David Koepp - Cold Storage

“They ain’t supposed to add their own locks. Ours are the onliest ones you gotta use, so we have access. Like in case there’s illegalness going on in there.”

“What kind of illegalness?”

By way of an answer, Teacake pulled his master key out from the retractable key chain reel on his hip, put the key into the main lock on the unit, flicked it open, and cranked up the door. He immediately regretted it and proved the wisdom of the adage “Don’t open a door unless you know what’s on the other side,” if any such adage existed.

Inside the unit, twenty-four fifty-five-inch Samsung flat-screen TVs, still in the factory packaging, were neatly stacked in rows, leaning against the walls.

“My mistake,” Teacake said. “Everything’s cool.”

He closed the door again and they continued down the hall. She looked at him.

He shrugged. “I don’t care what they got, they just can’t hide it from me. Rules is rules.”

She looked at him. “Why do you talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re from the hood.”

“This is how everybody I know talks.”

“You know me, and I don’t.”

“You got any other objections to how I am?”

She thought about it. “Not yet.”

They got to the end of the corridor and pushed the button for the elevator. He looked at her while they waited.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” he said.

“Not as much as you.”

“Nobody talks as much as me.”

She looked back down at her phone, moving the image down the ladder, through the earthen part, toward SB-4.

He had more questions. “So you got college, you do this sometimes, what else?”

“That’s not enough?”

“Not really. You don’t get many shifts.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “My job is to watch the monitors.”

“Yeah, I see you too.”

The elevator arrived, and she got in first. He followed. The doors closed.

“You get, what, maybe two nights a week?” he said.

“So far.”

“So, you got another job?”

“Sorta.”

“You got people?”

“Do I have ‘people’? Of course I have people. Teacake, you’re— What’s your real name?”

“Travis. Meacham.”

“Travis, you’re kind of sucking all the fun out of this.”

The truth was, he knew she had people, and he knew exactly which people she had, but there was no way to bring it up without seriously creeping her out. Her first night at work had been exactly two weeks ago, and he’d noticed her on the monitors immediately. She was taking a shift usually filled by Alfano Kalolo, an enormous Samoan who had to go three hundred pounds, easy.

The camera in the eastern reception area was placed close to the desk, and Alfano so dominated the screen that his absence one night fairly screamed at Teacake to take notice. Truth, who would not notice a thing like that? When Alfano sat on the little metal stool, he was a man-mountain who appeared to be eating a four-legged metal insect with his ass. When, that Thursday two weeks ago, Teacake looked up and saw Naomi there instead, a heavenly choir sang in his head.

He’d stared at her image that night with the intensity of a teenager monitoring his Facebook likes. She sat, she stood, she did her rounds, and always she walked in beauty, like the night. He’d memorized that poem in Ellsworth; they’d had to pick something and learn it by heart for Explorations in Poetry, and that was the shortest of the ones you could pick. He knew the poem, but he didn’t know the poem until he saw Naomi on the monitor.

When she showed up for work again two days later, he studied her on the monitors for hours, absorbing as much detail as one possibly could from a 540-pixel image. She had a book with her that night. He couldn’t quite get the title, but he loved her focus, the way her brow furrowed up at parts. He loved the way she turned the pages; he loved that she even read at all and didn’t just stare at her phone like everybody else. When she wasn’t back until the following Sunday, he realized that she was a fill-in, that she was grabbing shifts when and if she could get them, and that there was a very real possibility that she would never be back again.

So, he told himself, it wasn’t really that he followed her after work. Yes, he did leave five minutes early so he could zip around to the other side of the bluffs and be near her parking lot when she left. And yes, he did swing out onto the highway just after she did and keep his car a safe and unthreatening distance behind hers on the road at all times, and yes, he did speed up when she sped up and slow down when she slowed down and make the same turns that she made, until he eventually reached her place of residence. But he knew in his heart it wasn’t with weird intent—he was trying to engineer a casual run-in.

It just didn’t work out. Once Naomi left the Atchison parking lot, it was kind of hopeless, all country highways till he got to her apartment complex, and then how on earth could he pull up in the car next to her at her building and say, “Oh, hey! Don’t you work where I do? Didn’t I watch—I mean see you on the monitor a couple times, and man, isn’t it weird that you live here, twelve miles away, and I was going that exact same way but my car started making this weird sound so I had to stop right here, in the parking lot of the very same apartment building where you live? Isn’t that bizarre ?”

He couldn’t say that. The smoothest motherfucker in human history (arguably Wilt Chamberlain) couldn’t have pulled that one off.

So, rather than scare her, Teacake had just sat in the car, waiting till she went in, pretending to be absorbed in his phone. It was a flip, by the way, so if she’d noticed him she might well have wondered what the hell he was staring at. He waited till she got inside, then he waited some more, just to see which light went on, then he waited a teensy bit more, just to see if, well, because he did, and before he knew it almost an hour had gone by, and he really honestly was about to go when the door of the place opened again, and he saw her come out with the little girl.

There was no question that the girl was her daughter. Some things you can just tell. They looked alike, for starters, but also it was the way Naomi held the little girl’s hand. Nobody holds your hand like that except your mama.

The little girl was cute as hell and dressed in clean, pressed clothes, a detail Teacake noticed because his own clothes when he was a kid had always been dirty as shit. He blushed, right there in his car, embarrassed, not because he was stalking this poor woman and, now, her kid, but because of all the times that he went to school in filthy clothes and with an unwashed face. But this little girl was what a kid was supposed to look like. She was clean and bright and her mom had given her a good breakfast, he just knew she had, even though she’d come off a twelve-hour shift and hadn’t slept since God knows when. Naomi had come home and made breakfast, and maybe even put some cinnamon sugar on the kid’s toast, the way she liked.

The little girl was talking a mile a minute, and Naomi was listening. Not “uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, cool” kind of listening, but trying to actually make sense of what the kid was saying, which had to be nonsense. I mean, how much can a four-year-old say that matters, anyway? He didn’t know, but from what he’d heard, the percentage was pretty low, mostly it was just “I want more frosting” or some shit.

They got to the car, the little girl got into a car seat in the back, and Naomi stood there, waiting, her hand on the door, as her daughter finished her pointless point.

Teacake rolled down his window, just a little. He was close enough, just barely, to make out a few words. Not the little girl’s—those were all faint and little-girly and coming too fast from inside the car—but he could hear what Naomi said in response, after waiting till her daughter stopped for a breath.