David Koepp - Cold Storage

Teacake looked at the phone. “Wow.”

“What?”

“He’s just such an asshole. I’m always kinda taken aback.”

“He hung up?”

Teacake nodded and called again. It went straight to voice mail. Teacake lowered his phone, stumped. “I have to admit, I did not see that coming.”

“Did he sound all right?”

“Well, he sounded like a jerkoff. So I guess it was him and he’s all right. Let’s get to him before your friend does.”

“He’s not my friend,” she said, indignant.

“Whatever. The guy you had a baby with. Let’s stop him.” He went to the door and threw the bolt on one end. She stepped in front of the bolt on the other end, not done talking about this yet.

“He has a gun.”

“He has a .22. Yes, a .22 can fuck you up, but the magazine only holds ten rounds, and I think he used them all.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because while we sat here for the last fifteen minutes I counted ’em in my head. One in the hallway, when we were running away from him. Three outside the door, when I was rolling under it. And six that he shot at the door after we had it locked. Look, you can see where every one of ’em hit.”

She looked up and, indeed, there were six little dimples, spread out over a three-foot area in the metal door, where the slugs had dented the outside. She was impressed.

Teacake continued. “So, he can’t shoot us, right? He can only barf at us or blow up on us, but if we stay far enough away that’s not gonna matter. We get Griffin and whatever shitheads he showed up with to clear out, keep your baby daddy inside this place—”

“Please stop that.”

“—and wait for the cavalry to come. If they know what they’re doing, then boom. We saved the world. Or at least eastern Kansas.” He paused. When a good salesman knew he had a kicker, he always saved it till last and used as few words to express it as possible. Teacake knew he had it, so he took a suitable pause and then deployed it. “And your kid too.”

Naomi looked at him, touched.

Teacake went on, and this was the part that meant more to him than all the rest. It was the part he hadn’t realized until he got almost all the way through his speech and understood why he was selling so hard, why he was campaigning for the right to open the door and go risk his life when he didn’t absolutely have to. This bit came from the heart.

“Look, I know they pay us for shit here, but this place hired me straight outta jail, and nobody else would do that. I’m supposed to take care of it, and for once in my life, it would be nice to not fuck something up. This is my one job, and yes, it’s a shitty one, but it’s the only one I’ve got or that I’m gonna get. You don’t have to come with. I’ll leave, you lock the door, I’ll come back and get you when it’s clear.”

Naomi looked at him, and she thought, It’s funny. Some things improve with closer inspection. He sure did.

She threw the bolt on the other side of the door and, together, they pulled it up over their heads and stepped out into the hallway.

Immediately, Teacake was proven right about one thing—the gun must have been empty, because Mike had left it behind, on the floor where he’d sat. They started down the corridor. They’d taken only three or four steps when Naomi’s phone buzzed.

She signaled to Teacake, stopped, and answered it, whispering, “Still here.”

It was Abigail, ten minutes on the dot since she had last called. “Good. Just checking. Is your situation unchanged?”

Naomi hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“We left the locker.”

Abigail paused, thinking. “I am at a loss as to why you would do that.”

“There are more people here now. We gotta tell ’em.”

“How many people?”

“I don’t know. Call me back.” She hung up and looked at Teacake. “She was not happy.”

Teacake shrugged. “Who is?”

The loading of the Samsung boxes had gone pretty well so far but was taking longer than Griffin wanted. The renegotiation had slowed everything down. After all the work of finally selling these bozos on the TVs, that prick Ironhead had tried to lower the price to $75 at the last minute. And it wasn’t like he did it quietly either—everybody heard, and everybody wanted the same. Ironhead was good at this; they didn’t call him Ironhead just because of the bike he rode. He worked in sales at IRT and negotiating was second nature to him, so he’d waited till they were standing in the unit, took one look around at the overstock, and knew he had Griffin over a barrel. They haggled for a couple minutes, but Griffin’s head was throbbing by this point, and the idea of everybody walking out of here and leaving these things was unthinkable. So $75 it was, the grand total take-home for the night was going to be $450 instead of $600, but whatever, Griffin took it.

The TVs were heavy and awkwardly shaped, so it took two people to carry them out, one at a time. Cedric and Wino had taken the first one out, Cuba and Garbage the second, Shorty and the Rev the third, and Griffin and Dr. Steven Friedman had made two trips already. Ironhead had somehow managed to cast himself in more of a supervisory capacity and was leaning against the inside wall of the unit grabbing a quick vape when Mike showed up in the doorway.

Mike stood there for a long moment, his breath wheezing in and out. He stared at Ironhead, who looked back at him. “What the fuck do you want?”

Mike didn’t answer, just stared. Ironhead blew out a cloud of smoke. “I asked you a question, dickhead.”

Mike still didn’t answer. Ironhead took a step forward. “You are about to have a serious problem, man. Privacy of the eyes, motherfucker, either you take two steps back and look away from me right this fucking second, or I will bounce your head off that wall till it goes pop. You understand?”

Mike turned away and looked down the hallway, not because Ironhead told him to, but because he heard voices. Cedric, Wino, Cuba, and Garbage were headed back from their first load to the truck, coming for more, and they were drawing close. They saw Mike, but he took a few steps back, giving them plenty of space. Ironhead assumed he had managed to intimidate the psycho who’d been staring at him.

“That’s what I thought,” he said to Mike as the others came back into the unit to get another TV. Cuba looked over her shoulder, recognizing the weirdo who had watched them earlier. His shirt was even tighter than before, two of the buttons already popped over his swollen midsection, and a couple others looking like they were about to give way.

“What does that guy want?” she asked Ironhead. “I saw him before.”

“Fuck if I know. Don’t worry about him. Just keep going, we don’t got all night.”

Cedric had seen enough of Ironhead’s bossy behavior over the years to be sick of it. “When are you gonna grab one, you lazy piece of shit?”

“Hey, I’m coordinating. You should be thanking me. I should be charging you a commission for the money I saved you.”

From outside, they heard shouts, two voices somewhere far away, and they looked again, past that weird staring guy, but didn’t see anybody. Ironhead turned back to the others, waving them along with some urgency. “Get a TV, come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

There was a low tearing sound, like a sheet ripping in half, and they all turned at the same time. Mike was back in the doorway, and the sound had come from his midsection. His stomach lining, stretched beyond its elastic capacity, had finally separated from the stomach wall and was now a free-floating mass of viscous jelly inside his abdomen.