Deadly Interest

by Julie Hyzy

  Seconds later, I followed, just as I heard David’s feet hit the first rungs.

  He called to us, but I jumped out the small doorway, I found myself hit by a cold wind outside on the building’s roof and a warm flush of relief for getting out of that shaft. Maya and I spun, shutting the door behind us. There was no lock on the outside.

  I searched the flat area for something big to use as a brace, but there was nothing.

  The city surrounded us, taller on every side. I had a wild hope that someone looking out their tall apartment window would see us and call the police. But these weren’t apartment buildings; these were offices. And I couldn’t imagine anyone working this late on a Sunday night.

  I tried to think.

  The door we held was set into a square rooftop structure, about six feet high, and the same dimensions on each of its sides. It was an extension of the shaft below. Stretching slightly, I could see four other similar structures in places that matched up with the three other elevators below, plus one extra. That meant that there must be other doors leading back down. If only we could keep him here long enough for an escape.

  “Hold tight,” I said. I ran around to where I’d detected a shadow that didn’t ‘fit.’ Bingo. A piece of machinery—I was unsure what it was—stood against one of the nearby walls. It looked like a steel construction horse, but much heavier.

  Wind whipped hair into my face, sent icy stings into my eyes. I dragged the metal horse, using every bit of untapped energy I didn’t know I had. Every step felt like an hour, and as I drew nearer to Maya, pushing hard against the door, I felt as though I was being pulled further away. I grunted with the effort, finally coming around the rear, and pushing it into place.

  We shoved it tight, wedging it as best we could, making it harder for him to break through. We needed time to find a way out.

  “Shh,” I said, holding my finger to my lips. I pressed my ear against the cold metal door, the iciness against the tender skin making me grimace. I listened.

  I couldn’t hear him coming. I heard nothing at all.

  Maya listened, too. We stared at each other, faces inches apart, the steam from our breath curling upward toward the night sky. Nothing.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing Maya, throwing one last hopeful look at the barricade we’d set up. “We gotta go.”

  I made my way to the closest shaft structure, feeling my way around it in the dark, in search of the access door. Much is said about big city lights, but here, up on the twelfth-floor roof of a building dwarfed by neighboring superstructures, there was only the light from the sliver of moon above and leftover Chicago brightness from tall metal and glass walls. The sides of these upper shaft things were painted black, the door black, too, so I relied on my touch to find the opening.

  We’d only been up here for minutes—three, maybe five at most—but my fingers already felt the paralysis of chill. “Go check that other one,” I said, in a whisper. Maya raced around me to the third shaft and set to work. I didn’t want to crawl through another shaft, but I knew now I could do it if we had to.

  Moments later I heard her frustrated cry of effort. “I . . . can’t . . . get . . . it.”

  Neither could I.

  I tried squeezing my frozen fingertips into the narrow door indentation, running along the length of the perimeter by touch, trying to find some place where the door would give. Flat-handed I covered the door itself in a concentric-circle search, knowing there had to be some knob, or other device capable of providing access. “Damn,” I said, pounding my angry fist against the metal panel. I glanced to my left; our barricade on the other shaft remained in place.

  Something was wrong.

  I moved back to the metal horse, leaned against the cold metal wall again. I heard nothing. No movement up the ladder, no sound of exertion from inside.

  I knew.

  “Maya,” I shouted.

  She was next to me in a second. “He’s not coming up this way.” I pointed toward the door that had given us roof access. My gaze swept the area. Four additional structures. Two wouldn’t open for us. That left two more.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Maya’s teeth chattered; she hugged herself, knees bending up and down to keep warm. “Where is he?”

  I shook my head.

  “We’ll go down the way we came,” I said, starting to drag the horse barricade back, away from the door. I had a moment’s terror thinking that he might just be waiting behind the metal door for us to open it. But I’d gotten to know the man. He waited for no one. He was on his way up here, from some other direction.

