Severance Package

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Shut up,” McCoy said.

  Nichole was surprised how fast Molly dropped the blade. She thought it would be more of a fight. But so what.

  Nichole wrapped her left hand around Molly’s throat and used her right to grab the material of her skirt. She pushed hard, slamming Molly’s head against the doorframe. Nichole pulled her back, then pushed forward even harder, aiming higher up the wall. Molly’s head ricocheted off drywall again. Then Nichole hurled her across the room, smashing her compact little frame against the opposite wall. Some drywall shattered on impact. Dust exploded from the surface. The floors seemed to jolt beneath her feet.

  On the return throw, Nichole put Molly through the window overlooking the office, shattering glass and wrapping Molly’s body in the aluminum slats of the venetian blinds.

  The Russian farm girl rolled ten feet through glass and bent aluminum before coming to a dead halt.

  Eat it, Molly Kaye Finnerty, Nichole thought. Her arms were already sore. It had been a while since she’d gone to the gym.

  On the floor, Molly didn’t move.

  Oh hell.

  She didn’t do it again, did she? Accidentally kill someone?

  This would not be good.

  Nichole thought about her cousin Jason, who was four years older, and liked to inflict all manner of playground tortures on any younger cousin he could catch at family gatherings. That is, until the day Nichole—all of eight years old—grabbed Jason’s wrist, twisted his arm behind his twelve-year-old back, locked the elbow, then pushed. She pushed up hard, hard as she was worth, dislocating Jason’s shoulder.

  Nichole’s father said, “Sweetie, you’ve gotta learn to control that temper of yours. You’re stronger than you think.”

  I hear you, Dad.

  But any concern was short-lived. The moment Nichole stepped through the shattered window, glass crunching beneath the soles of her black flats, Molly came to life.

  She sprang up, like an unbreakable industrial coil had been fused into her spine.

  She stood erect, like nothing was wrong, even though she sported cuts over her arms and face, with some glass still poking out from the flesh. But Molly acted as if the shattered glass, broken drywall, and bent aluminum didn’t exist. Hands at her sides. Hair still parted in place. Lips still deep red, glistening with moisture.

  She smiled at Nichole. Raised her eyebrows, as if to say, What else you got, big girl?

  McCoy let loose a “Hooo-hah!”

  Which annoyed Keene. He’d seen, hated that Al Pacino movie.

  “Big deal. She’s standing up.”

  “Uh-uh,” said McCoy. “My baby is Cool Hand Luke.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Nichole instantly decided that her dad had been exaggerating that day, that her cousin was nothing more than a little pansy.

  Because Nichole thought she’d given that Russian farm girl a serious pounding, and yet there she was. Standing. Grinning. Taunting.

  But that didn’t stop her from charging forward, grabbing Molly by her throat and crotch, and starting the punishment all over again.

  The floor plan of this unused section of Murphy, Knox was relatively simple. Closed-door offices lined three sides, with a series of supply closets along the fourth. In the middle of the floor were drywall sections that divided the space into cubicles and, toward the middle, a space for two photocopiers and four printers. Five years out of date. Unplugged. Unsupported.

  What interested Nichole were the closed office spaces. Each with their own window, reaching from two feet from ground level up to the ceiling. Privacy granted with aluminum venetian blinds mounted on the inside.

  Nichole smashed Molly’s body through the closest available window.

  The crash was spectacular; the force behind the throw was so great that Molly took glass and aluminum blind with her as she rolled across the carpet and bounced off the opposite wall.

  Nichole stepped through the broken window.

  “How you feeling today, Molly,” she said. “Everything okay?”

  Nichole heard the sound of spitting. Russian farm girl was finally feeling it. Good. She needed answers, and Nichole was already tiring of throwing her through plate glass windows.

  “Just relax down there. We’re going to do some talking. Whatever language you prefer. We could even do Farsi.”

  Molly planted both hands on the carpet, then pushed down against the floor and snapped up into a perfect standing position. Facing Nichole.

  Smiling.

