Hal Ackerman - Stein,stoned

“I’m not dear, I’m not a boy, and I’m not yours,” said Michael.

Vane turned to Stein. “I know where she is. I can take you to her.”

“You don’t know anything,” David Hart spat. His hand flashed into his pocket and emerged with a snub-nosed. 22 pistol. The report in the wide-open air sounded like a little pop. Vane clutched his chest and went down. Morty Greene engulfed Hart, took away his gun and then very nearly disarmed him in the literal sense. Michael tried to bolt, but Morty did a one-arm pushup, holding David to the ground and leg-whipping his fleeing accomplice. Small bodies lay strewn all about.

Stein knelt alongside Paul Vane and pushed a handkerchief against the wound to staunch the blood.

“Are you all right?”

“Just a glancing blow to the heart.”

Now the entire landscape began to vibrate. The SWAT helicopter swooped in over the top of the hill. Chief Bayliss leaped out again, trying to understand through the tableau in front of him what might have taken place. He saw Morty Greene on the ground holding Michael Esposito down with his legs and David Hart down with his arm

Vane looked up at Bayliss from Stein’s arms. “We need to get to Espe headquarters right away.”

“Who is this?” Bayliss demanded to know. “Who are all of them?” David Hart and Michael Esposito and Paul Vane all began to speak at once.

“Sir.” Morty Greene suggested politely. “Best you listen to the little bleeding one.”

The police helicopter whizzed east over the Palisades. The cabin was filled with noise and activity. Esposito and David Hart were handcuffed in the tail of the craft amidst Bayliss and a dozen Special Ops. Paul Vane was wedged in the jump seat between Morty Greene and the pilot. A medic had dressed his wound. It was painful but not life threatening. Stein was an empty ghost, his face pressed against the plastic bubble, looking down over the terrain. Edna Greene sat alongside him and could read his thoughts. “Your baby will be all right,” she said. “I don’t believe any of these men would hurt a child.”

Stein nodded thanks. But not because he believed her.

Paul Vane nudged the pilot’s elbow and pointed down. “There it is.” The pilot brought them down over the loading platform. The deck foreman who had taken over for Morty Greene was a muscular Italian in a formfitting undershirt with a marine buzz cut and bright corneas that made him look continually startled. Bayliss held onto the bulwarks and picked his way through the matrix of limbs and weapons, positioning himself to be closest to the exit when the bird touched down.

They alighted on the Astroturf front lawn of the executive wing. Bayliss leaped out first. The paramedic helped Paul Vane down. Aided by an adrenaline high and unmindful of his wound, Vane led the unit around to the elevated side of the building where the executive office wing fronted the warehouse silos.

“You know the layout?” Stein asked.

“I’ve been here once or twice,” he said with a tight smile.

Inside, there were five corridors leading out from the central lobby. Bayliss deployed his men in groups to cover each artery of the wing. “The rest of you wait here,” he directed.

“Like hell am I waiting here,” said Stein.

“I’m not messing around with you, Howard. Stay out of the way!”

“This might be the time to mention that my name is Harry.”

The paramedic who had taken Vane down the hall to the bathroom to re-dress his bullet wound now came running back in a state of agitation. “Somebody’s locked in the girl’s loo.”

“Angie!” Stein bolted down the wing that the medic had just come from. The sound of muffled pounding could be heard from inside.

“Angie? We’ll have you out in a second.”

He tugged on the door but it was solid and locked and he couldn’t budge it. He yelled down the hall. “Does anyone have a key?”

Morty Greene had gotten his mother comfortably seated in the ergonomic chair in the main lobby and now ran up to where Stein was tugging on the door. He extracted a skeleton key that fit into the lock.

“I’m not going to ask how you have that,” said Stein.

“I appreciate that.”

The thick double door opened and Lila sprang out, a total wreck After a moment’s relief Stein looked past her. “Where is she?”

She could barely look at Stein, so wracked with guilt was she. “They wanted to take her picture.”

“You let her go off with strangers?”

“I know where she is,” said Vane.

Stein tried to hear relief in his voice but heard only restrained dread. Paul guided them through a door that looked like it led to an emergency staircase, but instead opened into a narrow corridor. It took a surprise dogleg to the left and seemed now to be angled upward. The perspective gave no evidence of elevation, but walking was more difficult. There was another security door at the end of the corridor. Stein’s blood froze at the sound of running water. Steady. Unabated. Neutral. The way it had run that night at Nicholette’s.

The doorway opened up onto a webwork of metal catwalks encircling an observation point fifty feet above an enormous open lake, two hundred feet around. One slender metal tightrope wire crossed above the center. Anyone traversing that bridge would feel like a Flying Wallenda. The bridge was vibrating.

A steady hum and splash emanated from the depths of the pit where epic-sized mechanical arms were rotating heavy steel mixing rudders through the liquid below. Through sluices at symmetrical points on the circumference torrents of ingredients cascaded into the lake. The roiling liquid formed a layer of foamy soap scum several feet high that looked like weary cappuccino.

“Daddy.”

The sound of Angie’s voice penetrated through every other sound, as it always had, all of Stein’s life since she was born.

“There!” Lila pointed down into the lake where archipelagos of glycerin islands dotted the surface. The not very solid masses were diminishing in size, from large islands to very small ones, and then disappearing into the mixing blades. Angie was kneeling adrift on one of the tiny glycerin islands. Her legs and her arms were bound.

Vane melted into a pool of shame under Stein’s horrified look.

Stein could only choke out, “You weren’t going to tell me?”

“He promised she’d be safe.”

“Angie, I’m coming! Hold tight.” In a spastic frenzy Stein tore off his shirt and ripped at his shoes, trying to pull them off without untying them.

“Leave them on,” Vane instructed. “The glycerin-alcohol tincture is more buoyant than water. You need the ballast. You have to pull her down to the bottom. Then swim through the drainage pipes.” Stein listened carefully. “You’re going to be under for at least sixty seconds. Tell her not to take too deep a breath. You won’t be able to get down deep enough with too much air in your lungs.”

“Hurry, Daddy.”

Stein maneuvered slowly out over the thin, vibrating, wire bridge. When he was positioned nearly above Angie he closed his eyes and plunged. Feet first. Stein had never learned to dive; he had never liked water. At the moment of impact he curled his knees to his chest, gulped a breath and cannonballed through the surface of the viscous liquid.

At the bottom, the tubes, like two giant nostrils, snorted out the impurities from the pool; the ferrocycrosulphate, the flecked mica flecks of phenol2Yisobutyltryptophane. He could do this, he told himself. He would propel himself up to the surface now.

The first twenty feet up was dessert pastry. Easy. Sweatless. He was a seahorse, bobbing to the surface. Squinting, he could see the outlines of the bottoms of solid mass. The hype about the shampoo was right in one regard, it didn’t sting his eyes. He could see translucent outlines. Then he hit the glycerin level. It was like swimming through a five hundred foot clam. He had no more breath and began to flounder. His body thrashed. His neck arched, desperately pushing his nose toward the surface. At last, with a thwop, he surfaced through the membrane into fresh air.