by Stephen King
Holly’s building is straight ahead, but when the light turns green, Barbara turns right, toward downtown. It won’t take her long to get there. The front door of the Frederick Building will be locked, but she knows the code for the side door in the service alley. She’s been at Finders Keepers with her brother many times, and sometimes they go in that way.
I’ll just surprise her, Barbara thinks. Take her out for coffee and find out what the hell’s going on. Maybe we can even grab a quick bite and hit a movie.
The thought makes her smile.
7
From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:
I don’t know if I’ve told you everything, Ralph, and I don’t have time to go back and check, but you know the most important thing: I’ve stumbled across another outsider, not the same as the one we dealt with in Texas, but related. A new and improved model, let’s say.
I’m in the little reception area of Finders, waiting for him. My plan is to shoot him as soon as he steps out of the elevator with the blackmail money, and I think that’s how this is going to go. I think he has come to pay me off rather than kill me, because I think I convinced him that I only want money, along with his promise never to commit another mass killing. Which he probably doesn’t mean to keep.
I’ve tried to think as logically about this as I can, because my life depends on it. If I were him, I’d pay off once, then see what happens. Would I plan to leave my job at the Pittsburgh station afterwards? I might, but I might stay. To test the blackmailer’s good faith. If the woman were to come back, try double-dipping, then I’d kill her and disappear. Wait a year or two, then resume my old pattern. Maybe in San Francisco, maybe in Seattle, maybe in Honolulu. Start working at a local indie, then move up. He’ll get new ID and new references. God knows how they can stand up in this age of computers and social media, Ralph, but somehow they do. Or have so far.
Would he worry about me passing on what I know to someone else? Maybe to his TV station? No, because once I blackmail him, I become complicit in his crime. What I’m counting on most is his confidence. His arrogance. Why wouldn’t he be confident and arrogant? He’s been getting away with this for a long, long time.
But my friend Bill taught me to always have a backup plan. “Belt and suspenders, Holly,” he’d say. “Belt and suspenders.”
If he suspects I mean to kill him instead of blackmail him out of three hundred thousand dollars, he’ll try to take precautions. What precautions? I don’t know. Surely he must know I have a firearm, but I don’t think he can get one in because he has to assume the metal detector would alert me. He may use the stairs, and that could be a problem even if I hear him coming. If that happens, I’ll have to play it by ear.
[Pause]
Bill’s .38 is my belt; the package I taped to the elevator ceiling is my suspenders. My insurance. I have a picture of it. He’ll want it, but there’s nothing in that package but a tube of lipstick.
I have done the best I can, Ralph, but it may not be enough. In spite of all my planning there’s a chance I won’t come out of this alive. If that’s the case, I need you to know how much your friendship has meant to me. If I do die, and you choose to continue what I’ve started, please be careful. You have a wife and son.
8
It’s 5:43. Time is racing, racing.
That fracking traffic jam! If he comes early, before I’m ready…
If that happens I’ll make something up to keep him downstairs for a few minutes. I don’t know what, but I’ll think of something.
Holly powers up the reception area’s desktop. She has her own office, but this is the computer she prefers, because she likes to be right out front instead of buried in the back. It’s also the computer she and Jerome used when they got tired of listening to Pete complain about having to climb to the fifth floor. What they did certainly wasn’t legal, but it solved the problem and that information should still be in this computer’s memory. It better be. If it’s not, she’s fracked. She may be fracked anyway, if Ondowsky uses the stairs. If he does that, she’ll be ninety per cent sure that he’s come to kill her rather than pay her.
The desktop is a state-of-the-art iMac Pro, very fast, but today it seems to take forever booting up. While she waits, she uses her phone to email the sound file containing her report to herself. She takes a flash drive from her purse—this is the one containing the various photos Dan Bell has amassed, plus Brad Bell’s spectrograms—and as she plugs it into the back of the computer, she thinks she hears the elevator moving. Which is impossible, unless someone else is in the building.
Someone like Ondowsky.
