Jack Kerley - A Garden of Vipers

But would the unlocking mechanism be electronic or mechanical? How did elevator repairmen deal with these situations?

I squatted below the mechanism, pushed upward on one leg, grabbed a steel bar hooked to the door, and pulled myself up until I was staring into greasy metal components. I studied the mechanism holding them shut, saw a servomotor beside the bar holding the door. There was a red button on its side, just the size of my thumb. I pressed it.

Bing. The doors withdrew.

Soft yellow light drifted into the elevator shaft. I pulled myself through the opening. My chest crossed the threshold, then my belly, and finally the whole of me was squirming facedown on the floor. I could hear the pain in my ankle, a high red whine. I forced myself to look down: swollen with fluid.

“Hello?” a wavering voice said.

The old man was sitting at the desk as if he’d never moved from it, a strained look on his face, trying to understand my appearance in his world. I crawled to a leather-upholstered chair, pulled myself to standing, hopped to his desk.

“Phone!” I yelled. “Where’s a phone?”

He stared at me like I was a life-form never before encountered, his mouth opening and closing like a boated fish. A floor lamp stood behind the desk. I hobbled over and tore off the shade, used the pole as a crutch to the window. Barred, the glass threaded with wire.

I turned and saw Daddy Kincannon at the open shaft, looking down with a sense of wonder.

“Get back from there, Pops!” I yelled.

He shuffled his feet backward in a decrepit moonwalk. I thumped past chairs and tables and love seats to the chimney, too narrow. The old man sat on a couch and picked up a copy of Forbes. He held it upside down, occasionally shooting me puzzled glances above the pages.

A small bedroom was off the sprawling main living area. I tore through a closet, not knowing what I was looking for, finding nothing but casual clothes and robes. No, there in a back corner, a cane! An old man’s bentwood cane, leather handle, rubber tip. Maybe the old guy had bouts of gout.

Think. Analyze.

The old man had been there fifteen years, or was it twenty? Surely in all that time someone had planned for an emergency, fire, tornadoes. This was the Prime Buck, numero uno, tucked away but provided exceptional care. Had he ever been prepared for a problem, drilled until the response lodged in his frizzled brain cells?

“There’s an emergency, Mr. Kincannon,” I yelled. “Is there a way out?”

He wiped a strand of drool from his mouth. I thumped across the floor, got down on one knee, took his hand in mine, like I was proposing marriage.

“What do you do for fire, sir? Have you been told?”

He looked at me with expectant eyes, like I was judging his answer and he wanted a passing grade.

“Sir?” I prompted.

“Hot spots and piss pots. Climb inside, hide and ride.”

Piss pots?

I thudded to the bathroom. It was the size of my living room: bath tub, Jacuzzi, multiheaded shower. I yanked open a closet. Empty, the size of a phone booth. I smelled rain and warmth, outside air. It seemed to be wafting up from the floor of the closet. I stepped inside, hands patting the walls. My fingers found a wooden latch. I turned it and began falling, a controlled drop. I heard a counterweight rising with my descent.

Not a closet, a converted dumbwaiter.

The booth slammed hard and I crumpled, boxed tight, surrounded by total darkness. I pushed on the sides of the booth. A door popped loose like a hatch and I found myself with a faceful of the azalea bush concealing the small door. Lightning flashed, a bomb burst of white across the vast rolling carpet of lawn. The house loomed above. I pictured Buck Senior returning to his desk, reading an inverted magazine, vaguely recalling a limping visitor from years ago.

I crept from an azalea bank the size of a truck, rain pelting me like stones. My ankle felt like white-hot thorns had been driven through it from every angle. Lightning shimmered between boiling clouds and I saw Kincannon’s house in the distance, perhaps a third of a mile. It seemed forever far away.

But I’d just been granted a reprieve, and whether it had been through pure luck, or something underlying the realm of language and human capacity to understand, I was going to get there if I had to drag myself every inch. Knock on the door of the goddamn scion of that goddamn family.

Hello, Buckie, remember me?

Nautilus awoke to a roar in his ears and the smell of blood and excrement in his nose. His head ached and something dry filled his mouth. A gag, he figured, consciousness swirling into his head on a blaze of fear and adrenaline.

He was still tight to the floor of the Crown Vic, moving. Occasionally the interior of the car brightened from lightning or passing cars. Private Security slumped sideways, head between the front seats, trails of blood draining from his nostrils. Rain whipped in the open passenger window. Nauseated, dizzy, his head throbbing, Nautilus still managed to figure that was how the extra water had filled the floor of Taneesha’s car.

The truck slowed and turned and the ride became bumpy, like on a rutted dirt road. After a few minutes they stopped. Nautilus heard Crandell get out of the truck. The dark turned to a hazy light.

Crandell opened the door, freed Nautilus from the D-ring, reattached the cuffs, the weapon never straying from Nautilus’s head.

“End of the line,” Crandell said, yanking tape from Nautilus’s mouth, followed by a wadded rag. Nautilus gasped, sucked in air, his tongue dry as sandpaper. He looked out the cruiser’s windows.

They were inside a barn, yellowed utility lights casting shadows across bales of hay, an ancient tractor, and a miniature backhoe. Beside the backhoe’s bucket was a trough seven feet long, three wide. A mound of fresh dirt was piled beside the ditch.

Lightning flickered outside the barn, doors open at one end, thunder hitting seconds later. Crandell jumped to the ground. “Step on out, Detective Nautilus. Sorry about your head. It was a light tap, you’ve been out under ten minutes.”

Nautilus looked at the ditch, then at Crandell, polo-shirted, hands in the pockets of his Dockers, muscles rippling in his forearms as he jingled coins in his pocket, looking like he’d just finished an excellent supper.

Nautilus said, “Why should I get up just to lay down in the hole in the ground?”

“Because ends can come fast, or they can come slow. I have an hour or so to kill-pardon the pun-and it can be a fast hour for you, or it could be agonizingly slow. If I put a couple slugs in your hip bones, I guarantee it could feel like days. Do you really want to spend days with me, Detective?”

Crandell popped open a utility room at the side of the barn, pulled out two wooden folding chairs, snapped them open, set them beside the trough.

“How’d you know I was coming, Crandell?” Nautilus said, looking at the thick barn rafters above. “Someone tip you off?”

“Shuttles did.”

“What?”

“You’re a star, big boy. Celebrated member of the MPD, big-shot detective. You and Ryder got reps of going against the grain, hot dogs. But you always get ’er done, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Before all this got set in motion, Shuttles and me worked out a simple code to ID the potential problem types. A person’s initials plus a letter. F’rinstance if it was Ryder, the code was DS. What’s Harry Nautilus?”

“IO,” Nautilus said. “Like in the note Shuttles had me send you. IO was in there two times.”

“Shuttles is a bright boy.”

Crandell gestured to the chairs he’d set up on the barn floor beside the trench. “Come keep me company, Harry,” he smiled. “Who knows what might happen?”