14

by Peter Clines

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Eddie nodded. He looked past Nate’s shoulder to the stack of mail crates. There were three of them now. One straddled the other two to make a short step-pyramid of returned issues and bundled flyers. Nate had spent most of the morning looking up suicides and population predictions.

  “You’re falling way behind,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t help that you’ve never gone as fast as some folks upstairs think you could.”

  Nate was confident that most of the people in the upstairs office thought this job was done by a machine or farmed out to another company. He doubted anyone past Eddie and the accountant even knew his name. “I’ve tried to explain,” he said, “that their estimates for how fast this can be done are impossible.”

  Eddie put his hands up. “Hey,” he said, “I’m on your side. And normally it’s no big deal if you’re slow. But this is getting kind of extreme, don’t you agree?”

  Nate sighed and nodded. In all fairness, he’d done maybe ten hours of work in the past week. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it’s getting a bit out of hand.”

  “I’m fighting to keep you and Anne and Zack on the payroll. But that means I need a hundred and ten percent from you guys, you know?” He waved a pizza-scented hand at the step-pyramid. “If someone came down and saw all this, they’d tell me to get rid of you.”

  “Right,” said Nate. “Sorry.”

  “What’s the problem? If it’s something I can help with, just let me know.”

  Nate saw the potential minefield ahead of him. “It’s not a problem,” he said after a long three seconds. “I just haven’t been getting a lot of sleep.”

  Eddie gave a sage nod. “Trouble at home?”

  “No,” he said, “nothing like that.”

  Eddie’s brow wrinkled up for a moment. Then his face split into a wide grin. “Ahhh,” he said. “Not getting any sleep that way.”

  A grenade landed in the middle of the minefield.

  “No,” said Nate. “No, that’s not it at all.”

  “You dog,” said Eddie. He gave Nate a punch in the shoulder that landed too hard. “What’s her name?”

  “Veek,” he said without thinking.

  “She hot?”

  “I...” An image from his dream appeared in his mind. Veek in her horn rims and an orange sweatshirt, next to Xela, naked with green hair. He pushed the picture away as fast as it had appeared and nodded for Eddie’s benefit. “Yeah. Yeah, she’s hot.”

  “Man, I remember those days,” said the heavy man. “Working all day, going home and being up all night.” He put deliberate emphasis on up.

  Nate tried very hard to keep an image of Eddie having sex from forming in his mind. It was like not thinking about a pink elephant. Or, in this case, a sunlight-deprived elephant that smelled like greasy pizza.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m a little obsessed. In a good way.”

  “Power to you, man,” said Eddie. “Where’d you meet her? At one of those nights out the editors organize?”

  “No,” said Nate. He thought of marching straight ahead. Surely there couldn’t be any mines left after that last blast. “She lives in my building.”

  Eddie’s eyebrows went up. “Really?”

  Nate nodded.

  “Kind of risky, don’t you think? I mean, if she’s hot and willing it’s sweet but if things go wrong, well, she’s always right there.”

  “Yeah, it’s not like that,” said Nate. “We’re both in it for the same thing, y’know?” He found religion and began praying he could get out of the conversation without creating any more details of his imaginary sex life.

  Eddie grinned and nodded again. “Cool,” he said. “Between you and me, I think it’s great. But, y’know, I can’t tell them that.” He looked at the ceiling, then back to the pyramid of returned mail. “You’ve got to tell her no for a couple nights and start banging things out here at the office.” He snickered. “Banging things out. That’s pretty funny.”

  Nate nodded. “Pretty funny.”

  Eddie nodded again and his face went slack. The grin was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “Okay, then,” he said. He leaned forward until his ass came away from the desk. It was like watching an avalanche in slow motion. “If you can get most of these done by next week, that’d be great.”

  “I’ll try,” said Nate. “It’d be a lot easier if I could have my hours back.”

  “Nah. Just work around them.”

  * * *

  There was a corkboard by the Kavach Building’s curving staircase. Normally it was decorated with rows of business cards or sheets of pizza coupons. When Nate got home all those things had been swept away and a fresh sheet of white paper was centered there. The handwriting was crisp and precise.

  To All Tenants:

  A family crisis requires that I leave town for a long weekend. I will be leaving Friday morning and will return the following Tuesday.

  Under normal circumstances I would not be gone for such a long period, especially not with the recent bout of vandalism. However, I have spoken with Toni from the management company and assured her there will be no problems on par with the ones which occurred last week.

  Please respect your fellow tenants. If there are emergencies, please contact Toni directly on her cell phone.

  Oskar Rommell

  Property Manager

  He doesn’t know, thought Nate. Toni-slash-Kathy’s secret identity was still safe from the people behind Locke Management. Probably, he realized, because she'd never sent him anything about the building’s history.

  Oskar gone for almost five days. They’d have lots of time to investigate.

  It was close to ten when someone banged on his door. Nate stood at the wall across from his kitchen, his arm stretched out to where the warning was written in blood. His eyes went to the door and he thought it was Oskar, here to grumble that Nate was thinking about the words under the paint.

