have no idea.”

  “I … I don’t … I don’t know what …”

  “Let me give you a hint. A twelve-year-old boy. Mother dead of a heart attack. Couldn’t handle going up all those flights of stairs anymore. You wouldn’t spend a dime on that building. We had no heat half the time, rusty water coming out of the taps, mice and rats and cockroaches, holes in the ceiling where water dripped down from shitty plumbing on the upper floors. But most of all, we had no fucking elevators. The only things you ever replaced were the Not in Service signs. You killed her, Richard.”

  There was a dawning realization in Headley’s eyes.

  “Vallins …” he whispered. “Your mother was … Maude.”

  “I wondered if you’d recognize the name when you hired me.” Chris smiled. “But it had been so long, and you never asked.”

  “I … I’m sorry,” the mayor said. “But … Glover … you didn’t have to …”

  “I didn’t have to do anything,” Chris said, shifting the backpack around to the front so he could see into it. “I didn’t have to mess with the elevators at your good friend Morris Lansing’s building. I didn’t have to have some fun with the elevators at the Sycamores, where one of your biggest fund-raisers was held. Pretty sure I saw Margaret earlier. And I didn’t have to fuck with the elevator at the Gormley Building, where your good friend Mr. Steel lives. But I wanted to. I wanted to send a message to all those who gave you a helping hand. The kind you never gave anyone. I wanted to send a message to the people who helped put you where you are when you so don’t deserve to be there.”

  But not the taxi bombing, Barbara thought. It didn’t fit. It never had.

  Vallins looked down again into the backpack and smiled. “Ah, here we go.”

  What he pulled out looked like an oversized TV remote. Barbara thought back to that news conference, when that city official said there were devices out there, that same size, that could allow someone to commandeer a building’s elevators. He let the backpack drop to the floor.

  “So,” Chris said, holding the remote at eye level so everyone could see it, “this is my little friend that’s your ticket out of here. With this, I can return the elevators back to their normal functions. You’ll all be able to go home. Just don’t anyone think of rushing me, or trying to jump me, or I’m going to toss it down the shaft. Are we clear on that?”

  There were a few nods among the guests.

  “Awesome,” he said. “But there is an if. One big if.”

  “Please,” Headley said. “Don’t hurt anyone here. You want to toss me down there, let me be with my son? Fine. I’ll jump right in if you’ll let these people go.”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Vallins said. “I’m going to let you go.”

  “What?” Headley said, his voice cracking.

  “That’s right. I’m going to bring one elevator up, and you can get on it. And I’m going to send it—very safely—back to the lobby.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would you let me—”

  Vallins raised a finger on the hand holding the gun. “Let me finish.”

  The mayor went silent.

  “You’ll get off in the lobby and I’ll bring the elevator back up, without you. Then you’ll take the stairs and rejoin us.”

  “I’m … what?”

  Vallins smiled and nodded. “You’re going to walk your way back up here. Well, almost.” He paused. “See how you like it. Now, you’re in pretty good shape for a man your age, although I don’t know how often you run to the tops of skyscrapers. We’re going to make it interesting. We’re going to put a time limit on it. I’m going to give you twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty—”

  “That seems more than enough time. When they had a race to get to the top of the Freedom Tower, there were people who did it in under fifteen. So I think I’m being generous. The only thing is, the clock starts ticking as soon as you get on the elevator to go down.”

  “This is … and what if I’m late?”

  “You heard the four explosions that took out the stairwells. There’s a fifth bomb just waiting to go off that will pretty much take off the top of this building. Everyone here, including myself, will die. So, if you decide to run away, to not come back, that’s what’s going to happen.”

  The mayor stood there, speechless.

  Barbara leaned forward, close enough to the mayor to whisper to him and be heard.

  She said, “You should get going.”

  Richard Headley’s eyes met hers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything.”

  Barbara felt as though the room was spinning.

  Then the mayor looked at Arla, took both her hands in his, and squeezed. “What a wonderful young woman you’ve turned out to be. I’ve only had an instant to be proud of you.”

  Arla appeared to be on the verge of fainting. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “Time’s a-wastin’,” Vallins said.

  Headley let go of Arla’s hands.

  Vallins looked at Barbara and said, “Do me a solid and set the timer on your phone to twenty minutes.”

  “Okay,” Barbara said with feigned calm. She reached into her clutch and brought out her phone. At that moment, it dinged. An incoming email.

  “That’ll be from me,” Vallins told her. “Sent on a delay. You can read it later, if you get the chance. Got the timer ready?”