  No hesitation this time. Nichole wrapped both hands around Molly’s neck and slammed her back against the wall.

  “You want to talk, puta?” Molly said, curling her lips into another hideous smile.

  Nichole would admit it. She lost her mind for a moment.

  She screamed and hurled Molly through the window again. Molly tripped over the bottom frame of the window and rolled across the hall and into a cubicle. Within a second, she had popped up again. But this time Nichole was ready. She hopped through the jagged window frame, planted her feet, pivoted, and leveled a roundhouse kick at Molly’s face that—if Nichole’s training sessions were any indication—would fracture her skull upon impact. Nichole was through screwing around. She needed to hurt Molly.

  But Nichole’s foot never had the chance to connect.

  Because Molly launched up in the air, flipping backwards over the wall of the cubicle like a dolphin at a waterpark.

  Nichole’s foot slammed into drywall instead.

  McCoy was practically orgasmic. “Oh! Did you see that? Oh!”

  Keene had a difficult time containing his surprise. That was an incredibly impressive move. And he had watched a lackluster video feed. Imagine what it must have looked like in real life.

  The audio, however, was crystal clear. Murphy had equipped the office with omnidirectional mikes in pretty much every corner. The man clearly wanted to hear if his operatives tried to stifle a fart. So Keene heard the thud of the kick slamming into drywall, and it was like a wrecking ball accidentally dropped on a slab of sidewalk.

  “I’m so in love,” McCoy said.

  “Want me to pull it out of your pants for you, give it a few tugs?”

  “Would you?”

  “Pervert.”

  “Tired old queen. Okay, quiet now. This is getting interesting.”

  McCoy tapped a few keys. The view on two of the monitors—McCoy’s laptop and a freestanding monitor in front of Keene—flipped to a new vantage point. Within an office, looking out a window missing a blind.

  Girlfriend’s back was to the camera.

  Nichole leaped over the drywall. No fancy flips. She just swung her legs over, eyes forward at all times. Molly was waiting for her. Still smiling. In the six months that Molly Lewis had been employed at Murphy, Knox, Nichole couldn’t remember a single time she’d seen Molly smile. Perched behind her big cluttered oak desk, she’d appeared to be perpetually overworked, nervous, or constipated.

  A smile on Molly now was unsettling. Kind of like seeing a comatose patient spontaneously curl her lips into a rictus of imaginary bliss.

  “Going to throw me through another window, Nee-cole?”

  Nichole responded by kicking her through another window.

  Sometimes, the best thing in a fight is to resist the urge to get creative.

  This time, though, Molly caught herself before plunging through the stress-fractured glass. She regained her balance in a second, curled her right hand into a fist, then drove it into Nichole, just below her left breast.

  The moment she took the punch, Nichole knew something was wrong. A single blow shouldn’t hurt this bad. It shouldn’t send her heart racing. It was the first punch Molly had thrown, and it threatened to send Nichole to her knees.

  Wait. Update on that. It did send Nichole to her knees. Why couldn’t she catch her breath? What was wrong with her?

  Suddenly she was aware of Molly’s face in
hers.

  “Does it hurt?” she whispered in a heavy Russian accent.

  It wasn’t going to end now.

  Not like this.

  Because Nichole still had a fully loaded HK P7 tucked in the waistband of her capris.

  Nichole reached behind, wrapped her hand around the grip.

  Molly either guessed or knew what was coming. She executed another perfect back flip—both palms up and over and planted on the carpet—and then smashed her feet through the already spider webbed glass, her body following behind.

  Nichole swung the pistol around and started firing.

  BLAM!

  BLAM!

  BLAM!

  Glass shattered completely.

  Drywall burst into chunks.

  The recoil knocked Nichole back, off her knees and onto her butt, but she continued to blast away.

  BLAM!

  BLAM!

  BLAM!

  That was it, because Nichole felt a sledgehammer blow to her chest, and then she stopped breathing.

  Jamie jolted when he heard the gunfire. Three bursts of gunfire, followed by another three, then a barely audible gasp.

