Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

Barbara looked. “Six minutes, twenty-five seconds.”

“My mother was a wonderful woman. Strong and proud and good. Not... confrontational. She didn’t like to make waves.”

“Would your mother be proud of you now?” Barbara asked. “Would she want you to get even this way?”

He just smiled. “Save your breath.”

Barbara sighed. “I’m guessing you were something of a techie,” she said.

“Yup. Always messed about with computers. Taught myself, mostly. Same was true with elevators. Studied every manual I could find, memorized them. But I still needed some help with that. Found someone to fine-tune my skills. Help me figure out all the security stuff. But he and I, we had a bit of a falling out Sunday night. I had a feeling he was going to talk to the police. He’d stopped believing I had people watching members of his family. He was right about that. It was only ever just me.”

He paused, surveyed the room full of his hostages. Someone, over by the window, was softly crying.

“Where are we on the clock?” he asked Barbara.

She looked at the phone in her hand, the tenths of seconds flying past on the counter.

“Four minutes, fifty-five seconds,” she said.

Vallins nodded. “Doesn’t look good.” He glanced toward the bar. “Last call, folks.”

They were making good time.

They were winded, their hearts were pounding, and their legs were killing them, but Bourque and Delgado were nearing the top.

Delgado had slowed, briefly, as she took a call from someone on the ground who wanted her to know that at some point, they might run into the mayor, who was also in one of the four stairwells, heading back up. She was quickly briefed. When she got off the phone, she called out to Bourque, three steps ahead of her, “There’s some bad shit up ahead.”

She told him the body they’d seen flying by in the shaft was the man they’d come to talk to, and that he had been pushed by one of the mayor’s aides, who evidently was the guy behind all the elevator mayhem.

And that aide, Chris Vallins, was holding court on the ninety-eighth floor, ready to blow the whole thing up if Headley didn’t make it back up in time.

“Why?” Bourque asked between pants.

“Beats me,” said Delgado. “From what I gather, if we can’t get to this guy in the next ten minutes or so, it’s not going to matter.”

As they reached the landing between the ninety-fifth and ninety-sixth floors, Bourque stopped. Some painting equipment had been left there, tucked into the corner, a not-unfamiliar sight on their trip skyward. Paint touch-ups being done throughout the building, but for the opening, workers’ supplies had been tucked out of sight. To steady himself, Bourque placed a hand on one of the steps of a five-foot ladder and took a few breaths.

Delgado stopped. “Are you okay?”

“I just need one second,” he said.

“Wheezing?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No. Just exhausted.”

“You’re a fucking medical miracle, you are,” Delgado said. “Or a psychological one. Not sure which.”

“Okay,” Bourque said, “I’m good.”

They continued on with the climb.

Bourque still couldn’t believe he was okay. His doctor, Bert, had been right on the money about how he might come out of the shortness of breath that had been plaguing him for so long. Or maybe there was another explanation. Maybe it had something to do with duty. Duty to the job. Duty to his partner.

Duty to Lois.

He was not going to abandon her. He was not going to let her continue to the top of this building and face whatever was up there without him. And maybe that determination, that sense of conviction, was stronger than the mental dysfunction that had been converting his stress into a constriction of his windpipe.

And what the fuck did it matter, anyway? He could breathe, and he was doing this.

One thing he knew with absolute certainty. If he got out of this alive, he was not going to make a cardboard replica of this goddamn building.

Delgado, behind him at this point, said, “What’s this?”

The steps were starting to be littered with tiny pebbles of concrete.

“Must have something to do with the explosions we heard,” Bourque said. “We’re almost there.” A pause, then, “Hello.”

They had just passed the door marked Floor 97. Just one floor to go. But there was a small problem.

There was a four-step gap in front of them.

“Holy shit,” Delgado said.

“There are three other stairwells,” Bourque said, reaching for the handle of the door to the ninety-sixth floor.

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“I told you. The plans are in the book I got.”

Delgado nodded, briefly impressed. But she was still visibly worried. “If the other stairways were passable, wouldn’t people already be scrambling down them?”

“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll check. And if they’re blown up, too, I saw something that might be able to help us.”

“No, we shouldn’t split—”

“Two minutes,” he said, and started running back down the stairs.

Not much more than a minute later, he reappeared with the painter’s aluminum ladder, the one they had passed moments earlier, slung over his shoulder.

“Oh, God,” Delgado said. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“The other stairwells are no good. This is our best shot.”

He rounded the top of the stairs, nearly clocking Delgado with the ladder as he went by.

“Is it long enough?” she asked.

“It’ll have to be.”

He went to the last step before the gap and placed the ladder across it. It was long enough, but there was nothing to brace it against. Once anyone actually got on the ladder, it would slide and drop into the opening.

“I’ll hold it,” Delgado said.

“What?”

“I hold the bottom of it in place while you climb across. Then you hold it and I’ll follow.”

Bourque was skeptical. “Are you sure? I’m not the svelte athlete I once was.”

“Yeah, like you were ever an athlete. Get a move on.”

Delgado planted her feet firmly on a lower step, knelt down, and placed both hands on the bottom rung of the ladder, which lay on a forty-five-degree angle across the opening. Bourque, delicately, grabbed hold of a higher rung, then, careful not to hit his partner in the head, put his feet on a lower one that was just above her head.

Now, all his weight was on the ladder.

“You okay?” he asked.

She grunted. “Move it, fatso.”

Carefully, he made the crossing, looking ahead and not at the stairs a flight below, or the sliver of space between sets of steps that appeared to go down to the depths of hell. Gingerly, he got himself onto the step on the other side of the divide, taking his weight off the ladder.

Delgado let out a long breath as Bourque planted his butt on the second step after the gap, leaned over, and gripped the top of the ladder.

“Okay,” he said.

Delgado got onto the ladder as tentatively as her partner had. She made the crossing slowly. As she reached the other side, Bourque leaned over slightly to give her room to get a grip on the closest concrete step.

As her legs were coming off the last step of the ladder, her foot slipped, and pushed hard on the upper rung. Bourque lost his grip, and the ladder fell, hitting the lower stairwell with a loud, metallic crash.

Delgado clung to the step, her legs dangling in space.

Bourque got his hands under her arms and pulled. She scrambled to get hold of the next step, and once she had it, and her waist was over the threshold of the step below, she pulled herself up the rest of the way.

“I guess we better hope there’s another ladder at the top so we can get back down,” she said.