David Koepp - Cold Storage

“I hear you, sweetie. That stinks.”

And then she closed the door.

That was what killed him. It wasn’t “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad,” or “Honey, please, we’re late,” or “That’s some stupid ridiculous bullshit, you gotta learn to shut up when you talk to people.” It was “I hear you, that stinks.” It was all he ever, ever wanted from people when he talked to them. To be heard. And this lady gave it to a four-year-old, after being up all night.

And all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

So what Teacake wanted to say that night, while they rode down in the elevator, what he was dying to say was “You’re fucking awesome with your daughter,” but is there a good way to ease into that when you’re not even supposed to know she has a daughter?

So instead, he said nothing.

The elevator doors slid open.

Sub-basement 1 was supposed to be the only sub-basement, and it had never occurred to anybody to question the need for the number. SB-1 looked just fine on the elevator keypad, as good as any other number. The facility’s history as a government installation wasn’t a secret, so finding out there had once been other, lower levels wouldn’t have been much of a surprise, had anybody ever bothered to think about it. But to find out there were three of them, and they were connected by an elaborate series of sensors and alarms to a control panel that had since been walled up behind the reception desk, you know, that would have raised a few eyebrows.

According to the schematic, the top entrance to the tube ladder was located at the end of a short dead-end hallway about a hundred feet from the elevator bank. Naomi reached the end first, stopped, and turned around in the white-painted cinder block space. There was nothing there that suggested an entrance, in fact the opposite—everything about this space said, This is the end .

There were three larger storage units on each side of the hallway, the big two-hundred-square-foot jobs that were mostly used by factories storing overstocks. But there was no door or hatchway or obvious entrance of any kind, except for a small, narrow cabinet between two units marked STAFF ONLY.

Naomi looked from the map, to the hallway, to the map. “I don’t get it.”

“You’re sure it’s here?”

She held the map out to him. “Look for yourself.”

He took the phone, held the map one way, then the other, slid it around a bit. Naomi went to the far wall, the dead end, and smacked it a few times here and there with the flat of her hand. Solid. She knocked, tapped with a fist.

“Cinder block,” she said. “If it’s behind here, we’d need a sledgehammer. Or a jackhammer.”

“Yeah, I’m not down for that.”

Teacake turned the phone upside down, looking at the schematic again. He looked down at the floor. That’s interesting, man.

He zipped the keys out of his key ring again—had to admit, he loved the metallic zing that it made whenever he pulled them out, he’d never been a person who had more than one key before this job—and went to the narrow maintenance cabinet. He opened the cabinet, took a claw hammer off a tool rack, and went back to the same spot in the hallway where he’d been standing, about three feet from the cinder block dead end. He moved till his back was against the wall, got down on all fours, and tapped the hammer once on the floor. It made an unpromising chunk sound.

“That’s concrete,” she said.

“Yup.”

He crawled forward, brought the hammer down again. Same sound. He kept crawling, tapping the hammer every six inches or so, getting the same sound every time.

“It’s a concrete floor, Travis.”

“Weird to hear my real name.” He kept moving, kept tapping the hammer on the floor.

“Sorry,” she said. “It bothers you?”

“Can’t decide.” Yes, he could, and he already had. It didn’t bother him; he loved it. His heart skipped a beat every time she said his name. He couldn’t wait till she said it again. Please say it again, just one more time?

THWUNG. He’d nearly reached the center of the hallway, and when he brought the hammer down there it produced a hollow, metallic echo.

He looked up at Naomi. She grinned and squatted down on the floor next to him. He held up the phone, swiping to enlarge a certain portion of the screen. “Right there. That semicircle made of dashes, kinda shaded gray, can you see it?”

“Yeah, barely.”

“That’s the entrance. They just painted over it.”

Together, they looked down at the floor. He spun the hammer around in his hand a couple of times, thinking. He sat back.

“Okay, look. There’s no way we could hide this shit we’re about to do.”

“What are we about to do?”

“Wreck some more stuff,” he said. “But here’s how I see it. Part of our job is security, and there’s an alarm going off, a’ight? It’s too late to call Griffin, he’s wasted by now, and he wouldn’t know what the fuck it is anyway. He’d just call corporate, but there’s nobody at corporate either, it’s not like there are self-storage emergencies and they got operators standing by, see what I’m saying? The only other people I can think of to call are the cops.”

“To say there’s an old smoke alarm or something going off in the basement?”

“Exactly. Ridiculous. But here we are, and there’s an alarm going off, and this whole place is stuffed to the rafters with incredibly valuable personal belongings.”

“Right! This stuff is meaningful to people.”

“This is true, what you’re saying. I’ve always felt that way.” He was warming up to it now, feeling the creative buzz of getting your story straight with somebody. “There is an alarm going off, and we are guards. We are people of the security profession.”

“We’re more like clerks.”

“Stay with me. Yes, it is a shitty job, but it is our job.”

“It’s our responsibility.”

“Yes!”

“Plus we’re curious,” she added.

“Yeah, but we leave that part out.” She wasn’t a natural at lying. That’s all right, he knew enough about it for both of them. “A’ight? We in?”

“You know I am.”

“Watch your eyes.”

She raised a hand and turned away, and he spun the hammer around so it was claw-end down and swung it at the floor, hard. The hollow metallic boom was louder, there was definitely something down there, and it wasn’t cement floor. Chunks of dried paint flew. He swung again, two, three, four times in quick succession, and more paint flecked away. On the last blow a two-inch-square section flew off and gave them a good look at the unfinished surface beneath.

There, under several layers of long-dried oil-based semigloss gray floor paint, were the unmistakable metal dimples of a manhole cover.

It had been five or six years since Roberto Diaz had gotten a call in the middle of the night. It was a fluke that the phone even rang on his bedside table; since retirement he’d gotten in the habit of turning the thing off around nine at night and not turning it back on again until he’d had at least one cup of coffee in the morning. He’d been much happier ever since. Mellower, anyway. Annie couldn’t quite get there with her devices; she always left her phone on in case one of the kids needed anything, but their youngest was twenty-eight, so chances of that were slim. Still, she liked to check the New York Times in bed first thing after she woke up to see if the world had improved in the last eight hours. Strangely, it never had, but Annie was not one to give up hope.