Want To Play (Monkeewrench) m-1

by P. J. Tracy

  He walked over to the windows and opened the louvered blinds, for all the good it did. The sun was behind a black wall of clouds that looked like they weren’t going anywhere soon. ‘Darkest goddamned day of the year and we lose power.’

  ‘Why isn’t the generator kicking in?’ Grace asked. ‘I thought we had it set up to take over automatically.’

  Harley shrugged. ‘Who knows? We’ve probably never had the thing running or serviced since we got it. It’s like a car battery – use it or lose it. I’ll go down and take a look. Roadrunner, how much battery time do we have on the computers?’

  ‘Around two hours.’

  ‘I’ll report it to the power company and start making backups of our drives,’ Grace said. ‘You guys go see if you can’t get the generator running.’

  ‘Where the hell is the generator, anyhow?’ Roadrunner asked.

  ‘It’s in the power room in the garage.’

  Roadrunner looked confused.

  Harley rolled his eyes. ‘Didn’t you ever notice the door with the big yellow high-voltage sign on it . . . never mind. You’re hopeless. Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘But the elevator runs on electricity.’

  Harley sighed impatiently. ‘The stairs, Roadrunner.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Roadrunner had reluctantly taken the lead down the dark stairwell, carefully mincing a slow side step to accommodate his size-fourteen feet. But the farther down they descended, the darker and more tomb-like the stairwell became and the more nervous he got.

  ‘Damnit,’ Harley barked suddenly, his voice reverberating in the concrete sarcophagus and nearly sending Roadrunner into the next world.

  ‘WHAT?!’ Roadrunner shrieked.

  Harley paused to peel a big, sticky cobweb out of his beard. ‘Spiders. Sorry, buddy, didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just hard to remember all your phobias.’

  ‘You’re telling me you’re not creeped out by this?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘Oh, I’m plenty creeped out, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see a damn thing,’ Roadrunner complained. He reached up and smacked one of the dark, wall-mounted light fixtures as if his ire could produce light. ‘And what about these? Aren’t they the glowy things that are supposed to stay on all the time?’

  ‘Yes, but the glowy things operate on battery and if you don’t change the batteries, they stop glowing eventually,’ Harley said in a tone more suitable for a toddler.

  ‘We need a flashlight. Why didn’t we bring a flashlight?’

  ‘Because we’re stupid. And don’t even think of asking me to run up and get one. Just keep moving. There’s a deputy down here somewhere and cops always carry those big-ass five-trillion-candlepower flashlights.’

  Roadrunner was suddenly seized by a volley of sneezes that could have qualified him for the Guinness record book.

  ‘Jesus, you okay?’ Harley asked when he’d finally finished.

  Roadrunner sniffled, then moved forward again. ‘Yeah. But somebody needs to clean this place out,’ he said in a nasal voice. ‘There’s enough dust in here to plant a garden.’

  Harley grunted as one of his lug-soled motorcycle boots caught on a concrete riser. When he reached out to grab the railing for support he made contact with something furry. ‘Fuck!’ he squealed, snatching his hand back and holding it close to his chest. ‘Don’t touch anything. I think I just felt up a rodent.’

  Roadrunner sneezed again. ‘This place is hermetically sealed. If a rodent ever managed to get in here, it’d be dead by now.’

  ‘Oh yeah? So what else is furry, the size of Rhode Island, and has a heartbeat?’

  ‘Probably just a spore cluster.’

  ‘What the fuck’s a spore cluster?’

  ‘I don’t know. The stuff that’s making me sneeze.’

  ‘You just keep telling yourself that, Roadrunner.’

  ‘We should have brought a flashlight.’

  ‘Shut up. Where the fuck is the door?’

  ‘You say “fuck” a lot when you’re nervous.’

  ‘Who’s nervous?’

  There was a hollow thunk as Roadrunner collided with the steel door. ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Good job. You found the door.’

  Roadrunner pushed on the steel bar and the door swung open onto the garage, which was even darker than the stairwell had been.

  ‘Deputy Mueller?’ Harley called out. The only answer was his own echo. ‘Deputy? Are you down here?’ More silence.