  The knock came again. Three quick, solid thumps. He squinted through the peephole and saw a fish-eye view of Roger. He looked excited.

  Roger pushed his way in as soon as the door opened. “Bro,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Okay, remember I told you I’m doing this low budget indie thing?”

  Nate didn’t remember, but he nodded anyway.

  “Met the lead actress the other day. Smokin’ hot lady. She’s pretty cool, been talking with her and guess what? She speaks, like six different languages. One of ‘em’s Russian.”

  The picture Roger was trying to draw got a lot clearer.

  “Okay,” said Nate, “but it’s not Russian.”

  “Yeah, but she speaks a bunch of those languages,” Roger explained. “Russian, French, Italian. Figure I could ask her if she could help us out.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not French or Italian, either.”

  “Bro, why not let her look and see?”

  Nate considered it. “Do you think she would?”

  “She’s pretty cool, and it’s not like we’re asking for anything big. Just to look at a couple paragraphs and translate ‘em, right?”

  “Right.” Nate gestured Roger into the apartment. He had hard copies of all the photos posted around his desk, and he pulled down an image of the glowing words. “You want a couple copies? I’ve got two versions of it.”

  Roger shook his head. “This is perfect,” he said. “One piece of paper, nice and casual, no big deal. I can ask her tomorrow and we could know what it means by the weekend.”

  Thirty Nine

  The next knock came just before three the following afternoon. Nate opened his door to find Veek and Tim standing there. A large backpack hung from one of Tim’s shoulders. Nate looked at Veek. “Shouldn’t you be at work?

  “I called in sick,” she said with a sly grin. “Ready for adventure?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Veek and I had a talk,” said Tim. “We know there was
a threat involving this building. Possibly a murder, too. It’s time to get a bit more active.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Nate.

  “We’re going into the cellar,” said Veek.

  “Sorry?”

  “The big room,” she said, “and the sub-basement. We need to see what’s in there.”

  “What about Oskar?”

  “Oskar is being a perfect old-world gentleman and driving Mandy out to the Food 4 Less in Van Nuys,” said Tim. “Their staff got hit with a bug and they’re short on cashiers. She had a chance to get an extra shift if she could be out there by four.”

  “With rush hour on the 101, he’s going to be gone for at least an hour and a half,” said Veek.

  “How much of that is true?”

  “Enough that Mandy went along with it,” said Tim. “The clock’s ticking. Are you coming?”

  The three of them made their way down the back staircase and into the basement. Nate stopped in front of the first padlocked door, the one across from the laundry room. “Want to start here?”

  Tim nodded. “Get the small problems out of the way first,” he said.

  “So how are we getting in?” asked Veek. “We never went over that.”

  Tim pulled a worn leather checkbook from his back pocket and flipped it open to reveal an array of lock picks. They had the dull gleam that came from years of use. The picks slid into the padlock and his fingers adjusted them. It was a smooth and practiced technique.

  Veek’s eyes bugged behind her glasses.

  “So,” Nate said, “you know how to pick locks, too?”

  “I published a book on it a few years back,” Tim said. “One of those how-to things they used to sell in Soldier of Fortune and Writer’s Digest and magazines like that. It seemed like a useful skill, so I played around with it.”

  “Y’know,” said Veek, “there’s only so many times you can fall back on the ‘I published a book about it’ thing and we’re going to buy it.”

  He smiled. “It is a great catch-all excuse, though, isn’t it?”

  “How do you know how to do all this stuff?”

  The pick gave a sharp twist and the padlock popped open. “Tell you what,” said Tim. “You want to tell us what you’re doing with that brute-force computer up in your apartment? You go first, I’ll spill all my secrets next.”

  Her smile faded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Good call,” he said. “I’m just a retired publisher. You would’ve been pissed.”

  The door opened and they looked in. A bucket filled with hand tools sat near the door. A very broken weed-whacker stood in one corner. A plastic rake leaned over it.

  Three metal-framed shelves stood against the walls, filled with boxes. Half of them were labeled, either with the original packaging or with fat swipes of a magic marker. Halogen bulbs, hallway lights, pipe fittings, several boxes of fuses with different watts and amperages. Others had random codes on them or phrases like KATIE’S BEDROOM that told Nate they’d been recycled from previous uses.

  “Wow,” said Veek. “A dirty storeroom.”

  “But now we know,” said Tim.

  “And knowing is half the battle,” said Nate.

  They all smiled. Tim pulled the door shut and snapped the lock shut on the hasp.

  The ornate double doors stood at the end of the hall. The bar stretched across them, and the chain wrapped around it. “How do you want to do this?” asked Nate.

  Tim swung the pack off his shoulder and pulled out a long, metal flashlight. It was one of the black ones policemen used. He handed it to Nate. “The easy way,” he said. He turned to Veek. “Do you have your phone?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Get photos of the chain,” he said. “How it loops around the bar and the handles. We want to be able to put it back the same way.”

  Nate aimed the light at the first bracket on the left, where the chain looped under the steel L and around the bar. Veek’s phone clicked and Nate moved the light to the next crisscross of links.