  Together we pulled the heavy piece of machinery, moving it as fast as we could. So much easier with both of us handling it, we heaved it just far enough to give us clear access to the hatch. We wrenched at the squeaking metal door, and the hairs on the back of my neck zinged to attention.

  I couldn’t climb back into a shaft. I couldn’t.

  I had to.

  “Go ahead,” I said, keeping a shivering arm on the open door, lifting my head from our efforts, intending to keep a terse eye on the remaining empty areas of the roof. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “No you won’t,” David said.

  I whirled.

  He’d come up from behind me, and now pointed the gun at Maya, who’d just begun to lower her right foot behind her. “Get back up here.”

  David’s eyes reflected the lights around us with an angry glitter. There were yellow streaks of firefighting chemicals on his clothes and in patches across his face. Grimacing, he blinked repeatedly, inching fingers under his glasses, to rub at his eyes, one at a time, never shifting his stare from us. I looked around the lonely expanse. How had he gotten here? As if in answer to my unasked question, he lifted his chin, tilted it sideways; I glanced that way. He’d come through the spare access door that led up from the stairway.

  With the visceral impact of a body blow, the realization hit me that I had nothing left with which to fight.

  “Did you really kill a man, Alex?” David shook his head, as though in appreciation. “You promised to tell me all about it. You promised me a ride on the Ferris wheel too.” He sighed. “I’m very disappointed.”

  He was backlit by the thousands of pinpoint lights from nearby buildings, the crisp night wind lifting the short tufts of his hair. In another situation, I could have been enjoying the view, and the feel of freedom up here. Another flashback, this one of his mustache grazing the side of my face as we gazed outward over the lake at Navy Pier. This time when my body shuddered, it shook with disgust.

  Maya stood close to me, we stared together at the barrel of the weapon that seemed uncertain as to whom to kill first. My chin trembled from the cold and from fear; David words taking me back to the moment I’d pushed a man into the path of an oncoming train.

  “You’re not going to be able to kill me,” he said with a curious lightness to his tone. “I’m indestructible.”

  I didn’t have anything to say.

  “But there’s no other way out, is there?”

  I shook my head, tried to keep my legs from giving out. The image of Owen’s head taking the point-blank shot ricocheted through my mind and I saw my own head, a bullet in its center, jerking back with the impact of my last life experience. I tried to speak, cleared my throat, and tried again. “What now?”

  He smiled. “Back downstairs.” He wiped at his nose, and coughed. “This way ladies,” he said, stepping backward as though to allow us passage in front of him and indicating our direction with the gun. We didn’t move.

  “I am sorry about this, Alex,” he said. The wind whipped his words from his lips, but I heard them.

  In an instant I saw how it would go down. He’d kill me, then Maya, and somehow make it look like some tragic murder-suicide. George would know better. George would put it together.

  But that gave me little comfort. I’d still be dead.

  Desperation clawed through my paralysis of fear—and took over
.

  I couldn’t stop myself. I leapt at David, swiping the glasses from his face with my left hand and scratching at his eyes with my right. The gun went off with a loud, powerful blast that made me clamp my teeth together in pained anticipation.

  Though it took a split-second, time decelerated for me. My body went through a quick checklist of pain sensors even as I kicked and strove to deliver brutal blows—my single goal, to grab the gun.

  I hadn’t been hit.

  But Maya had.

  She fell backward—I was aware of her long nails grasping at David, trying to help me. Now they pulled away almost elegantly as gravity drew her body downward. I didn’t know where she’d been hit. I couldn’t take the time to find out. Fight or flight had kicked in, my instincts taken over by some wild animal within. The part of myself that remained human, begged me to stop fighting, to try to help her—futile an effort as that may be.

  Instead, I set into him with nothing more than blind, deaf, determination. I felt nothing, I heard nothing. The world had taken on a high-pitched wail that might have been coming from my soul. I attacked. Moving, writhing, biting, kicking—aware of nothing more than staying alive.

