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Eddie nodded. He looked past Nate’s shoulder to the stack of mail crates. There were three of them now. One straddled the other two to make a short step-pyramid of returned issues and bundled flyers. Nate had spent most of the morning looking up suicides and population predictions.

“You’re falling way behind,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t help that you’ve never gone as fast as some folks upstairs think you could.”

Nate was confident that most of the people in the upstairs office thought this job was done by a machine or farmed out to another company. He doubted anyone past Eddie and the accountant even knew his name. “I’ve tried to explain,” he said, “that
their
estimates for how fast this can be done are impossible.”

Eddie put his hands up. “Hey,” he said, “I’m on your side. And normally it’s no big deal if you’re slow. But this is getting kind of extreme, don’t you agree?”

Nate sighed and nodded. In all fairness, he’d done maybe ten hours of work in the past week. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it’s getting a bit out of hand.”

“I’m fighting to keep you and Anne and Zack on the payroll. But that means I need a hundred and ten percent from you guys, you know?” He waved a pizza-scented hand at the step-pyramid. “If someone came down and saw all this, they’d tell me to get rid of you.”

“Right,” said Nate. “Sorry.”

“What’s the problem? If it’s something I can help with, just let me know.”

Nate saw the potential minefield ahead of him. “It’s not a problem,” he said after a long three seconds. “I just haven’t been getting a lot of sleep.”

Eddie gave a sage nod. “Trouble at home?”

“No,” he said, “nothing like that.”

Eddie’s brow wrinkled up for a moment. Then his face split into a wide grin. “Ahhh,” he said. “Not getting any sleep
that
way.”

A grenade landed in the middle of the minefield.

“No,” said Nate. “No, that’s not it at all.”

“You dog,” said Eddie. He gave Nate a punch in the shoulder that landed too hard. “What’s her name?”

“Veek,” he said without thinking.

“She hot?”

“I...” An image from his dream appeared in his mind. Veek in her horn rims and an orange sweatshirt, next to Xela, naked with green hair. He pushed the picture away as fast as it had appeared and nodded for Eddie’s benefit. “Yeah. Yeah, she’s hot.”

“Man, I remember those days,” said the heavy man. “Working all day, going home and being up all night.” He put deliberate emphasis on
up
.

Nate tried very hard to keep an image of Eddie having sex from forming in his mind. It was like not thinking about a pink elephant. Or, in this case, a sunlight-deprived elephant that smelled like greasy pizza.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m a little obsessed. In a good way.”

“Power to you, man,” said Eddie. “Where’d you meet her? At one of those nights out the editors organize?”

“No,” said Nate. He thought of marching straight ahead. Surely there couldn’t be any mines left after that last blast. “She lives in my building.”

Eddie’s eyebrows went up. “Really?”

Nate nodded.

“Kind of risky, don’t you think? I mean, if she’s hot and willing it’s sweet but if things go wrong, well, she’s always right there.”

“Yeah, it’s not like that,” said Nate. “We’re both in it for the same thing, y’know?” He found religion and began praying he could get out of the conversation without creating any more details of his imaginary sex life.

Eddie grinned and nodded again. “Cool,” he said. “Between you and me, I think it’s great. But, y’know, I can’t tell them that.” He looked at the ceiling, then back to the pyramid of returned mail. “You’ve got to tell her no for a couple nights and start banging things out here at the office.” He snickered. “Banging things out. That’s pretty funny.”

Nate nodded. “Pretty funny.”

Eddie nodded again and his face went slack. The grin was gone as quickly as it had appeared. “Okay, then,” he said. He leaned forward until his ass came away from the desk. It was like watching an avalanche in slow motion. “If you can get most of these done by next week, that’d be great.”

“I’ll try,” said Nate. “It’d be a lot easier if I could have my hours back.”

“Nah. Just work around them.”

* * *

There was a corkboard by the Kavach Building’s curving staircase. Normally it was decorated with rows of business cards or sheets of pizza coupons. When Nate got home all those things had been swept away and a fresh sheet of white paper was centered there. The handwriting was crisp and precise.

To All Tenants:

A family crisis requires that I leave town for a long weekend. I will be leaving Friday morning and will return the following Tuesday.

Under normal circumstances I would not be gone for such a long period, especially not with the recent bout of vandalism. However, I have spoken with Toni from the management company and assured her there will be no problems on par with the ones which occurred last week.

Please respect your fellow tenants. If there are emergencies, please contact Toni directly on her cell phone.

Oskar Rommell

Property Manager

He doesn’t know,
thought Nate. Toni-slash-Kathy’s secret identity was still safe from the people behind Locke Management. Probably, he realized, because she'd never sent him anything about the building’s history.

Oskar gone for almost five days. They’d have lots of time to investigate.

It was close to ten when someone banged on his door. Nate stood at the wall across from his kitchen, his arm stretched out to where the warning was written in blood. His eyes went to the door and he thought it was Oskar, here to grumble that Nate was thinking about the words under the paint.

The knock came again. Three quick, solid thumps. He squinted through the peephole and saw a fish-eye view of Roger. He looked excited.

Roger pushed his way in as soon as the door opened. “Bro,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this.”

“What’s up?”

“Okay, remember I told you I’m doing this low budget indie thing?”

Nate didn’t remember, but he nodded anyway.

“Met the lead actress the other day. Smokin’ hot lady. She’s pretty cool, been talking with her and guess what? She speaks, like six different languages. One of ‘em’s Russian.”