  ‘If she were here, she wouldn’t be sitting quietly in the dark waiting to ambush us,’ Roadrunner said.

  ‘Good point. So she’s not down here. Probably took off when the lights went out. We’re going to have to do this without light.’ He paused, imagining the layout of the garage in his mind. ‘Okay, the generator room is directly across from us, on the other side of the garage,’ Harley said. ‘Grab onto my shirt and we’ll grope our way down the wall.’

  Roadrunner clamped onto Harley with a death grip and shuffled behind him blindly. ‘Ick. The floor is sticky. Is your hog leaking oil again?’

  ‘My hog has never leaked oil. Okay, we’re here.’ He dug in his jacket pocket, pulled out his key ring, and started feeling each one, searching for the small padlock key. ‘What I’d like to know is why we have a padlock on the generator room. It’s not like anyone is going to steal a two-thousand-pound chunk of metal.’

  He finally found the right key, popped the padlock, and opened the door.

  The power room was even blacker than the rest of the garage, if such a thing were possible. It took a moment for their eyes to find the hulking form of the generator in the corner. They clambered over to it, trying to decipher its parts with their hands.

  ‘So what am I feeling for?’ Roadrunner asked.

  Harley scratched his beard. ‘Check the cords, connections, and let me know if you find any buttons. I think this thing is supposed to have a reset switch on it somewhere.’

  Roadrunner reached out blindly and found a dangling cable that seemed like it should be connected to something, but what did he know? He’d failed shop class in high school two years in a row before the frustrated teacher had finally given him a passing grade in exchange for help with what had then been a state-of-the-art Kay-Pro computer.

  As he maneuvered around the generator to get a better grip on the cable, his head connected painfully with a very sharp metal object attached to the wall. ‘Ooowww!’ he squawked, stumbling back and holding his head.

  ‘God, you’re a klutz. You’re going to end up killing yourself one day.’

  ‘Hey, it’s dark, okay?’

  ‘What did you run into?’

  Roadrunner reached out and felt the offending piece of metal. ‘It’s . . . a metal box. On the wall.’

  ‘That’s the breaker box. Hey, good idea. Maybe we just tripped something.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. That’s why I just gashed my head on it,’ Roadrunner grumbled.

  Harley squeezed next to Roadrunner and felt around for the box. ‘Okay. I found it.’ He pulled open the cover and started feeling around inside. ‘I can’t see shit, but one of the switches is facing a different direction.’

  There was a click and suddenly the lights blazed on. ‘YES!’ Harley shouted victoriously.

  ‘Thank God . . .’

  And then the door to the room slammed shut on them with a deafening metallic thud.

  ‘Oh shit!’ Roadrunner panicked.

  ‘Don’t worry, buddy. Door doesn’t lock automatically. Against code. Here, I’ll show you.’ He walked over and reached for the handle.

  Outside the generator room, a pair of gloved hands slipped the padlock through the hasp and snapped it shut.

  46

  Magozzi was hunched over Tommy’s shoulder, breathing down his neck. ‘Why is this taking so long?’

  ‘It’s a seven-hundred-page file. I just started . . .’

  One of Tommy’s other computers chirped. H
e nudged Leo back and rolled his chair over to a computer on a side table. ‘Monkeewrench just got another message.’ He squinted at the monitor and read aloud: ‘ “I didn’t want to have to do this.” Man, what do you suppose that means?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Magozzi started to say, but then a shrill alarm started to sound. ‘What the hell is that?’

  Tommy was rigid, unblinking, totally focused on the monitor as a line of numbers and letters flashed on and off beneath the message. ‘Goddamnit,’ he whispered, then turned to Leo, his eyes wide. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, there are no firewalls. It’s a direct line. This message came from the Monkeewrench computers.’

  Magozzi froze for a second and heard a roaring in his ears. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘The guy’s there, Leo. Right now.’

  Harley was using his shoulder as a battering ram. The door rattled in its metal frame, but it wasn’t going to give anytime this century. ‘God-damn-it!’

  ‘I thought you said it didn’t lock from the inside.’

  Harley took another run at the door. ‘It’s not supposed to.’

  ‘Harley, give it up. You’re not going to break down a metal door.’

