Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

The desktop is a state-of-the-art iMac Pro, very fast, but today it seems to take forever booting up. While she waits, she uses her phone to email the sound file containing her report to herself. She takes a flash drive from her purse—this is the one containing the various photos Dan Bell has amassed, plus Brad Bell’s spectrograms—and as she plugs it into the back of the computer, she thinks she hears the elevator moving. Which is impossible, unless someone else is in the building.

Someone like Ondowsky.

Holly flies to the office door with the gun in her hand. She throws the door open, sticks her head out. Hears nothing. The elevator is quiet. Still on five. It was her imagination.

She leaves the door open and hurries back to the desk to finish up. She has fifteen minutes. That should be enough, assuming she can remove the fix Jerome figured out and reinstate the computer glitch that had everyone climbing the stairs.

I’ll know, she thinks. If the elevator goes down after Ondowsky gets off, I’m okay. Golden. If it doesn’t…

But it’s no good thinking about that.

The stores are open late because of the Christmas season—the sacred time when we honor the birth of Jesus by maxing out our credit cards, Barbara thinks—and she sees at once that she won’t find parking on Buell. She takes a ticket at the entrance to the parking garage across from the Frederick Building and finally finds a space on the fourth level, just below the roof. She hurries to the elevator, looking around constantly, one hand in her purse. Barbara has also seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages.

When she arrives safely on the street, she hurries to the corner just in time to catch the walk light. On the other side she looks up and sees a light on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building. At the next corner, she turns right. A little way down the block is an alley marked with signs reading NO THROUGH TRAFFIC and SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY. Barbara turns down it and stops at the side entrance. She’s bending to tap in the door code when a hand grips her shoulder.

Holly opens the email she’s sent herself and moves the attachment to the flash drive. She hesitates for a moment, looking at the blank title strip below the drive’s icon. Then she types IF IT BLEEDS. A good enough name. It’s the story of that thing’s fracking life, after all, she thinks, it’s what keeps it alive. Blood and pain.

She ejects the drive. The desk in the reception area is where they do all their mailing, and there are plenty of envelopes, all different sizes. She takes a small padded one, slips the flash drive into it, seals it, then has a moment of panic when she remembers that Ralph’s mail is going to some neighbor’s house. She knows Ralph’s address by heart and could send it there, but what if some mailbox pirate grabbed it? The thought is nightmarish. What was the neighbor’s name? Colson? Carver? Coates? None of those are right.

Time, racing away from her.

She’s about to address the envelope to Ralph Anderson’s Next Door Neighbor when the name comes to her: Conrad. She slaps on stamps willy-nilly and jots quickly on the front of the envelope:

Below this she adds C/O CONRADS (Next Door)and DO NOT FORWARD HOLD FOR ARRIVAL. It will have to do. She takes the envelope, runs flat-out to the mail-drop near the elevator, and tosses it in. She knows that Al is as lazy about collecting the mail as he is about everything else, and it may lie at the bottom of the chute (which, to be fair, few people use in this day and age) for a week, or—given the holiday season—even longer. But there is really no hurry. Eventually it will go.

Just to be sure she was imagining things, she punches the elevator call button. The doors open; the car is there and the car is empty. So it really was her imagination. She runs back to Finders Keepers, not exactly gasping but breathing hard. Some of it’s the sprint; most of it is stress.

Now the last thing. She goes to the Mac’s finder and types in what Jerome titled their fix: EREBETA. It’s the brand name of their troublesome elevator; it’s also the Japanese word for elevator… or so Jerome claimed.

Al Jordan adamantly refused to call a local company to fix the glitch, insisting that it had to be done by an accredited Erebeta repairperson. He invoked dire possibilities should anything else be done and there was an accident: criminal liability, million-dollar lawsuits. Better to just close the elevator’s eight floor-stops off with yellow OUT OF ORDER tape and wait for the proper repairperson to show up. It won’t be long, Al assured his irate tenants. A week at most. Sorry for the inconvenience. But the weeks had stretched into almost a month.

“No inconvenience for him,” Pete grumbled. “His office is in the basement, where he sits on his ass all day watching TV and eating doughnuts.”

Finally Jerome stepped in, telling Holly something that she—a computer whiz herself—already knew: if you could use the Internet, you could find a fix for every glitch. Which they had done, by mating this very computer to the much simpler one controlling the elevator.

“Here it is,” Jerome had said, pointing at the screen. He and Holly had been by themselves, Pete out making the rounds of bail-bondsmen, drumming up trade. “Do you see what’s happening?”

She did. The elevator’s computer had stopped “seeing” the floor stops. All it saw were its terminal points.

Now all she has to do is pull off the Band-Aid they put on the elevator’s program. And hope. Because there will be no time to test it. Time is too tight. It’s four minutes of six. She calls up the floor menu, which shows a real-time representation of the elevator shaft. The stops are marked, B through 8. The car is stopped on 5. At the top of the screen, in green, is the word READY.

Not yet you’re not, Holly thinks, but you will be. I hope.

Her phone rings two minutes later, just as she’s finishing.

Barbara utters a small scream and whirls around, back against the side entrance, looking up at the dark shape of the man who has grabbed her.

“Jerome!” She pats her hand against her chest. “You scared the bejesus out of me! What are you doing here?”

“I was just about to ask you the same question,” Jerome says. “As a rule, girls and dark alleys don’t mix.”

“You lied about taking the tracker off your phone, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes,” Jerome admits. “But since you obviously put on one of your own, I don’t think you can exactly claim the moral high grou—”

That’s when another dark shape looms up behind Jerome… only it’s not entirely dark. The shape’s eyes are glaring like the eyes of a cat caught in a flashlight beam. Before Barbara can shout at Jerome to look out, the shape swings something at her brother’s head. There’s a terrible dull crunch and Jerome collapses to the pavement.

The shape grabs her, shoves her against the door, and pins her there with one gloved hand wrapped around her neck. From the other he drops a chunk of broken brick. Or maybe it’s concrete. All Barbara knows for sure is that it’s dripping with her brother’s blood.

He bends toward her close enough for her to see a round, unremarkable face below one of those furry Russian hats. That weird glare is gone from his eyes. “Don’t scream, girlfriend. You don’t want to do that.”

“You killed him!” It comes out in a wheeze. He hasn’t choked off all her air, at least not yet, but he’s cut off most of it. “You killed my brother!”