I knew where to find Lucas.
STAIR MASTER
I headed down—for the basement. The records room and case file study area. Lucas loved it down there. Said it reminded him of law school. Also a good place to hide out when you’re office is a sealed crime scene.
Speaking of…
“Can I help you?” The voice startled me and Sam. For a second I paused on the steps, thinking someone was in the stairwell with me. Then I let Sam’s view overlay mine and I saw the security guard in the doorway to Lucas’s office. A tall black man, athletic, one hand on the gun perched on his hip. I couldn’t read his name tag from how she looked at him.
“Mr. Royston has relocated to the basement, right?”
Told you she knew.
“You can’t be up here, ma’am. This area is cordoned off.”
“Sorry. Thank you.” She went to leave the office. The guard stopped her.
“Did you sign in? Can I see some ID?”
The sound was hard to hear with my feet pounding in the concrete stairwell and the image came out all shaky from my own bobbing head as I took the steps fast and spun around the tight turns of the stairs. I saw enough.
Sam moved damn fast with that knife. She brought it up quick and caught him under his chin. The blade stuffed into him and he leaned back, taking her with him as she gripped the knife fiercely. His hand reached for his gun. She took her hands off the knife and slapped at his arm, getting two bloody palms around his wrist as he tried to muscle the gun out of his holster. The knife stuck out from under his chin, the point going straight up, splitting his tongue and sticking firmly in the roof of his mouth. He drooled blood from the jaws he could not shut.
She pushed against his gun arm and rammed him against the door jamb again. He gargled out a yell and thrashed side to side like a beached shark.
I nearly slipped and had to slow down, partly to catch my breath and partly because what I saw though her eyes disturbed me to the point it made running hard.
She clamped down a hand over the gun then lifted her other hand up and yanked down hard on the knife. A spew of blood came out of his mouth as he tipped forward once the knife came out. He let loose a ragged scream and the way he leaned and spewed blood he looked like a drunk at the end of a very long night.
His night really was almost at an end.
She thrust forward with the knife and caught his neck as he tilted forward, stabbing the blade down between his collarbone. She pulled it back out and swung down to catch him in the back of the neck. I felt the muscles in my arm tense and release with each stab.
When the knife dug into the thick muscles and clustered nerves of his neck, the guard took a dive for the floor. The electricity had been cut. Lights out.
I resumed my run. I felt my head go hot. She looked in, saw the stairwell, the downward slope of the stairs. She knew where I was headed and knew I’d get there first.
We’d see if that did me or Lucas any good.
COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE.
The case files library is basically exactly what you’d expect from the name. Banished to the basement it’s where files go to die, or at least wait until some law school interns spend the next hundred years scanning all the papers into a hard drive…that no one will ever look at.
I think there used to be a librarian, but she died and no one ever thought to replace her, or maybe no one else wanted the job. Spending your days in a windowless basement surrounded by the molding case files of criminals and miscreants? Who wouldn’t want that job?
I banged out of the stairwell into the florescent lit hallway. The tile flooring hadn’t been changed since the 50s and there were two white porcelain drinking fountains mounted on the wall. Indents in the layers of faded mint paint made me think there used to be signs mounted above. One for Whites and one for Coloreds, perhaps? Yeah, the place was out of date.
Heavy double doors kept the records safe and sound from fire. The one time I came down here with Lucas I remarked that it would be a great place to sneak away for noontime sex and he told me I wasn’t the first person to think of it. After my sprint down the stairs, I’d come prepared, heavy breathing already.
The trick here would be finding Lucas without two things happening: Sam seeing exactly where I found him and him thinking I’m her and shooting me or hitting me or something else painful. I doubted he started carrying a gun, but if anything would drive him to it, this day would.
I pushed open the doors and they squeaked haunted house loud. Warm, stale air greeted me and I felt the same shudder you feel when you enter an old person’s home. The kind of place where someone’s been getting nothing but meals on wheels for ten years and the laundry never gets done. I whisper/yelled for him. “Lucas? It’s me.”
Me could be either of us. She could be lying. Why couldn’t she be a good evil twin and speak with an accent or something?
In front of me stood rows of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. Banker’s boxes with case file numbers filled every inch of shelving. They disappeared in front of me to a vanishing point and spread out on either side of me. I felt the way I did when I got lost in a corn maze at ten years old. Spaced throughout the stacks were heavy wood tables, placed there so you wouldn’t have to carry the boxes too far to get what you needed out of them. I bet that’s where the people did their nooners. On top, under, didn’t matter. The place felt more mausoleum than library.
I picked a direction and started walking. I kept my eyes down on the floor, trying to catch as much as I could in my periphery without letting her see anything telling. The hot spot in my head burned again. I tried to force her out the way she gave me the bounce earlier, but she seemed determined. I gave her nothing, even put my hands up like horse blinders on the sides of my temples.
“Lucas,” I repeated every few feet, hoping to scare him out of the stacks like a mouse.
Deeper and deeper I went in to the maze, expecting to see skeletons from law clerks who hadn’t made it out. Behind me I heard the double doors open. Sam had arrived.
I crouched lower and picked up the pace. I saw some of the boxes on the bottom row deep into the maze. The dates on them were from the 1970s. I listened hard for signs of Lucas, and for her footsteps. I heard nothing. I stopped moving, closed my eyes and didn’t make any effort to see what she saw. Only concentrated on the sound.
A background buzzing of the florescent tubes, the slow movement of warm recycled air, the only thing keeping us alive down there even though it did nothing to alleviate the stuffiness. No signs of life. Everything electronic and inert.
I’d nearly forgotten that’s exactly what I’d been looking for.
The lights overhead all sounded the same, the air moved all around me from no discernible direction. The other high hum came from a single source. A tiny fan on the back of a computer, working overtime in the stagnant air.
I kept my eyes down, seeing nothing but my shoes on outdated tile from the Eisenhower era. I let the sound guide me. I shifted to a full-on whisper.