  ‘Any better ideas?’

  ‘You have your cell?’

  ‘Roadrunner, we’re in a concrete room inside another concrete room underground. A cell phone is not going to work.’

  ‘I just saw a movie where this guy is in an underground bunker in Iraq during Desert Storm and that cell phone worked.’

  ‘That’s fucking Hollywood for you.’ He grabbed the knob and started shaking it in pure frustration.

  ‘Harley?’ Roadrunner said in a small voice behind him.

  ‘Yeah, what?’

  ‘Am I bleeding? Like, a lot?’

  Harley turned and saw Roadrunner touching his head where he’d run into the breaker box. ‘You have a big, red goose egg that’s starting to turn blue now, but no blood.’ He followed Roadrunner’s worried gaze down to the floor. The concrete was covered in bloody footprints.

  Their footprints.

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ, Harley. That wasn’t oil out there,’ Roadrunner whispered.

  And suddenly everything clicked – the power that shouldn’t have gone out, but did; the door that wasn’t supposed to lock, but did – Harley let out an anguished roar and pulled out his .357 and leveled it at the doorknob.

  ‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!’ Roadrunner screamed. ‘You can’t shoot a steel door in a concrete room, you’re going to shred us to ribbons!’

  ‘I know that!’ Harley’s hand was shaking; Roadrunner’s eyes followed the muzzle of the gun as it wobbled back and forth. ‘I know that,’ he said again, this time in a whisper, and when he turned to look at Roadrunner, he was crying. ‘He’s here, Roadrunner. And Grace is up there alone.’

  And then they heard the elevator, rising.

  ‘Grace?’

  ‘Magozzi, is that you?’

  ‘Grace, do you trust me?’ He was running through the office, dodging desks, pushing aside anyone who got in his way, cell phone pressed to his ear so hard it would hurt for days.

  ‘No, I don’t trust you.’

  ‘Yes you do, Grace. You trust me with your life. You’ve got to. The killer’s there! Get out! Get out of there right now! Right this second . . . Jesus Christ goddamnit it to hell!’

  ‘What?’ Gino was pumping, panting behind him.

  ‘I lost her.’

  ‘Goddamnit,’ Gino echoed, and they were in the hall, down the stairs, racing for the front door because that was closest to the car, knocking over the anchor from Channel Ten, rocking a stationary camera, hitting the bar on the door so hard Magozzi thought for a minute it might go right through the glass.

  He’d hit redial the second he’d gotten disconnected, and the phone at Monkeewrench kept ringing, ringing in his ear.

  Grace stood frozen at her desk, phone pressed to her ear, her eyes wide and fixed on the elevator across the loft. She could hear the grind of the gears as it rose; she could see the cables moving through the wooden grate.

  ‘Magozzi?’ she whispered frantically into the phone, and heard nothing in her ear but dead air.

  Do you trust me, Grace?

  Her hand was shaking so badly that the receiver rattled when she set it down on the desk.

  The killer’s there! Get out! Get out of there right now!

  She heard her heart pounding against the wall of her chest, she heard the hum of the computers and the oblivious twitter of a bird outside the window.

  And over it all, she heard the elevator, coming up.

  Run! Hide, goddamnit! She dropped to a crouch behind her desk and in a flash she was back in that closet in Georgia ten years ago, doing what FBI Special Agent Libbie Herold told her to do. She’d heard her heart pounding then, too, and other sounds: the quick padding of Libbie’s bare feet across the wooden floor, toes still wet from her shower; the creak of a floorboard in the hall, and then a snick, snick, coming from the bedroom doorway. Through dusty louvers she saw Libbie’s bare legs wobble back into view, and then there was a flash of metal that opened her thighs in two bloody smiles that spilled a red lake on the floor. And through it all, Grace hadn’t made a sound. She’d just cowered in her laughable hiding place, eyes wide with terror as she waited for her turn, doing nothing to help Libbie Herold, doing nothing to save herself. Doing nothing.

  Run and hide. It was an instinct so ingrained, so powerful, that in an instant it had overridden the exhaustive training of the last ten years. The defense classes, the bodybuilding, the target practice, all of it useless as Grace cowered now as she had ten years ago, waiting, doing nothing.