  Forget about the blood. Forget about your burst hot dog fingers. Get out there. It might be Nichole who’s hurt. She saved you. You need to return the favor.

  It wasn’t the most dignified thing in the world, but Jamie had little choice. He crawled out of the empty office on his elbow and knees. Standing up would make his head a bobbing target above the cubicles. He’d heard gunfire, but had no idea who was taking the shots. Last he saw, Molly had a gun in the conference room. The one she’d used to shoot David. Jamie wasn’t going to survive having his fingers carved up by a psycho secretary only to catch a stray bullet in the head. That would be anticlimactic.

  He took some comfort in knowing that he hadn’t completely lost his sense of humor.

  Jamie crawled down the short path to the edge of the cubicles. The plan: Stop there, poke his head out, look down the long hallway.

  He made it there, holding his sliced-up, burst–hot dog hand away from his vision as much as possible. He couldn’t look at it. Not yet.

  He looked around the corner.

  He saw legs.

  Bare legs, terminating in a pair of flat black shoes. One of the shoes was half off, hanging from the toes.

  God, that was Nichole. She wore capris, no pantyhose. It was the psycho Molly who had dressed up for a hot August morning in the conference room. Long-sleeved blouse and everything. Nichole was bare-legged.

  So Nichole was down for the count.

  Crap.

  Where was Molly? Did she still have that gun?

  Think, Jamie, think. Because as much as your hand kills, it’ll be nothing compared with the guilt over letting someone die. No matter that it was Nichole Wise, who’d probably looked at him only once in his year of employment, and dismissed him as a nonentity. Nichole was innocent. And no matter how much of an ice princess she’d been, she did distract Molly. She’d saved him.

  Was Molly still down there? Waiting for him, with either a gun or her blade?

  Nichole’s foot twitched. Her shoe fell off completely. Rolled to one side.

  Screw it.

  Jamie used his elbows and knees, braced against the floor and the side of a cubicle wall, to make it up to his feet. He limped down the hall as fast as he could. “Nichole,” he said aloud, figuring if Molly was waiting for him, perhaps she’d be lured out at the sound of his voice. And he’d have a prayer of ducking into an open office or empty cubicle. Not that he knew what he would do after that. Not against someone who could paralyze him with two fingers. But he was making this up as he went along anyway.

  “Nichole,” he repeated.

  Jamie reached her, and leaned his back against a section of drywall next to the shattered window.

  There was no sign of Molly.

  But Nichole was unconscious.

  Maybe even dead.

  “Nichole!”

  Jamie walked over and dropped to his knees, felt the side of her neck with his good hand. No pulse in her carotid artery. He put his ear to her mouth. Nothing. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do this without it being agony, but he knew what he had to do. CPR. He’d learned it in a class, a month before Chase was born. Andrea had insisted. Now, he was faced with the real thing.

  Jamie ripped open Nichole’s blouse with one hand. Saw that she wore a white lace bra, low-cut. He reached under her neck, tilted her head back. Pinched her nose. Pressed his lips to hers. Pushed air down into her lungs. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes. Pumped her chest—yes, using his bloodied, shredded hand, and her bra was soon stained with red. Breathed into her mouth. Pumped her chest. Felt for a pulse. Breathed in her mouth again. For such an intense act, it was devoid of all sensuality.

  The third time around, he revived Nichole.

  Her eyes fluttered open. She saw Jamie, but seemed to have trouble focusing on him.

  For a moment there, Jamie could have sworn she was about to hit him.

  “Are you okay?”

  Nichole’s chest rose up and down, working hard to suck in air.

  “Fine.”

  Her fingers danced over her stomach, looking for something. The sides of her blouse. She found them, and covered herself.

  Jamie leaned back against the wall of the cubicle. His mouth tasted like cigarettes.

  Thirty-five hundred miles away, McCoy frowned.

  Tapped some keys. The view changed on the second screen. Tapped more keys. The view changed on the third screen. Then the laptop.