  She fiddled with some settings, then said, “Ready.”

  “Hold it up and show me,” Vallins asked, and she did. Vallins looked at the mayor. “How about you? Set to go?”

  Headley swallowed and said, “I’m ready.”

  “We’re on ninety-eight, but call me when you get to the ninety-seventh floor.” Vallins smiled. “You have my number. I’ll send an elevator to bring you up the last story.”

  Headley nodded that he understood. He reached into his jacket to make sure he had his phone. He looked at it, brought up Vallins’s number
, then returned it to his pocket.

  Vallins, keeping the gun trained on him, entered some instructions into the remote control elevator device with his other hand. Seconds later, an elevator car arrived. Vallins swept his arm gracefully toward it, inviting the mayor to board.

  Headley walked forward, got into the car, turned and looked at the crowd, his chin quivering.

  Vallins pressed another button and the door closed. He then looked at Barbara and said, “Go.”

  She tapped Start on the timer app and held the phone up to show him.

  Vallins smiled. “Don’t you go pausing it on me now, or I’m gonna be mad.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ve got some time to kill while we wait for Richard to return,” he said to everyone. “Go ahead and enjoy yourselves, have a good time, enjoy the food.” He pursed this lips. “I’ll tell you this. If anyone’s offering, I wouldn’t say no to a shrimp.”

  Seventy-One

  Jerry Bourque was hunched over, hands on his knees, looking down into the shaft where he’d lost his inhaler.

  “Oh, fuck,” he said. But then he craned his neck around to get a peek up the shaft instead of down. “What the hell was that?”

  “I heard four blasts,” Delgado said, standing beside him and briefly placing a comforting hand on his back. She felt it rise and fall in rhythm with the wheezes emanating from his throat.

  She glanced back down the hallway, at the four apartment doors.

  “I can’t believe no one came out to see what’s going on,” she said.

  Bourque, slowly standing back up, said, “I read that people weren’t moving in until after the opening bash. And anyone who’s moved in already is probably at the party. Except for the top floor, the building’s probably deserted.”

  Delgado slowly shook her head. “Some folks are gonna want their deposit back.” She took a phone from the purse slung over her shoulder, tapped it. “This is Detective Lois Delgado. I’m with Detective Jerry Bourque and we are on the sixty-fifth floor of the Top of the Park. The elevators have been disabled and we heard explosions that sound like they’re coming from the top. Send everything.” She listened to the person on the other end, said, “Got it,” and then ended the call.

  “What?” Bourque asked.

  “They know. Tons of 911 calls coming in. Look, how are you doing? You sound like a tea kettle.”

  Bourque took several breaths, listened to the air struggling to get through his windpipe.

  “I’ll be okay. Come on, we have to get up there.”

  Delgado shook her head adamantly. “No. No way. It’s like forty more stories. You take the stairs down, I’ll head up.”

  “You’re not going up there alone. God knows what’s happened.”

  “You’ll fucking kill yourself if you go up there.”

  “No,” he said, and wheezed. “I can do it.”

  “There’s backup coming. You don’t—”

  “Yeah, well, we’re about sixty flights of stairs ahead of whoever’s coming next to help out.” He reached out and put a hand on his partner’s shoulder. “It’s in my head. There’s—” and he stopped for another breath “—nothing actually wrong with me. I just … I just have to focus, and maybe I can get my wind back.”

  “No, you have—”

  “Quiz me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Give me a category.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “It’s a trick my doctor gave me. I think about something else, other than my breathing. Concentrate on a subject. Like the city’s tallest buildings—although, right now, that’s probably a bad choice. You know, five Spielberg movies. Name all the different Star Trek series, or what years the Yankees have won the World Series, or—”

  “I’ve got one,” Delgado said.

  Bourque blinked. “Okay. Good. Hit me.”

  “Name five Ryan Gosling movies.”

  The corner of his mouth curled up. “Good one.”

  Wheeze.

  “Okay. Um, the Blade Runner sequel, whatever they called that.”

  “That’s one.” Delgado held up one finger.

  “And La La Land,” he said.

  Wheeze.

  “That’s two. Three to go.”

  “Uh … the one where he was driving the car.”

  “I need a title,” Delgado said. “I’m cutting you some slack, missing the title of the Blade Runner sequel. But for this I want the title.”

  Bourque closed his eyes for a second. “Oh, fuck, of course. Drive.”

  “That’s three.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Wheeze.

  “There was that funny detective one he did, with Russell Crowe. Good Guys. No, The Nice Guys.”

