One of Them (Vigil #2)

by Loudermilk, Arvin

  “You’re being vague.”

  “I have to be. It’ll be easier to show you than to tell you. There’s another exit, a private one. It can be accessed from the bullpen.”

  Sam stood up and huffed. “Me, I actually will be going out through the garage. And I should probably be doing that right about now. It’ll be best to have a little distance between me leaving and you leaving. Not that we’ll fool anyone for long that way, but it won’t hurt to make them look in two separate directions.”

  “You’ll page me, right?” Mac said.

  “Yep. When I clear the building, when I get onto my flight, and when I’m all set up in my new palatial estate.” Sam handed the duffel over to me. “You might as well take this,” he said. “You never know.”

  “Do you have your own getaway plan as well?” I asked Mac.

  “I do. It’s similar to Sam’s. But I’m sticking with you until you’re settled.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. But Sam did.

  “You had better watch out for this one,” he told me. “I think he wants to play house.”

  “Wait.” I grabbed him by the arm and deepened my voice, making sure my seriousness was understood. “I cannot thank you enough. All of this has been above and beyond. Totally above and beyond.”

  He shrugged, as if what he had just done was an everyday thing. “I’ve been planning retirement for a while now. This just moves up the date a couple of years. And getting you out of that hellhole was well worth it. Things had to be made up for. You wore the uniform. You’re one of us. It was a matter of principal.” He turned to Mac. “Well, my friend, it’s been swell.”

  “It sure has.”

  “Be seeing you?”

  “Be seeing you.”

  Sam left us, leaving the door cracked open behind him. I felt sick, hating myself for being the horrible, life-absorbing succubus that I was. I owed these two men everything—and I could never, ever repay them.

  “Ready?” Mac said, his lack of enthusiasm showing.

  “I am.”

  A beat later, and we were on the move too.

  Safe and Sound

  The bullpen was as still as a tomb. Its desks abandoned; its adjoining offices dark.

  Mac and I entered the open hall workspace via the elevator, walking briskly toward the only sign of life the place had—a lit office along the south wall, about thirty-five yards ahead of us. My eyes alert, the duffel strung over my back, and the Glock snug in my grasp, I asked Mac if he had ever seen the place looking so inactive and inert before. Were days off like this a normal occurrence? How often could an entire police division just take off, even a specialty branch like this one was? His answer shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. He was just as wrapped up in the bullshit as everyone else.

  “The Detail is not LAPD,” he told me in that tiresome, matter-of-fact way that he had. “We never were. This a federal task force in the strictest of sense. The local components were only for show.”

  “For me, you mean?”

  “Oh, we started pretending way before you. We always operated with mayoral sanction, but next to no one knew that no actual locals were involved in our group, which helped keep our activities secret, and got us access to crime scenes right away without any intra-bureau entanglements. Until the bosses did what they did to you, I always saw this as a sweetheart deal. I liked working here. And I liked what we did.”

  “That means you’re not a detective.”

  “Special Agent Mac Douglass, at your service,” he said, and then pushed a rolling chair out of our path and vaulted two paces ahead of me.

  I raised my voice and sneered. “If you hadn’t just saved my life, I would be beating your ass to a pulp right now.”

  We arrived at the lighted office. He went in first. I followed.

  “On the job, sometimes you’ve got to stretch the truth a bit,” he said. “I should not have to explain that to you. You may be a rookie, but you’re no rube.”

  Pissed off as hell, I planted myself at the front of the glass enclosure and kept one eye on the elevator we came out of, and another on the nearby emergency exit. “You lie to perps,” I said, unable to let it go. “You don’t lie to the people you’re working with.”

  “I lie when necessary. Whenever necessary. But let’s agree to disagree.” Mac swept behind his desk, laid down his rifle and kneeled. I got up onto my tiptoes to take a glance at what he was doing. His safe was back there, embedded into the wall, about eighteen inches up from the white plastic baseboards. He spun in his secret combination and drew open the weighty door. He dug straight in and pulled out a stack of papers. A reserve sidearm was resting on top of them, a .45. He looked back at me, thought about it, and then placed the weapon back inside the safe and closed the door.

  He rose back up and said, “Can you bring me the duffel?”

  I slipped it off my back and hauled it over to him. Mac pointed at the western print rug beside the desk and I dropped it there. He ducked down again and unzipped the nylon bag. I returned to my watchful position near the door.

  “I’m taking everything I had in there,” he said as he set the paperwork from the safe down onto the tranquilizer weapons. “Most of it has to do with you and Jessup anyway. We don’t have time to be choosy.”

  “What else do you have in here that we could use?”

  He hesitated. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Unrelated files. Hard copies.” I gestured at the corner of the desk. “What about your computer? What do you keep on there? Can’t we just throw that into the bag as well?”

  “It’s too heavy.”

  “Well, as you say, I’m kinda strong now.”