  He twisted, turned, dragging me with him, then bumped into the open metal door, causing him to stumble, his grip on me to loosen.

  The sound of the gun clanking to the rooftop floor near my foot was what finally broke into my screaming. David’s voice, repeating my name as he struggled to subdue my flailing extremities, sounded like an echo from far away. He couldn’t stop me because he didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was doing. Sheer impulse urged me to drive hard against his bulk with the shaft yawning behind him.

  Imbalance. His.

  I sensed it as he tottered at the brink of the opening.

  One more push.

  I backed up a half step and then rammed my shoulder into his chest.

  His arms flailed, his back jutted into the darkness behind him, but at the very last second his hands caught the sides of the door—suspending him there, his breath panting in labored grunts. I could almost see the rage gather in his chest as he dragged himself forward, bellowing, deep with effort. His knuckles whitened, he hauled himself up, about to stand.

  I twisted, reaching down, and whisked the revolver from the ground, knowing this was the moment of decision. In the half-second it took to right myself, and steady the gun with both hands, I knew I was ready. With a deep hatred in my heart I’d never encountered before, I squeezed that trigger. Hard.

  Light and sound burst forward in the night, as I felt the impact from a recoil I hadn’t anticipated.

  As though meant only for me to hear, over the din of screams and exploding gunpowder, the bullet made a quiet chunk into the meat of David’s flesh. I opened my eyes long enough to watch the soles of his feet tumble away.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  “Maya?” I dropped the weapon to lean over her body, lying prone—face-up where she’d fallen. I tapped my fingers along the side of her cheek, trying to determine, in the dark, where she’d taken the hit. Faint curls of breath wisped out of her mouth and nose at regular intervals. Thank God. She was still alive.

  She’d fallen close to the shaft structure. In its shadow, with her wearing dark clothing, and my mind still processing David’s attack, I had a difficult time finding the site of the bullet’s entry. I didn’t want to move her, but neither did I want to leave her alone, if there was anything I could do to keep her alive.

  I needed to get help.

  Pulling my jacket off, I used it as a blanket, to cover her till I got back. “It doesn’t look bad at all,” I lied, still not seeing where she’d taken the bullet. “You’re going to be fine,” I added, then headed back down the shaft.

  Facing fears makes them go away.

  I’d heard that enough times, seen enough reality shows, and read enough psychobabble to believe there might be some truth in that, but I hadn’t ever seen the need to test the theory myself.

  Now, as I made my way down the ladder, I found that my elevator shaft nightmare had less power to intimidate me. The fear of the unknown, the strange ominous feel I’d always had not knowing what loomed above, didn’t paralyze me. I was at the top. I was here. And there was nothing but me and the sense that I’d made it.

  I processed all this even as I made my careful way down the same ladder we’d climbed only short minutes ago. David’s body had hit the top of the car below me, and he lay on his back, arms and legs spread like a fully-clothed version of the DaVinci depiction of man in a pentacle except for the tilt where his left thigh had impaled itself on an upright piece of metal. My stomach gave a queasy pitch at the sight; I breathed out my mouth and turned away.

  His right hand lolled over the edge, into the open escape hatch. I moved it, none too gently, in my effort to rush.

  “Alex.”

  I whipped my head around at the whispered word.

  “Help me.”

  His lips curled back, baring teeth clenched in pain. Eyes tight, he took sharp, hesitant breaths.

  I’d been about to lower myself through, with no thought other than getting help for Maya, but the realization that my words might be the last he’d ever hear stopped me for the briefest moment.

  “Hang in there,” I said, then realized with gut-punch impact that I’d said those very words to Barton while we waited for the parameds to arrive. “Help will be here soon.”

  * * * * *

  After calling 911, calling George, then getting back up to the roof via the stairway this time, I waited with Maya, encouraged by her occasional returns to consciousness. The bullet had torn through her left shoulder, and though she’d bled enough for me to find the wound in the darkness, I knew she was strong. I hoped and prayed that she make it.