Holly flies to the office door with the gun in her hand. She throws the door open, sticks her head out. Hears nothing. The elevator is quiet. Still on five. It was her imagination.
She leaves the door open and hurries back to the desk to finish up. She has fifteen minutes. That should be enough, assuming she can remove the fix Jerome figured out and reinstate the computer glitch that had everyone climbing the stairs.
I’ll know, she thinks. If the elevator goes down after Ondowsky gets off, I’m okay. Golden. If it doesn’t…
But it’s no good thinking about that.
9
The stores are open late because of the Christmas season—the sacred time when we honor the birth of Jesus by maxing out our credit cards, Barbara thinks—and she sees at once that she won’t find parking on Buell. She takes a ticket at the entrance to the parking garage across from the Frederick Building and finally finds a space on the fourth level, just below the roof. She hurries to the elevator, looking around constantly, one hand in her purse. Barbara has also seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages.
When she arrives safely on the street, she hurries to the corner just in time to catch the walk light. On the other side she looks up and sees a light on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building. At the next corner, she turns right. A little way down the block is an alley marked with signs reading NO THROUGH TRAFFIC and SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY. Barbara turns down it and stops at the side entrance. She’s bending to tap in the door code when a hand grips her shoulder.
10
Holly opens the email she’s sent herself and moves the attachment to the flash drive. She hesitates for a moment, looking at the blank title strip below the drive’s icon. Then she types IF IT BLEEDS. A good enough name. It’s the story of that thing’s fracking life, after all, she thinks, it’s what keeps it alive. Blood and pain.
She ejects the drive. The desk in the reception area is where they do all their mailing, and there are plenty of envelopes, all different sizes. She takes a small padded one, slips the flash drive into it, seals it, then has a moment of panic when she remembers that Ralph’s mail is going to some neighbor’s house. She knows Ralph’s address by heart and could send it there, but what if some mailbox pirate grabbed it? The thought is nightmarish. What was the neighbor’s name? Colson? Carver? Coates? None of those are right.
Time, racing away from her.
She’s about to address the envelope to Ralph Anderson’s Next Door Neighbor when the name comes to her: Conrad. She slaps on stamps willy-nilly and jots quickly on the front of the envelope:
Detective Ralph Anderson
619 Acacia Street
Flint City, Oklahoma 74012
Below this she adds C/O CONRADS (Next Door) and DO NOT FORWARD HOLD FOR ARRIVAL. It will have to do. She takes the envelope, runs flat-out to the mail-drop near the elevator, and tosses it in. She knows that Al is as lazy about collecting the mail as he is about everything else, and it may lie at the bottom of the chute (which, to be fair, few people use in this day and age) for a week, or—given the holiday season—even longer. But there is really no hurry. Eventually it will go.
Just to be sure she was imagining things, she punches the elevator call button. The doors open; the car is there and the car is empty. So it really was her imagination. She runs back to Finders Keepers, no
t exactly gasping but breathing hard. Some of it’s the sprint; most of it is stress.
Now the last thing. She goes to the Mac’s finder and types in what Jerome titled their fix: EREBETA. It’s the brand name of their troublesome elevator; it’s also the Japanese word for elevator… or so Jerome claimed.
Al Jordan adamantly refused to call a local company to fix the glitch, insisting that it had to be done by an accredited Erebeta repairperson. He invoked dire possibilities should anything else be done and there was an accident: criminal liability, million-dollar lawsuits. Better to just close the elevator’s eight floor-stops off with yellow OUT OF ORDER tape and wait for the proper repairperson to show up. It won’t be long, Al assured his irate tenants. A week at most. Sorry for the inconvenience. But the weeks had stretched into almost a month.
“No inconvenience for him,” Pete grumbled. “His office is in the basement, where he sits on his ass all day watching TV and eating doughnuts.”
Finally Jerome stepped in, telling Holly something that she—a computer whiz herself—already knew: if you could use the Internet, you could find a fix for every glitch. Which they had done, by mating this very computer to the much simpler one controlling the elevator.