  Sporting a wide grin, he snapped his fingers. “No, I’ve got a better idea.” He opened up the bottom left desk drawer and removed a tan notebook. He set it down in the center of the blotter and flipped through it. It was full of computer disks, clipped into the rings with semiopaque sheet holders. “These floppies contain every case that I’ve worked on here. We don’t need the computer.” He closed the book back up and tossed it onto the pile in the bag. He began rummaging through another drawer. He yanked out these flat and square plastic cartridges one at a time, until he had an eventual stack of seven. “The zip disks are computer-related as well. They’re filled with back ups of what I have on my actual machine.” He pushed out his chest proudly. “I’m a Nineties man, and we’re careful that way. We’re not losing our work in some surprise system crash.”

  “How annoyingly efficient of you,” I said. “Is there anything else?”

  He glanced around. “Not in here. And I’m not sure we should be raiding the other offices. The sun’ll be down in ten minutes. It’s most likely all right for us to leave now. I’m just waiting on one more thing.”

  “And that is?”

  “Sam’s page. I want to know he’s clear before we make our move.”

  Just as Mac finished speaking, the phone on his desk warbled. Line one was flashing red as it rang.

  I went on immediate alert. “That couldn’t be him, could it?”

  Mac shook his head. “He would never call. You heard him say it, he was going to page. Sam always does what he says.”

  “Unless he wasn’t able to.”

  The phone continued to ring, chirping four more times.

  “Should I pick it up?” Mac asked.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “What do you want to do then?”

  “We should probably get our asses out of here, but you still haven’t told me how we’re going to do that.”

  “Castellano’s office.” The phone stopped ringing and Mac put the last of the computer disks into the duffel and handed it back to me. I whisked it over my shoulder and I waited for him to regain his rifle from behind the desk. Once he was back standing, we left the office and head
ed across the blackened bullpen.

  “So what’s in Castellano’s office?” I asked him.

  “There’s a door in there. It’s inside his private bathroom. It looks like a utility closet, but it’s actually a roof exit.”

  “Roof exit?” I said, louder than I should have, not quite getting how an exit onto the roof was going to be of any help in a building twelve stories tall.

  As I was groaning my discontentment, on the other side of the bullpen, the elevator car dinged and its doors slid open. Mac and I dropped down below the desk line so fast I was surprised there wasn’t smoke coming out of our asses.

  “Who the fuck was that?” I whispered.

  Mac tilted his head. “The person who was calling?”

  A male voice boomed out. “Hello? Agent Douglass? This is Sergeant Simmons. I need you to respond to me at once, sir. I saw someone at the top of the room. Was that you, sir? I’m aware that you are up here. You signed in. Please, say something. I need you to identify yourself.” A flashlight beam started crisscrossing the area. If the Simmons guy got even halfway across the bullpen, he’d have been able to spot us easy.

  Mac slid his rifle all the way under the desk. “I can get rid of him,” he said. “You crawl out of here and get to the roof and wait for me. If I’m not there in ten minutes—” He shrugged. “Hopefully I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  He jerked upward and raised his arms high. The roving flashlight found him an instant later.

  No Time

  I ditched the duffel down the nearest aisle, remaining on my knees as I looked around for someplace to hide. There was no way I was leaving Mac on his own.

  The flashlight beam held steady, and Simmons’s radio crackled. Ahead five feet, a free-standing kiosk with a computer terminal seemed to be my only refuge. I ducked behind it. It had a decent width. If I kept low and quiet, and the lights stayed off, I wouldn’t be discovered. Not if I didn’t want to be.

  “Sorry about the confusion,” Mac said to Simmons as he was closing in on him. “I tripped and fell when I heard the elevator open. I’m totally embarrassed. I’m a fucking klutz.”

  “You can put your arms down,” Simmons said, and then chuckled. “What were you doing out here in the dark?”

  “Coming back from taking a whiz. I didn’t want to turn the lights on. I never do. It’s a waste. I knew the way, and the pisser is not that far from my office. I just wasn’t expecting visitors. You shocked the hell out of me when you came in. It was like I suddenly forgot how to walk.”

  “You took a good long while to respond, you know.”

  “Yeah. I was hoping you’d go away. I didn’t want to have this conversation.”

  “Then your bathroom break was also the reason you didn’t answer your phone?”

  “My phone was ringing? I didn’t realize. Was it you?”

  “No, it was downstairs. They were calling to inform you that I was on the way up.”

  “Huh. What are you doing here?”

  “Colonel Carter is making a big delivery. No one can be walking the halls while he’s doing it.”

  “Is there anyone in the building but me?”

  “You’re the only one who’s not where they’re supposed to be.”

  “But I am where supposed to be. In my office.”

  “On a holiday?”

  “Yeah, a holiday. My caseload is damned heavy at the moment. I have work to do.”

  I could not let this go on any longer. The two guards beneath my cell and the one in the monitor room wouldn’t have been able to answer calls like the one Mac had just gotten. They’d be discovered any second, if they hadn’t been already.

  Simmons’s radio made an ugly noise, and I half expected a call to come through informing this bumbling dipshit to detain Mac for treason. It ended up being static, but that specific call was coming—and soon. I had to act, and without the Glock. That would have made too much noise.

