The light went out. I stayed where I was, kept watch on the window. Soon I saw a shadowy and indistinct figure standing close to the glass. I could barely make out the outline of this person. Nick Parrish?
Or was I only imagining him again?
I couldn’t be sure. But I hadn’t imagined that flashlight.
I crouched farther into the shadows and dialed the police.
49
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 12:15 A.M.
The Roof of the Wrigley Building
Next I called home.
“Irene? Are you all right?”
“I’m okay. Did I wake you?”
“No. I’m waiting up for you.”
“You know how you said I should tell you if I thought I saw Parrish again?”
“Yes. Where is he?”
I told him that I had just reported a possible burglary in progress in the building next door, and quickly explained why I was on the roof. “But now I’m wondering if I should have mentioned Parrish after all,” I admitted. “I don’t want them to be unprepared if it is him.”
“Get inside, and find Jerry or Livy or anyone else who’s working there. Promise me you’ll do that until a unit gets there. And alert the security guard in the lobby.”
I agreed to do as he asked, and began my descent.
I had entered the second stairwell when I heard footsteps. I halted, listening.
I heard a door close below me. The metal rails were vibrating, as most of the building does when the presses are running. The rumble comes pulsing up from the basement, not loud at this height, but persistent. I felt my hand trembling in a different rhythm. I took the phone out again and tried to dial security, every little beep of the keypad seeming to blast out like a brass band. I waited for the call to go through, but nothing happened. I looked at the display — no signal. The stairwell wasn’t a great place for reception.
I waited. I thought I heard another sound below me.
Jerry or Livy, I told myself. Moving from floor to floor to work on the computers. I waited.
When one of those three-minute years had gone by without my hearing any other sounds, I crept down to the next level and reached a doorway; I tried it — it was locked. I was frustrated, but not surprised. Even by elevator, these upper-level offices could only be accessed if you had a special key, and the doors to the stairway opened only from the other side.
I listened, and still not hearing any other noises, went for broke — completely unnerved now, I made a mad dash down the stairs. I swung around the last turn on the landing above the newsroom just as the door to the newsroom flew open. A man in dark clothing stepped out. He was pointing a gun at me.
I stopped, threw my hands up, and tried to say something. My mouth worked something like a guppy’s, but no sound came out.
The security guard spoke first. “Jesus Christ, Kelly!” he said, lowering his gun to my kneecaps. “You just scared the shit out of me.”
“Put the gun away, please,” I said, wishing I could recall his name. “You’re still scaring the shit out of me.” Barely shaving, but he had a gun. Geoff, the day-shift guard, was nearing eighty (some swore it would be for the second time) and never wore a weapon. Guess who made me feel safer?
He holstered it, and hiked up his belt. “Your husband called. He said you had called him from the roof on your cell phone, but when he tried to call you back, there was no answer. He just got the phone’s voice mail. So he tried to call your desk, but he got the cell phone again.”
“This warrants an armed response?”
“Oh — well, as for that — just before I heard from him, I heard a call on the scanner — they think Parrish is in the building next door. I figured he might be after you, so I came prepared.”
This was spoken with an easy confidence that did not indicate the slightest awareness that I might have been the recipient of a few rounds of whatever caliber he had in the clip. He was smiling now, and extended a hand, ready to assist me down the stairs. I let him guide me into the newsroom, where I all but collapsed into the nearest chair.
He picked up his radio and talked into it. “This is Unit One calling in.”
When there was no reply, he frowned in consternation and tried again. “Unit One to Central. You there, Jerry?”
“Leonard?” came the reply. “You calling the front desk? What’s with this ‘Unit One to Central’ horseshit?”
Leonard. How could I have forgotten that name?
“Do not use profanity on the security radio, Jerry! Totally against regulations. Totally!”
Leonard rolled his eyes and turned the radio off. “I better get down to the desk,” he said to me. “Are you okay? You want me to get you a glass of water or anything?”
He hurried off to the water cooler before I could answer. A man of action, our Leonard. But I found myself starting to like him.
“I’ve got a bottle of spring water already started,” I said, and he detoured with a smart about-face to fetch it from my desk.
“You should call your husband, let him know you’re okay,” he said sternly, handing the bottle to me.
“I will.”
“He’s with LPPD Homicide, right?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. Bring him by sometime. I’d like to meet him. By the way — that was cool about throwing the monitor and all, but don’t break anything on my shift, okay?”
“I’ll try not to.”
A thorough search of the building next door did reveal that the office I had indicated had been broken into, although it did not appear that anything had been taken.
There was no sign of Parrish. It hadn’t been easy to look for him in every nook and cranny of the Box, but no one on the Las Piernas Police force acted put out by the effort they had exerted. That doesn’t mean they weren’t irritated — but better trained than Leonard, they didn’t threaten to shoot me.
When I came in to work the next shift on Thursday, there was a note stuck to the screen of my computer monitor:
Kelly, please do try to work one shift without bringing the cops in here.
John
I saved it to show to Frank the next time he asked me to let him hover over my desk.
Stinger was true to his word. On Thursday night, Jerry and Livy joined me to watch the landing, and were duly impressed. They then went downstairs to give Leonard a chance to take a look.
While we were waiting for the young man whom Stinger had (sight unseen) dubbed “Leonardo DaGung-ho,” I asked them to show me what was done to sabotage the helicopters up in the mountains.
Stinger showed me the drain plug.
“Why do helicopters have something like this on them?” I asked.
“In the normal course of a day,” he said, “moist air gets inside the fuel tank. The tank is made of metal, right? So as the metal in the tank cools, the water in the air condenses and drops into the fuel. Because water is heavier than the fuel, the water then goes to the bottom of the tank.”
“If water is in your tank,” Travis said, “and it gets mixed in with your fuel, it causes problems. When you start up and try to run, your engines might not run smoothly — they might misfire.”
“So you open the valve and let the water drain out of the tank before you start up?” I asked.
“Right.”
“So if it hadn’t been raining, the Forest Service crew might have smelled all the fuel leaking out of the helicopters that night in the mountains?”
“Might have,” Stinger agreed. “But what could they have done about it anyway? The person who sabotaged those helicopters walked off with the drain plugs.”
“So the rangers couldn’t have refilled the tanks without replacements.”
“Right. The Forest Service and the cops have had metal detectors out, trying to find those plugs. I think whoever sabotaged them still has his souvenirs.”