Майкл Коннелли - Dark Sacred Night

She closed the incinerator doors and turned around. She saw no shop vac or any other kind of vacuum that could have been used to clean it. She then remembered seeing equipment in the truck Dillon had driven to the job site earlier in the week and assumed that he carried both wet and dry vacuums with him.

This thought drew her focus to the truck parked in the second bay. It was the last place for her to search. It had been backed into the warehouse and she was staring at the two double doors of the rear compartment.

Ballard next checked the license plate. The registration sticker was two years out of date. It was clear this truck was not part of CCB’s active fleet.

She pulled back a handle that disengaged upper and lower locking pins on the doors and pulled one of them open. She stepped back to swing it to the side and saw that the truck might have been taken out of service but it was being used as storage. It was full of cleaning and containment supplies packaged in bulk. A tower of twenty-four-packs of paper towel rolls, five-gallon containers of soap, a trash can full of brand-new mops, plastic-wrapped cases of aerosol cleaners and air fresheners. Leaning against one side of the interior was a thick stack of cardboard boxes that needed to be folded into shape for use.

It was essentially a wall of supplies that blocked her view into the truck. There was a handle mounted just inside the door. Ballard grabbed it and pulled herself up, using the truck’s rear bumper as a step. The inside of the truck was shielded from the fluorescents. Ballard used her light to cut through the shadows and look farther in. She quickly realized that the supplies were stacked at the back of the truck only as a blind and that there was an open space behind them. She shoved the trash can and mops in and out of the way and moved into the truck to look.

On the floor there were some old food wrappers, napkins, and fast-food bags strewn around a thin mattress that looked like it had been taken from a folding cot. A dirty blanket and pillow were thrown haphazardly on top of it and a battery-operated lantern was on the floor. Ballard moved the blanket with her foot and exposed a metal loop bolted to the floor of the truck. She squatted down and looked closely at it, saw the scratch marks on the interior of the loop, and knew it could be used to handcuff or chain a person to the mattress. She noticed that there was a slightly sour smell to this area of the truck. It told Ballard someone had recently been inhabiting this space.

Ballard suddenly knew that it was the scent of fear. She had recognized it in herself before. She had heard of dogs trained to track it. Ballard knew she was in a place where someone had trembled and feared for her life.

Something on the floor next to the mattress caught her eye and Ballard leaned farther down to look. On closer examination, she realized it was a broken fingernail that had been painted pink.

The truck suddenly started shaking as a sharp metallic sound engulfed the warehouse. Ballard’s first thought was earthquake, but then she quickly identified it as one of the aluminum garage doors rolling up. Someone was about to enter.

She killed the flashlight, pulled her weapon, and thought about quickly climbing out of the truck. But that would put her out in the open and exposed. She held her place and listened. She heard the high idle of a truck engine but no movement. Then the engine revved and the vehicle entered the garage. After Ballard judged that it was in the bay next to her, the engine was killed.

Again, for several seconds there was only silence. Ballard didn’t even hear the sound of anyone getting out of the cab. And then the ratcheting sound of the garage door began again, this time as it was lowered.

Ballard listened intently, her ears her only tool at the moment.

She had to assume that the driver of the truck was Dillon. She listed three things in her mind that he could have noticed upon his arrival. The lights of the warehouse were on, one of the out-of-service truck’s back doors was standing open, and there was a missing skylight above. She had to assume that Dillon would notice all three and be aware that there had been a break-in. It remained to be seen if he thought the intruder had come and gone or was still in the warehouse. If he called 9-1-1, Ballard knew she would probably be arrested and her career would be over. If he chose not to call, then he would be confirming that he didn’t want police in the warehouse because of the things that had gone on in here. She flashed on the incinerator, its exhaust pipe coated black on the roof from use but its burning chamber spotlessly cleaned and vacuumed.

Ballard looked down at the thin mattress on the floor. She wondered if she would ever know who had been in this dark place and shivered under the thin blanket. Who had broken her nail trying to find an escape route. Her anger toward Dillon began to grow to the point of no return. To the killing place she knew she carried inside.

Ballard heard the door of the other truck open and its occupant climb out and drop to the concrete floor. Her only view out to the warehouse was through the open door at the back of the truck she was in, and that gave a tight angle of the space beyond. She waited and listened, trying to pick up Dillon’s footsteps and movements but hearing nothing.

Suddenly the back door of the truck she hid in was slammed shut, plunging Ballard into darkness. She heard the handle on the outside turn and the locking pins at the top and bottom of the door snap into place. She was locked in. She gripped her gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, but chose to stay in darkness, thinking it might keep her ears sharper.

“Okay, I know you’re in there. Who are you?”

Ballard froze. Though she had spoken to Dillon only once before, she knew it was his voice.

She said nothing in return.

“Looks like you broke my skylight pretty good. And that makes me mad because I don’t have the money for that.”

Ballard pulled her phone and checked the screen. She was basically in a metal box inside a concrete box and she had no service. And the rover she had taken from the station was sitting in the mobile charger in her car two blocks away.

Dillon started pounding on the door, a sharp metal-on-metal sound.

“Come on, talk to me. Maybe you agree to pay the damages and I don’t call the cops. How about that?”

Ballard knew that there was no way he was going to call the police. Not with what she had found in the truck. She needed to put that in her favor. She started to make her way toward the truck’s back doors. She had the gun. Most burglars don’t carry firearms, because it increases prison time if they are caught. Dillon would not anticipate her having one.

She startled when he hit the door again.

“You hear that? I’ve got a gun and I’m not fucking around. You need to tell me you are ready to come out with your hands where I can see them!”

That changed things. Ballard stopped moving forward and slowly crouched down to the floor in case Dillon started shooting through the thin steel skin of the truck. She held her weapon in a two-handed grip and was ready to approximate the origin of shots and fire back.

“Okay, fuck it. I’m opening the door and I’m just going to start shooting. It’ll be self-defense. I know lots of cops and they’ll believe me. You’ll be dead and I’ll—”

There was a loud bang on the back door of the truck — this one not metal-on-metal — and Dillon didn’t finish the threat. This was followed by the sound of metal clattering on the concrete. Ballard assumed that it was Dillon’s gun skittering across the floor. She knew at this point that there was a second person out there.

The handle on the truck’s back door was turned and the upper and lower locks released. The door opened, flooding the inside of the box with light. Ballard kept in a low crouch, using the trash can and mops as a blind. She raised her weapon to ready position.