  I stood up slowly, attempting to be as inconspicuous as a blonde, fair-skinned woman in a white t-shirt could be. And I got lucky. Simmons was too engaged in his conversation with Mac to notice fuck all. Only a measly twenty feet separated him from me. More than close enough. I pounced—skittering over the tops of the desks and diving towards the security dunce, my arms outstretched. He saw me coming at him at the last possible second, which meant he couldn’t brace himself for the blow. I collided into his torso, wrapped my arms around his back, and drove him into the floor. With his gun snapped into its holster, the radio was my first get. I then pinned him down with my kneecaps, covering his mouth with my left hand and unhooking the radio from his belt with my right. I slid it away.

  “Keep an eye on that for me,” I told Mac, my hand feeling the heat of Simmons’s blood rushing beneath his skin.

  “Don’t you hurt him,” Mac warned.

  I cocked my fist back, all prepared to beat the dude unconscious. But not knowing how strong I actually was made me think twice. I could have caved in his skull. My abilities and impulses could not be trusted, so what else could I do but follow Mac’s lead. And he didn’t want the guy hurt.

  “Well,” I said. “We can’t leave him here like this.”

  Simmons kept on struggling, kicking his legs out like a wild man. It’s not like he had any chance of getting away from me, but he didn’t realize that.

  Mac retrieved his rifle and put a dart into Simmons’s left calf. The TAC officer stopped squirming almost instantaneously.

  I got up, pulling my hand away with caution. “I hope that dosage wasn’t set for me.”

  “It wasn’t. It’s a low-grade mix,” Mac said. “I never had any intention of shooting you.”

  “Then you’re a moron, and have no idea what I really am.”

  “I know that you didn’t kill him, even when you had good reason to.” He took a breath. “And you came back to help me.”

  “Only because I owe you.”

  “It’s more than that.”

  I considered commandeering the radio and using it to keep track of our pursuers. But that was a 50/50 proposition at best. The thing could’ve had a tracking device installed. Even the mere possibility of that made it not worth the risk. I stepped over it and retrieved the duffel.

  “We’re cutting this close,” I said, hurrying Mac forward with a thump on his back. “They’re going to find those prisoners you tied up any second now.”

  A Helluva Leap

  As we cut through Castellano’s office, I eyed a covered Rolodex sitting enticingly on the edge of his desk. I snatched it up on impulse, thinking it might be some assistance with the ID numbers on the briefing papers we had just pilfered.

  The bathroom door we came in looking for was already half open. In bunched succession, Mac and I squeezed inside the orange-scented room. He flicked on the lights. The roof exit was along the side wall. Mac tried to open it, but it was locked. I told him to let me take care of it. I slipped the Rolodex inside the duffel, zipped it back up, and grabbed the silver-plated handle of the door, jiggling it. Breaking this kind of handle would have only forced me to fiddle with the locking mechanism afterward, so I just stepped back and kicked the thing in. It went sailing off its hinges, clanking backward into an unfinished cinder block wall.

  “After you,” I said, giving Mac another hastening push.

  On the other side of the opening was a staircase, leading upward. Mac hit the bottom rung first. As he scaled topside, I nipped at his heels. He was quick, but not quick enough for me—not with seven flights to go.

  “You’d think Castellano would’ve had a damn elevator installed,” I said as we went. “I don’t know how this is convenient in any way.”

  “He likes to exercise in here,” Mac replied. “And he only uses a chopper every so often.”

  A beep went off on Mac’s belt. It was the page we had been waiting for from Sam. He
had made it through. Mac’s shoulders slumped in relief, but his legs kept pumping, skipping every other step up.

  When we finally reached the top, Mac was worn out and winded. I was fine, although quite anxious to breathe fresh air again. But before that was going to happen, we had another door in our way, and another lock. I disposed of both with a sharp bang of my palm.

  Winds gusted through, and the clamor of the city pounded me with a fury. It was like I could hear everything at once. Literally—everything. Thinking was next to impossible.

  I walked outside and looked around. The sky was darkened, but by no means as black as it was going to get. To my left, there was a red and white helicopter parked on the tarmac. I thought for sure that was our way out. Mac was going to fly us away—of course he was. I hustled toward the waiting aircraft.

  He called me back to him. “Not that way. This way.” He held his arm out to the north, looking like a loyal and scruffy pointing dog.

  I came up beside him, but all I could see was the building ledge, a four-foot stony enclosure encircling the roof. I gripped my hands on its lip. There was a parking deck across the street at an almost equal level to the structure we were on, but down just slightly, less than a floor. The sound of vehicles speeding and honking beneath me was about all my mind could take in.

  “Think you can make it?” Mac asked me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “My head is super cloudy. You’re going to have to explain things as if I were stupid.”

  He brushed back his blowing brown hair. “To get away—you are going to have to jump across to that parking garage, with me in your arms. It’s only a four-lane roadway down there. I’ve seen you vamps jump way, way farther than that.”

  “I’m not in control of my body at the moment.” I clutched his arm to steady myself. “My senses are going crazy.”

  “We don’t have much of a choice, Grace. We’re going to have to do this. You’re going to have to do this.” He helped me take the duffel off. “Throw this across first. Chuck it hard.”