The picture Roger was trying to draw got a lot clearer.

“Okay,” said Nate, “but it’s not Russian.”

“Yeah, but she speaks a bunch of those languages,” Roger explained. “Russian, French, Italian. Figure I could ask her if she could help us out.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not French or Italian, either.”

“Bro, why not let her look and see?”

Nate considered it. “Do you think she would?”

“She’s pretty cool, and it’s not like we’re asking for anything big. Just to look at a couple paragraphs and translate ‘em, right?”

“Right.” Nate gestured Roger into the apartment. He had hard copies of all the photos posted around his desk, and he pulled down an image of the glowing words. “You want a couple copies? I’ve got two versions of it.”

Roger shook his head. “This is perfect,” he said. “One piece of paper, nice and casual, no big deal. I can ask her tomorrow and we could know what it means by the weekend.”

The next knock came just before three the following afternoon. Nate opened his door to find Veek and Tim standing there. A large backpack hung from one of Tim’s shoulders. Nate looked at Veek. “Shouldn’t you be at work?

“I called in sick,” she said with a sly grin. “Ready for adventure?”

“What do you mean?”

“Veek and I had a talk,” said Tim. “We know there was a threat involving this building. Possibly a murder, too. It’s time to get a bit more active.”

“Meaning what?” asked Nate.

“We’re going into the cellar,” said Veek.

“Sorry?”

“The big room,” she said, “and the sub-basement. We need to see what’s in there.”

“What about Oskar?”

“Oskar is being a perfect old-world gentleman and driving Mandy out to the Food 4 Less in Van Nuys,” said Tim. “Their staff got hit with a bug and they’re short on cashiers. She had a chance to get an extra shift if she could be out there by four.”

“With rush hour on the 101, he’s going to be gone for at least an hour and a half,” said Veek.

“How much of that is true?”

“Enough that Mandy went along with it,” said Tim. “The clock’s ticking. Are you coming?”

The three of them made their way down the back staircase and into the basement. Nate stopped in front of the first padlocked door, the one across from the laundry room. “Want to start here?”

Tim nodded. “Get the small problems out of the way first,” he said.

“So how are we getting in?” asked Veek. “We never went over that.”

Tim pulled a worn leather checkbook from his back pocket and flipped it open to reveal an array of lock picks. They had the dull gleam that came from years of use. The picks slid into the padlock and his fingers adjusted them. It was a smooth and practiced technique.

Veek’s eyes bugged behind her glasses.

“So,” Nate said, “you know how to pick locks, too?”

“I published a book on it a few years back,” Tim said. “One of those how-to things they used to sell in
Soldier of Fortune
and
Writer’s Digest
and magazines like that. It seemed like a useful skill, so I played around with it.”

“Y’know,” said Veek, “there’s only so many times you can fall back on the ‘I published a book about it’ thing and we’re going to buy it.”

He smiled. “It is a great catch-all excuse, though, isn’t it?”

“How do you know how to do all this stuff?”

The pick gave a sharp twist and the padlock popped open. “Tell you what,” said Tim. “You want to tell us what you’re doing with that brute-force computer up in your apartment? You go first, I’ll spill all my secrets next.”

Her smile faded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Good call,” he said. “I’m just a retired publisher. You would’ve been pissed.”

The door opened and they looked in. A bucket filled with hand tools sat near the door. A very broken weed-whacker stood in one corner. A plastic rake leaned over it.

Three metal-framed shelves stood against the walls, filled with boxes. Half of them were labeled, either with the original packaging or with fat swipes of a magic marker. Halogen bulbs, hallway lights, pipe fittings, several boxes of fuses with different watts and amperages. Others had random codes on them or phrases like KATIE’S BEDROOM that told Nate they’d been recycled from previous uses.

“Wow,” said Veek. “A dirty storeroom.”

“But now we know,” said Tim.

“And knowing is half the battle,” said Nate.

They all smiled. Tim pulled the door shut and snapped the lock shut on the hasp.

The ornate double doors stood at the end of the hall. The bar stretched across them, and the chain wrapped around it. “How do you want to do this?” asked Nate.

Tim swung the pack off his shoulder and pulled out a long, metal flashlight. It was one of the black ones policemen used. He handed it to Nate. “The easy way,” he said. He turned to Veek. “Do you have your phone?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Get photos of the chain,” he said. “How it loops around the bar and the handles. We want to be able to put it back the same way.”

Nate aimed the light at the first bracket on the left, where the chain looped under the steel L and around the bar. Veek’s phone clicked and Nate moved the light to the next crisscross of links.

Tim waited until they were done and the light settled on the bulky padlock. The picks slid into the lock and shifted beneath his fingertips. A moment later it popped open.

The chain clattered on the bar and handles as they unwound it. Tim pulled a pillowcase from his backpack, slung the chain into it with the padlock, and dropped it in the corner. He wiped some rust on his jeans and set his hands on one side of the wooden beam. Nate nodded from the other end. Dust streamed down as they lifted the bar out of the brackets. Tim stood it against the wall next to the pillowcase.

Nate’s hand settled on a handle. Veek closed her fingers on the other one. “Ready?”

“For about a year now,” she said. A smile spread across her face.

They pulled the doors open. The hinges were smooth and took the weight and movement without a single sound. Light from the hallway spilled into the room.