“Here it is,” Jerome had said, pointing at the screen. He and Holly had been by themselves, Pete out making the rounds of bail-bondsmen, drumming up trade. “Do you see what’s happening?”
She did. The elevator’s computer had stopped “seeing” the floor stops. All it saw were its terminal points.
Now all she has to do is pull off the Band-Aid they put on the elevator’s program. And hope. Because there will be no time to test it. Time is too tight. It’s four minutes of six. She calls up the floor menu, which shows a real-time representation of the elevator shaft. The stops are marked, B through 8. The car is stopped on 5. At the top of the screen, in green, is the word READY.
Not yet you’re not, Holly thinks, but you will be. I hope.
Her phone rings two minutes later, just as she’s finishing.
11
Barbara utters a small scream and whirls around, back against the side entrance, looking up at the dark shape of the man who has grabbed her.
“Jerome!” She pats her hand against her chest. “You scared the bejesus out of me! What are you doing here?”
“I was just about to ask you the same question,” Jerome says. “As a rule, girls and dark alleys don’t mix.”
“You lied about taking the tracker off your phone, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes,” Jerome admits. “But since you obviously put on one of your own, I don’t think you can exactly claim the moral high grou—”
That’s when another dark shape looms up behind Jerome… only it’s not entirely dark. The shape’s eyes are glaring like the eyes of a cat caught in a flashlight beam. Before Barbara can shout at Jerome to look out, the shape swings something at her brother’s head. There’s a terrible dull crunch and Jerome collapses to the pavement.
The shape grabs her, shoves her against the door, and pins her there with one gloved hand wrapped around her neck. From the other he drops a chunk of broken brick. Or maybe it’s concrete. All Barbara knows for sure is that it’s dripping with her brother’s blood.
He bends toward her close enough for her to see a round, unremarkable face below one of those furry Russian hats. That weird glare is gone from his eyes. “Don’t scream, girlfriend. You don’t want to do that.”
“You killed him!” It comes out in a wheeze. He hasn’t choked off all her air, at least not yet, but he’s cut off most of it. “You killed my brother!”
“No, he’s still alive,” the man says. He smiles, showing two rows of teeth that are orthodontic perfection. “I’d know if he was dead, believe me. But I can make him dead. Scream, try to get away—annoy me, in other words—and I’ll hit him until his brains spurt like Old Faithful. Are you going to scream?”
Barbara shakes her head.
The man’s smile widens into a grin. “That’s a good girlfriend, girlfriend. You’re afraid, aren’t you? I like that.” He breathes deeply, as if inhaling her terror. “You should be afraid. You don’t belong here, but on the whole I’m glad you came.”
He leans closer. She can smell his cologne and feel the meat of his lips as he whispers in her ear.
“You’re tasty.”
12
Holly reaches for her phone with her eyes fixed on the computer. The elevator’s floor menu is still on the screen, but below the diagram of the shaft there’s now a choice box offering EXECUTE or CANCEL. She only wishes she could be completely sure that selecting EXECUTE will cause something to happen. And that it will be the right something.
She picks up the phone, ready to text Ondowsky the code for the side door, and freezes. It’s not ONDOWSKY in the window of her phone, and it’s not UNKNOWN CALLER. It’s the smiling face of her young friend Barbara Robinson.
Oh dear God no, Holly thinks. Please God no.
“Barbara?”
“There’s a man, Holly!” Barbara is crying, barely understandable. “He hit Jerome with something and knocked him out, I think it was a brick and he’s bleeding so bad—”
Then she’s gone, and the thing masquerading as Ondowsky is there, speaking to Holly in his trained TV voice. “Hi, Holly, Chet here.”
Holly freezes. Not for long in the outside world, probably less than five seconds, but inside her head it feels much longer. This is her fault. She tried to keep her friends away, but they came anyway. They came because they were worried about her, and that makes it her fault.