  “Well done,” Delgado said. “Just one more.”

  “God, this is tough. Maybe if I dreamt about him every night like you do I’d—”

  “No excuses,” Delgado said.

  “Oh!” he said, snapping his fingers. “That funny superhero. Deadpool.”

  Wheeze.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was Ryan Reynolds.”

  “They’re not the same actor?”

  Delgado’s eyes softened. “You’re still short of breath. I can hear it. It sounds like you’re getting worse. Jerry, how bad can this get? Without your puffer?”

  “Bad,” he said. He had moved to a sitting position, his back to a short stretch of wall behind open elevator doors.

  “We need to get you help. We need to get paramedics up here.”

  “Too long,” he wheezed. “Too far up.”

  “Well, shit, what do we do? Christ, you need mouth-to-mouth?”

  He had just enough air to chuckle. “That sounds lovely, but I don’t think it’ll do anything.”

  “There’s got to be something. Look, I don’t want to leave you here, but I’ve got to head up. If you don’t move, if you don’t exert yourself, can you get enough air into your lungs that you’re not going to fucking die on—”

  They heard a scream.

  It had come from one of the elevator shafts.

  Bourque managed to shift his position in time to see, a heartbeat later, a tuxedoed man past the open door immediately to their right.

  Going down. In a hurry.

  Bourque and Delgado gasped, staring for several seconds into the space where the man had appeared for only a millisecond. If they had blinked, they would have missed him.

  Together, they moved tentatively to the opening and peered over the edge, Delgado standing and Bourque on his knees. Then Delgado looked up, as if checking to see whether more were headed their way.

  They both moved back from the opening and looked at each other, each taking several breaths as they waited for their pulses to stop racing.

  “Hey,” said Delgado.

  “What?” Bourque said.

  “Listen.”

  Bourque thought, Didn’t we just do this a minute ago?

  He tilted his head, raised his chin, as if putting his ear to the wind.

  “I don’t hear anything,” he said.

  “Me neither,” Delgado said.

  He looked at her, confused. Then it hit him.

  “The wheezing,” he said. He took several deep breaths without making a sound. “Son of a bitch.”

  What had the doctor told him? About how a sudden shock might reverse the psychosomatic condition?

  Just to be sure, he breathed in and out half a dozen more times, and felt no restrictions in his air passages.

  “I know where the stairs are,” he said. “I’ve got the book.”

  Seventy-Two

  When the elevator doors opened onto the lobby of Top of the Park, Richard Headley was met with a crowd. Police officers, firefighters, and paramedics blocked his path.

  “Out of my way!” he said. “Out of my way!”

  As a few emergency workers stepped back to allow him to get off the elevator, others were getting
on.

  “No!” he said. “He’s controlling it! If you get on it, you’ll die!”

  Once he was out of the car, and the others had exited, it began to go up.

  Headley wasn’t waiting around to watch. He was already looking for the closest stairwell door.

  “Mr. Mayor.” A woman’s voice. Headley ignored it as he spotted a sign pointing to the stairs.

  “Mr. Mayor!” Sharper this time, but he still did not respond as he looked for a way back to the top.

  “Richard.”

  He stopped, turned, and standing there was Chief Annette Washington.

  She reached out, touched his arm, and asked softly, “Do you know?”

  It took him a beat to understand what she was asking him. Everyone in the lobby, he realized, would have seen his son plummet past one of the open elevator doors. Glover would have had only a few below-ground-level floors left to fall after they’d seen him. Headley nodded solemnly and said, “Glover.”

  She nodded back.

  “Can I … can you see him?”

  “There’s four levels below street level,” she said. “He’s down there. We’re going to get him out, Richard.” She paused. “I don’t think you should look.”

  “I will,” he said. “But not now. I have to go back up. There’s not much time.”

  “What’s going on? What were those explosions?”

  He spotted a door to the stairs. “I’ll have to run and talk,” he said, breaking away from her.

  She ran after him. In the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, he told her, in bullet form, what had transpired. That his aide Chris Vallins was behind the elevator events. That he’d given the mayor only a few minutes to climb his way back to the ninety-eighth floor. That if he didn’t make it, another bomb would go off, killing everyone at the party.

  “Why?” asked Washington, one step behind him. “Why is he doing all this?”

  Headley stopped, briefly, on the landing of the third floor and looked at her. “I’ve done terrible things,” he said.

  “You can’t do this,” she said. “We’ll send up a team. We’ll find a way—”

  He gripped both her arms above the wrists and forced her to look into his eyes. “Annette, there is no time. Good-bye.”