Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

They passed a row of glass-walled offices, the manager and the membership director and so on, and then a kickboxing class or maybe it was a Zumba class; Tanner wasn’t sure of the difference. Music blasted inside the room, but it was muted by the glass walls. They took the stairs down to the men’s locker room.

“ Buenas tardes, Mr. Tanner,” said a short, swarthy man wearing a red SportsClub Boston uniform shirt, pushing a cart full of used towels.

“Hey, Ramon,” Tanner said.

In the second bank of lockers he immediately spotted his brass combination lock.

“Right here,” he told Abbott.

It was smuggling the computer out of his office in the gym bag that had first given him the idea. They’d already searched his home, and they’d surely search every inch of Tanner Roast’s offices for the laptop. Leaving it in the office safe — even hidden as it was — wasn’t a good idea.

But the one place where you wouldn’t stash anything of value was a gym locker. He’d gone in with the laptop in his duffel bag and came out with a bag that was about three pounds lighter.

Tanner found his locker, but the brass combination lock was no longer there. He pulled the door open.

The locker was empty.

For a moment everything felt unreal. Like the world had abruptly flipped upside down. Tanner felt light-headed. He just stared into the gaping maw of the locker.

Everything was gone. Not just his ratty old gym clothes and his deodorant. Everything.

This couldn’t be happening.

“Is this a joke?” Abbott snapped.

Tanner said nothing. He raced out of the locker room and thundered up the stairs, Abbott following right behind him.

They passed the Zumba-or-kickboxing class, and then Tanner stopped at the manager’s office. The manager was a tall, blond young woman with a strong Polish accent named Agnieszka.

“Can I help?”

“My locker — my locker is empty.”

“Pardon?”

“There’s stuff missing from my locker.” Tanner stared.

“You didn’t see notice?” the manager replied. “I post at entrance to men’s locker. Everyone must to remove contents of lockers by yesterday twelve noon for clean of locker area. Anyone who did not, we remove for you. We cut locks.”

“You removed — where? — where did you put stuff?”

“In lost and found.” She pointed out of her office and down the hall.

Lost and found was just an unmarked closet containing steel-wire shelves heaped with items: a shelf of locks that had been left behind, smelly sneakers, gym clothes. One shelf had some mini iPods and several sets of earphones. Tanner found a pile of his gym clothes and pair of running shoes.

No laptop. No computer.

“No?” Agnieszka said.

“It’s not here,” Tanner said, swallowing hard. “Could someone have put it somewhere else? Like, because it’s a computer, it’s valuable, all that?”

“Everything here,” Agnieszka said. “Valuable, not valuable, all here. No other place.”

“But it’s gone. It’s missing.”

“We don’t assume the liability for the lost or stolen items. Sign says this.”

“Right, I know, but where might someone have put it?”

Agnieszka shrugged. “This is only place. Maybe someone took? I lose two employees last week. I can’t keep cleaners, some reason. Always leaving.”

Will Abbott whirled around to look at Tanner. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

Agnieszka closed the door to the lost and found.

“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe someone steal?” She shrugged as if it didn’t make much difference to her. Might as well have been some pilfered, dirty gym socks. As she walked away, she muttered, “Is not good.”

William Abbott, his face gone red, grabbed Tanner’s arm, gripping it hard. “You goddamned son of a bitch, do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“It was in my locker,” Tanner said numbly.

“What the hell kind of long con do you think you’re running? Let me tell you, you’ve just made a very dangerous enemy.”

“Get your hands off me,” Tanner said. Abbott — though several inches shorter — was trying to hurt him.

“You’re a dead man,” Abbott said. Veins at his temples were throbbing visibly.

“It was in a gym locker,” Tanner said. “I mean, who the hell robs a gym locker?” He glanced out the window onto Tremont Street. He looked over at the Nepalese fruit stand, where he usually bought bottled water, and realized something was off.

He looked for the proprietor, Ganesh. But he wasn’t sitting there. Instead, it was a young white guy with a clean, hard look.

Ganesh was gone.

Ganesh never took time off. He sent more than half his earnings to his sister and her kids back in Nepal. Tanner always made a point of greeting him. Ganesh was always there. Something wasn’t right.

A guy in a baseball cap was sitting in an idling car, window open. Two guys in their thirties were standing in front of the entrance to the sports club, talking to each other, or at least pretending to; he wasn’t sure.

These were Earle’s men. They were waiting to grab Will once he exited the sports club with the laptop.

Now that plan had been dashed.

He knew how the conversation with Earle would go. Nobody would believe the laptop was truly lost or stolen. Without the laptop, Earle was not going to be in a forgiving mood. Abbott suspected him of playing a trick, and Earle would think the same way.

Earle’s men would grab Abbott, and once they learned he didn’t have the damned laptop, they’d come for Tanner. They’d detain him in the white facility, for who knew how long, and Tanner would be powerless to do anything about it.

No. He had to find a way out of the situation.

“You need to take your hands off of me,” Tanner said.

“You bastard, where the hell did you put it?” Abbott swung a fist at Tanner, who dodged, but the fist connected, cracking into Tanner’s upper chest around the breastbone. It was painful, and it pissed Tanner off. He let loose, shot a fist into Abbott’s solar plexus.

Abbott instantly doubled over and collapsed onto the floor.

Tanner raced down the hall.

He descended two floors to the custodial area, where he saw Ramon, the Guatemalan attendant, folding and stacking gym towels.

“Hi, Mr. Tanner,” Ramon said, surprised to see him there.

“Ramon, I need to ask you a favor. A big one.”

Will gasped. He couldn’t breathe. The wind had been knocked out of him. He was on his hands and knees and he felt like he was dying.

Some big muscled black guy in a blue polo shirt that said “SportsClub Boston” and “Trainer” loomed over him. “You okay, dude?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he mumbled.

“Gotta pace yourself, man.” The trainer put out a hand and helped Abbott up. “Have some water.”

Michael Tanner had slugged him just below the chest, right in the solar plexus, and it was breathtakingly painful. He didn’t know anything could hurt this much. He wondered if there was internal damage to organs and blood vessels. How was he going to explain this to Jen? He teetered, and the trainer steadied him by grasping his shoulder.

“Whoa, there, big guy, you need to sit down.”

Abbott leaned over, head down. His stomach was spasming. “I’m okay, thanks,” he gasped, waving the trainer away.

He didn’t know which way Tanner had run — he’d been too busy gasping for air — but he knew that, whichever way he went, Tanner was heading for the exit. Was there more than one? He walked, stumblingly, in the direction he’d come in from.

“Excuse me, sir?” said a small young woman with a pixie haircut and a gymnast’s build, a low center of gravity. “Weren’t you just swiped in?” She was wearing a blue polo shirt that said “Membership Director.”