“Holly? Are you still there?” There’s a smile in his voice. Because things have broken his way, and he’s enjoying himself. “This changes things, wouldn’t you say?”
Can’t panic, Holly thinks. I can and will give up my life if it will save theirs, but I can’t panic. If I do that we’re all going to die.
“Have they?” she says. “I still have what you want. Hurt that girl, do anything more to her brother, and I’ll blow up your life. I won’t stop.”
“Have you also got a gun?” He doesn’t give her a chance to answer. “Of course you do. I don’t, but I did bring a ceramic knife. Very sharp. Remember I’ll have the girl when I come to our little tête-à-tête. I won’t kill her if I see you with a gun in your hand, that would be the waste of a good hostage, but I’ll disfigure her while you watch.”
“There won’t be a gun.”
“I think I’ll trust you on that.” Still amused. Relaxed and confident. “But I don’t think we’ll be exchanging money for the flash drive, after all. Instead of money, you can have my little girlfriend. How does that sound?”
Like a lie, Holly thinks.
“It sounds like a deal. Let me talk to Barbara again.”
“No.”
“Then I won’t give you the code.”
He actually laughs. “She knows it, she was getting ready to tap it in when her brother accosted her. I was watching from behind the Dumpster. I’m sure I could persuade her to tell me. Do you want me to persuade her? Like this?”
Barbara screams, a sound that makes Holly cover her mouth. Her fault, her fault, all her fault.
“Stop. Stop hurting her. I just want to know if Jerome is still alive.”
“For the time being. He’s making weird little snuffling sounds. May have a brain injury. I hit him hard, felt I had to. He’s a big one.”
He’s trying to freak me out. He doesn’t want me thinking, just reacting.
“He’s bleeding quite a bit,” Ondowsky continues. “Head-wounds, you know. But it’s pretty cold, and I’m sure that will aid the clotting. Speaking of cold, let’s stop fucking around. Give me the code unless you want me to twist her arm again, and this time I’ll dislocate it.”
“Four-seven-five-three,” Holly says. What choice?
13
The man does indeed have a knife: black handle, long white blade. Holding Barbara by one arm—the one he hurt—he points the ti
p of the knife at the lock pad. “Do the honors, girlfriend.”
Barbara pushes the numbers, waits for the green light, then opens the door. “Can we put Jerome inside? I can drag him.”
“I’m sure you could,” the man says, “but no. He looks like a chill dude. We’ll just let him chill a little more.”
“He’ll freeze to death!”
“Girlfriend, you’ll bleed to death if you don’t get a move on.”
No, you won’t kill me, Barbara thinks. At least not until you get what you want.
But he could hurt her. Put out one of her eyes. Flay her cheek open. Cut off an ear. His knife looks very sharp.
She goes in.
14
Holly stands in the open door of the Finders Keepers office, looking down the hall. Her muscles thrum with adrenaline; her mouth is as dry as a desert stone. She holds her position when she hears the elevator start down. She can’t hit execute on the program she has running until it comes back up.
I have to save Barbara, she thinks. Jerome too, unless he’s beyond help.
She hears the elevator stop on the ground floor. Then, after an eternity, it starts up again. Holly steps backward, her eyes not leaving the closed elevator doors at the end of the hall. Her phone is lying beside the computer’s mousepad. She slips it into the left front pocket of her pants, then looks down just long enough to position the cursor over EXECUTE.
She hears a scream. It’s muffled by the rising elevator car, but it’s a girl’s scream. It’s Barbara.
My fault.
All my fault.
15
The man who hurt Jerome takes Barbara by the arm, like a guy escorting his best girl into the ballroom where the big dance is going on. He hasn’t relieved her of her purse (or ignored it, more likely), and the metal detector gives a feeble beep when they pass through, probably from her phone. Her captor ignores it. They pass the stairwell that until lately was used every day by the Frederick Building’s resentful residents, then enter the lobby. Outside the door, in another world, Christmas shoppers are passing to and fro with their bags and packages.