  He cycled through as many cameras as he knew, fanning out from that unused part of the office.

  “Where is she?”

  MIDMORNING BREAK

  (WITH PEPPERIDGE FARM COOKIES)

  Your best teacher is your last mistake. —RALPH NADER

  Vincent Marella hit the floors one by one, starting with twenty-three, focusing on the north side. Vincent knew he wouldn’t be that lucky and find a pane of glass missing on twenty-three. Or twenty–four. Or twenty-five. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight. Nahhh. Because then, it would be a quiet weekend, and heaven forbid something like that actually go down on his watch.

  Weekend staff at 1919 Market was kept to a minimum. Just four guards—three on at all times, while breaks and lunch were rotated. There wasn’t much downtime. Somebody always needed help. Not much difference there between corporate security and hotel security—always undermanned and underfunded. Often, Vincent could barely read a page uninterrupted. He did most of his reading on breaks, which never lasted long enough. Three up, one down. At all times.

  To check out the shattered-glass thing, Vincent put Carter on the desk and had Rickards check floors eight through twenty–two, starting with twenty-two and working his way down. Floors one through nine were lobby and garage, so that meant there were only twenty-eight floors to check. One at a time.

  By the time Vincent reached twenty-nine, he had settled into a rhythm: Punch STOP on the elevator control panel. Pray the floor had a single tenant. If so, pop the master key in the double security doors, enter through the lobby, and make a counterclockwise sweep of the floor, checking every window on the north side.

  On one floor, it was easy; there were no offices partitioned off, just cubicles. But the other floors used their prime window space to reward employees with private offices. Some had large windows covered with aluminum blinds. Very few people kept their blinds up—most preferred privacy on the job. Which meant he had to key into every single office. Sometimes the lock would stick, which would piss him off.

  Ah, weekend work.

  He knew he shouldn’t complain. He was lucky to have this gig after flaking out last year. In fact, he’d been out of work from Halloween through Presidents’ Day of this year, trying to get his act together. A few prescriptions, a couple of sessions with an occupational therapist—not fully covered on his insurance, by the way. Nothing helped.

  His teen
aged son, whom Vincent saw only on weekends, gave him the best advice of all, “Just chill, Dad.”

  So he tried to chill, best he could.

  After a good long while of chilling, Vincent saw some improvements. His heart stopped racing for no reason. He stopped hearing phantom noises. His dreams weren’t as horrifying as they used to be.

  A year ago, he’d been employed as a security guard on the night detail at the Sheraton, a reasonably expensive hotel on Rittenhouse Square, the richest slice of real estate in Philadelphia. The Sheraton had since closed. But one hot August night, a year ago to the month, Vincent had been called up to the seventh floor to check out a suspected domestic dispute. These things happen, even in a nice hotel. Before he reached the door, though, some ape in a suit tackled him, pounded the crap out of him. Vincent put up the best fight he could—he fought mean and sloppy, and this kind of approach had served him well in bars over the years. But it didn’t matter to this guy. Next thing he knew, there was a big fat ape arm around his neck, and he was plunging into darkness.

  Vincent woke up in bizarro land. His kid read these Japanese manga things, which you flip through from back to front. That was how life felt after he had been assaulted. Back to front. Nothing made much sense. Maybe it did to others. Other people who knew how to read this stuff.

  As it turned out, the ape who’d attacked him was believed to be part of some terrorist cell—I know, right? Vincent would say whenever he told friends this story, which wasn’t often. The DHS guy who showed up, somebody with a Polish name, thanked him for his bravery, slapped him on his back, and disappeared into the night. Vincent checked the Inquirer and Daily News, but never saw any follow-up. The hotel manager gave him a few days off, told him to shake it loose.

  Vincent had a hard time “shaking it loose.”

  Eventually, the Sheraton shook him loose.

  You go through life thinking you know your place in the natural pecking order. You know which creatures are easy pickings, and you know which ones outweigh you. Keep your head down and beat a steady path between the two, and you’ll make it out all right.