David Koepp - Cold Storage

He noticed her noticing, and he saw the slight change in the way she looked at him. A tiny lowering of her shoulders, the minutest tilt of the head away from him. It was always the same. If women were smart enough to know him, they were smart enough to not get to know him any better.

Shit. Why did he bother?

“See you around.” She headed for the door to the dock. He started to follow, but she glanced at him and the half-full trash can he was holding.

“Didn’t you want to dump that?”

“Oh, right. Yeah. Duh. Right.”

She turned back to the door and, busted, Teacake had no choice but to head for the dumpster. He was almost there when she called out, “Oh, there might be one thing.”

He turned back.

“Over on your side.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you hear a beeping sound?”

He looked at her for a long moment, and the voice in the back of Teacake’s brain that had been trying to get a hold of his attention finally broke through. See?! the voice said. I told you there was a beep!

Teacake looked at Naomi, his eyes lighting up with the realization. “Your side too?”

Teacake and Naomi stood stock-still in the middle of the floor on his side of the complex for a good forty-five seconds before he couldn’t take it anymore and had to say something. He usually found it hard not to fill silences, but being around her made it worse.

“I swear it was there before, maybe if we—”

She held up a hand, stopping him. Naomi had patience. Another five seconds went by in silence, then ten, then five more, and then there it was, right down at the bottom of human hearing levels, maybe 0.5 dB, if that, but the numbers didn’t matter, what mattered was that it absolutely positively was there.

Beep.

Their faces lit up in smiles, kids who’d just found their Easter baskets.

“Aha!” she shouted.

“I knew it!” he said, and they took off in opposite directions, he toward the north wall and she for the south.

“What are you doing?” Naomi asked as they passed each other in the middle of the floor.

“It was over here.”

She shook her head vigorously. “It was definitely over here,” and she planted herself, still again, listening by the far wall.

He called from across the room. “Lady, I heard this thing for half an hour after I got in, it didn’t register but it did, you know how sometimes you know something but you don’t, like, know it all the way, and then it just sort of pops up and—”

“Will you please be quiet?”

“I’m saying. This wall.”

“You are very chatty.”

“I know. It’s a thing. I—”

“Shh.”

He shushed. They stood still again. They waited the full rest of the minute.

Beep.

There it was again, like a starter’s signal, and they took off, each to the other’s wall, passing in the middle of the floor again, looking at each other with incredulity.

“What are you doing now?” she wanted to know.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s over here, you were right!”

They reached each other’s former positions, grinning. It was kind of fun, or a hell of a lot better than sitting alone and staring at their monitors all night, anyway. They waited again, trying not to giggle, failing a bit, but knowing they had thirty seconds to spare. Their eyes caught, both their faces wide and childlike, and wouldn’t it have been nice if the beep never came again and this moment could just last and last and last and—

Beep.

This time nobody moved. Teacake laughed.

“What?”

“I’m afraid to say.”

“You think you were right the first time.”

He nodded. Naomi looked up at the vaulted cement ceiling above them. It was steepled, like a roof but a shallower angle. The rake of the cement was funneling the noise, scooting it along the surface of the stone before dropping it down on opposite sides of the room.

“We’re both right,” she said. She crept to the center point of the room, trying not to make any noise, and waited.

Beep.

Her head snapped in the direction from which the sound had come. Now she had a bead on it. She eased over to the reception desk, reached behind the counter, and buzzed herself through the gate. She went to the wall ten feet behind the desk, laid her ear against it, and waited.

BEEP.

The sound was most definitely coming from behind this wall, but the other side was just another corridor, running along the interior of the first row of storage units in the ground-level section. It wasn’t till you walked back through the doorway, into the reception area, and stopped to look at the wall in profile, so to speak, that you noticed the extra space. There was about eighteen inches more than there should have been between the wall in the reception area and the wall on the other side.

“Why would anybody do that? Leave empty space like that?” Teacake asked.

“Insulation?”

“Between two interior walls? That’s some fucked-up useless insulation.”

“What is this, drywall?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“I have hung my share of it.”

BEEP .

He looked at her. “You want to call Griffin?”

“Under no circumstances do I want to call Griffin.”

He caught the extra meaning in it and was disappointed. “He tried that shit already?”

She shrugged. “He’s a pig.”

“Could have told you that.”

BEEP.

She looked at him. “So what do you want to do?”

“Well, what I want to do is take that picture down,” he said, gesturing to a large framed aerial photograph of the caves, circa 1940s, that hung more or less over the exact spot that the beeping was coming from, “pick up that chair over there”—now he pointed at the uncomfortable-as-hell metal office stool that was parked behind the desk—“smash it through that cheap-ass three-eighths-inch gypsum Sheetrock, and see what the fuck is beeping back there.”

“I’m okay with that if you are.”

He laughed. “I said that’s what I want to do, not what I’m gonna do.”

“Oh.”

They looked at the wall for a while. It beeped again.

She couldn’t take it. “Oh, come on. We can hang the picture back up over the hole to cover it and bring in a piece of Sheetrock tomorrow. I’ll help you patch it up. Nobody’ll know the difference.”

“Why would we do that?” he asked.

“Curiosity. Boredom.”

“You get bored, it makes you want to smash through walls?”

“Apparently. Don’t you?”

He thought about it. Not particularly, but She was asking. Why did people always come to him with their shit, and why did he usually do it? He was going to get on top of that question real soon, but first he ran some quick numbers in his head.

“Four-by-eight piece of drywall is fifteen bucks,” he said. “Plus a roll of joint tape, that’s another eight or nine.”

“I will give you twelve dollars and we can use a sampler can of paint from the paint store. It’s easy.”

“All so we can see a smoke alarm with a dead battery.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe we see something else.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we don’t know. That’s the thing.”

“I need this job.”

“You’re not gonna lose it.”

“No, I have to have the job.”

“I get it,” she said.

He was getting heated. “No, you don’t. It’s, like, a condition .”

“I said I get it. I’ve lived here all my life, I know what a parole condition is, and I know where black-and-gray tattoos with shitty ballpoint ink get done. Ellsworth, right? I mean, I’m hoping it was Ellsworth.”