  Tim waited until they were done and the light settled on the bulky padlock. The picks slid into the lock and shifted beneath his fingertips. A moment later it popped open.

  The chain clattered on the bar and handles as they unwound it. Tim pulled a pillowcase from his backpack, slung the chain into it with the padlock, and dropped it in the corner. He wiped some rust on his jeans and set his hands on one side of the wooden beam. Nate nodded from the other end. Dust streamed down as they lifted the bar out of the brackets. Tim stood it against the wall next to the pillowcase.

  Nate’s hand settled on a handle. Veek closed her fingers on the other one. “Ready?”

  “For about a year now,” she said. A smile spread across her face.

  They pulled the doors open. The hinges were smooth and took the weight and movement without a single sound. Light from the hallway spilled into the room.

  It wasn’t that different from what they’d seen in Xela’s photograph. The floor was a single slab of concrete. There were two long cracks in it. One had been patched, one hadn’t. A few green roaches scuttled away from the light and vanished into the dark corners of the room. They left thin paths in the dust behind them. Nate could see thousands of trails the bugs had traced over time.

  He glanced at Veek. “You going to be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.” She stomped her feet and sent ripples out through the carpet of dust. Nate noticed her pants were tucked into her boots.

  “Light switch,” said Tim. He was walking the perimeter of the room. “You want to risk it?”

  Nate looked around. “I don’t think this place is wired for high security,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  The switch clicked and the room exploded with brilliance. An oversized bulb in the center of the room drove back the shadows and the last few brave roaches.

  The room covered the front half of the building’s foundation. Its ceiling was wooden beams strung with a few decades of dusty cobwebs, made even brighter by the light bulb they surrounded. The walls were brick all the way around the room, and cast-iron pipes ran up each one into the building.

  At the center or the room was the railing. It was made of pipes held together by oversized flanges. There were two horizontal bars. The whole thing was seven or eight feet long and three feet wide.

  Between the pipes was a staircase. The steps were made of steel splattered with dots of orange rust. They led down into darkness.

  Tim finished walking the perimeter. There were some tools in one corner—a shovel and a pair of push brooms—that had all faded to the same shade of gray.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s pretty much just a big empty room. And the elevator shaft.” He pointed in the corner behind the door. There was a steel cage with a wooden frame built around it. The door looked like a screen door made with heavier mesh. There was no sign of the elevator. The shaft was empty except for a pair of cables running up into the building and down into the sub-basement.

  Veek snapped pictures with her phone. She photographed the coil on the wall and then tapped it. The coil swung and tore loose a few ancient cobwebs. They drifted in the air in slow motion. “It’s cable,” she said. “I told you so.”

  “Not copper though,” said Nate, looking over her shoulder. “Maybe it’s for the elevator.”

  She shrugged.

  Nate crouched by the stack of newspapers at the base of the railing. The top page was a haze marked with a few roach trails. He blew on it and words and pictures appeared from beneath years of dust.

  Tim stood next to him. “What’s the good news?”

  “Planes are safe again. It looks like President Carter’s hoping we can all pull together and get through the energy crisis.” Nate smiled. “Oh, and Governor Brown cut three hundred million from the state budget by saying no to raises for state employees.” He blew more dust off the paper’s banner. “L.A. Times. July fourteenth, 1979.”

  “Is that importa
nt?” asked Veek. “The date?”

  Nate thumbed through the stack of papers. They were yellow and stiff, but not too fragile. “Doesn’t look like it. I think it’s just a stack of newspapers somebody dumped in here.”

  “It does give us a sense of time, though,” said Tim. “Going off the rust on the lock and all the dust, I think it’s safe to say no one’s been in here since those got stacked there.”

  Veek tilted her head. “Thirty-three years,” she said. “That’s ten years before Oskar was even living in the building. He may never have been in here.” She glanced around the room.

  “Maybe he doesn’t have the key,” said Nate.

  Tim moved to stand next to them. He peered over the railing into the darkness and checked his watch. “Tick-tock,” he said. “Fifteen minutes gone. We’ve got an hour left if we want to play it safe. Ready to move on?”

  Nate looked at Veek. She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Want me to go first?”

  Nate took a breath and lifted the flashlight. “I’m supposed to be in charge, right?”

  Tim gave a thin smile. “Doesn’t mean you can’t delegate.”

  “I’ve got it.” He switched on the light and aimed it down into the shadows. The bottom of the stairs was about fifteen feet away.

  He set his foot on the first step. The metal creaked but didn’t budge. He went down another step and Veek put her hand on his shoulder. She gave it a squeeze. He reached up with his free hand to squeeze back.

  They descended into the darkness.

  Forty

  Going down several steps into a pitch black hole with only a flashlight took a lot more nerve than Nate thought. Every step made the circle of light shake and waver, plunging the stairs into darkness for an instant before he directed the beam again. It was a scene out of dozens of horror movies. He kept waiting for the light to reveal a skeleton, a blood stain, or an albino creature that had been locked in the sub-basement for years. Veek’s grip on his shoulder kept him calm. It got tighter with each step. By the tenth he was sure she was leaving marks.