  The police and paramedics arrived simultaneously, allowing me to move off to a far corner of the rooftop while they scrambled to work on Maya. Moments after their appearance on the scene, they’d scoped out the area and called for a helicopter.

  My teeth chattered, but I stayed up-top, hugging my knees as I sat far enough to be out of their way. One of the techs had given me a blanket, and I tugged it close, grateful for its warmth.

  I winced at the throbbing shoop-shoop sound of the helicopter’s whirling blades as it touched down. Turning my head from the cold gusts of wind particles it shot into my face, I whispered positive thoughts for Maya, as they loaded her stretcher and took off for Northwestern Hospital.

  George found me there, huddled, too tired, too overcome, to move.

  “I thought you promised me you wouldn’t get into a situation again,” he said, lightly, but the ambient light reflecting in his eyes told another story. He crouched to my position. “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Let’s get you downstairs.”

  * * * * *

  They’d transported David Dewars via ambulance to Stroger Hospital, and I took a small measure of comfort in knowing he and Maya wouldn’t be in the same emergency room. I worried for her.

  George thought I ought to be checked out, too, but I hadn’t suffered more than a few bad scrapes and a couple of hot bruises. “I’m fine,” I said. “But is there any way we can know how Maya’s doing?”

  We’d settled ourselves in the bank’s lobby, the three other glass elevators that had been sitting open-mouthed and dark on the main floor when we’d arrived, were now moving up and down between our level, ten, and twelve, filled with aftermath people.

  George pulled a uniformed officer over, spoke to him briefly and then sat down by me. I’d taken a place on the tile floor, eschewing the building’s security man’s insistence that I sit in his wheeled vinyl chair. I wanted to ask where he’d been when we needed him, but I declined his offer politely instead.

  Now, I leaned my head against the wall, staring upward at the dark skylit ceiling above.

  “Start from the beginning,” George said, pulling out a notepad.

  I did.


  By the time I’d gotten to the part about Owen’s arrival, the young officer George had spoken to earlier returned, handing me a large Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Just cream?” the fellow said, with a look that asked if that was right.

  “Perfect,” I said, reaching up. The steam poured upward as I opened the lid, and the first sip, hot and familiar down my throat, brought a sting to my eyes. “Thank you,” I said, in an uneven voice.

  As he left, I started to resume the story, then suddenly remembering, I asked, “Jared. What about Jared?”

  George shook his head, not understanding.

  “When Dewars came, he said that the guy in the garage security had been ‘taken care of.’ What did he mean?”

  The look in his eyes told me I didn’t want to know.

  He shook his head. “Point-blank to the temple.”

  My body began to shake then, as if reacting to a systemic toxin—struggling to work the poison out before it claimed my life, too.

  “Talk to me,” George said.

  I did.

  He received a call moments later; Maya was in stable condition. Despite the blood loss, she was expected to pull through.

  David Dewars remained critical. I’d planted the bullet in his side. While I’d missed other major organs, the shot had pierced his bowel. The fall down the shaft had broken his back. Even if he survived, the chances of lifetime paralysis were enormous.

  I felt no triumph, no relief.

  I felt nothing at all.

  * * * * *

  After I’d answered every question I could, George drove me home. We were quiet for the short ride from Banner Bank to Lake Shore Drive. As he merged into the southbound traffic, George turned to me. “You did good.”

  I shook my head. “This isn’t the job I signed on for, you know. News research isn’t supposed to be a life-threatening occupation.”

  He nodded, his face set—expressionless—alternating blue and dark as we drove past street lights along the shoreline. I stared out the window for the rest of the ride.

  George came in with me to my aunt and uncle’s house. Uncle Moose answered the door, but the look on my face must have been enough because Lucy and Aunt Lena, both pajama-clad and bleary-eyed, rushed me to sit on the sofa, full of questions.