  Like any prey, she tried to make herself smaller, pressing her arms tight against her sides, hugging herself, and then suddenly she felt the gun and remembered who she was. Who she had created from that ruined girl in the closet.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the window that led to the fire escape. She could still make it. Out the window, down the stairs, onto the safety of the street . . .

  Not this time. She closed her eyes briefly and turned back to the elevator. It was almost all the way up. Too late to race past it to the stairwell, but time enough to pull the Sig from its holster and chamber a round; time enough to dart forward to the cover behind Annie’s desk and steady the gun in both hands on the smooth wooden surface.

  This is your entire world when you shoot, her first firearms instructor had lectured over and over again. Your gun hand, your target, and the path between. Nothing else exists.

  She’d been in that world a hundred times, a thousand, firing fifteen rounds in a pattern so close the holes all overlapped. Ironically, the deafening noise of the target range had provided her only moments of real peace, when the world around her blurred and disappeared and there was only that narrow, sharply focused path demanding her attention.

  She felt the peace settle on her now as she put pressure on the trigger and saw only her gun, and the grate of the elevator door.

  She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, and waited with eerie calm to kill her first human being.

  Magozzi was driving so fast the Ford fishtailed when he took the turn onto Hennepin through a red light. Pedestrians and bikers scattered in front of the wailing siren and the screech of tires. Gino was in the passenger seat, one hand braced on the dash, yelling the warehouse address into the radio, calling for ERT and backup, broadcasting a possible officer down.

  Sharon Mueller wasn’t responding to radio calls.

  The top of the elevator rose slowly into Grace’s line of sight, then the interior, and when it was level with the floor, it clunked to a stop.

  Grace’s heart stopped with it, and then broke into a million pieces. She heard it break in her ears, and felt the clatter of all its parts against the inside of her ribs.

  There was no killer in the elevator. Only Mitch, slumped against the side wall, staring at his sprawled legs with blue, sig
htless eyes, wearing bloody Armani. The side of his head that faced her was utterly gone, inside out, as if someone had pulled off his ear like a pressure cap, letting his wonderful brain spill out.

  No, no, no. Grace felt an anguished, outraged wail threatening to rise from her throat, and knew that that sound, if she let it come, would be her surrender.

  So she looked away from strong curled hands that had touched her with tenderness, dead eyes that had loved her once and forever, and let the hatred come instead, filling her up.

  She moved silently, quickly, boots barely scuffing as she crept around the desk, past the elevator don’t look! toward the stairwell, gun held at arm’s length, leading the way.

  The door opened fast, but Grace was faster, down on one knee, holding her breath, finger increasing the pressure on the trigger until she felt that tiny tug of resistance that came a hair’s breadth before firing . . .

  . . . and then Diane stepped clear of the door and froze, staring down at the muzzle of Grace’s gun.

  She was in heavy sweats and her running shoes, a canvas purse slung over her shoulder. Her blond hair was snagged up in a ponytail, and her face was flushed and twisted and terrified. ‘I . . . I . . . I . . .’

  Grace jumped to her feet, grabbed Diane’s arm, and pulled her against the wall, all the while keeping her eyes and gun trained on the door as it eased closed. ‘Goddamnit, Diane . . .’ she hissed close to her ear, ‘did you see anyone? Harley? Roadrunner? Annie?’

  Diane made a tiny, keening noise in her throat, and Grace felt her start to collapse next to her. She jerked her eyes away from the door for a second, saw Diane staring at Mitch’s body in the elevator, her mouth open and her breath coming very fast.

  ‘Look what you did, Grace,’ she whimpered. ‘Look what you did.’

  Grace flinched as if she’d been slapped, looked down at her gun, then realized what Diane must be thinking. ‘For God’s sake, Diane, I didn’t do that!’ she whispered frantically, jerking Diane to her other side, standing between her and the awful thing in the elevator. ‘Listen to me, we don’t have time, there’s a deputy downstairs, did you see her?’

  Diane was moving her head, trying to see past Grace to the elevator. Her eyes were wild, open too far, a circle of white showing around the blue.