Deadly Interest (44 page)

David looked down at him
and smiled wistfully. He goddamn
smiled
. The sound of the shot rang
in my head, echoing and strong. I could barely hear, but somehow I
caught his words. “For the good of the firm, old chum.”

I didn’t wait. I grabbed Maya’s sleeve and
dragged her after me, back into the maze of the office. We ran
through a lattice-work of those folding six-foot portable wall
separators, my breath coming in ragged gasps.

“
Alex,” I heard David’s
smooth voice calling after me. “Don’t run. We can talk this out. I
promise.”

I pulled Maya into one of the sections and
forced her into a crouch. Her dark eyes jumped everywhere at once.
Everywhere but at me. Her breaths came out in panicked whooshes. I
thought she might hyperventilate.

“
We’re dead,” she said.
“He’ll kill us both.”

“
How can we get out of
here?” I asked, shaking her out of her stupor. A sudden crash to my
far left made me jerk, but we both managed to keep from yelping
aloud. Metal against wood, against plastic, thudding then, to the
floor. Several of the nearby portable sections shook, and I knew
David must be systematically kicking them over. It would only be a
matter of time before he found us.

I thought of Lucy. What would she do without
me? I shook Maya again when another crash sounded. Closer this
time.

“
There’s got to be a way
out of here.” I shook her hard. “Think.”

“
Alex,” his smooth voice
continued, “you know, I really believed you’d come to me if you
uncovered any irregularities. We had a bond, you and I. I trusted
you.” He heaved a sigh, slammed the cubicle next to us to the
ground.

We had to move. Now.

“
I’m terribly disappointed
in you.”

Leaping like startled rabbits, we made it
one cubicle over, just in time to hear his foot slam against the
wall we’d just abandoned. He must have been getting tired because
he kicked again, but this time, nothing fell.

“
I had such hopes for us,
Alex. I thought we could make beautiful music together.” He
chuckled. Moved nearer.

“
It’s not too late. I’m
willing to . . . negotiate.” I could hear him taking deep breaths.
He was winded. “Owen killed Evelyn Vicks. You know that now. But, I
didn’t know about it until he told me. He was stupid. Out of
control. Now, I have to come in and clean up his mess. But we can
still escape. Together. All we need are a couple of fall
guys.”

I tried estimate how close he was by his
voice. We scurried. Like rats, I thought. Trapped rats.

“
Owen already set things
up for Maya to take the fall,” his silky smooth tone continued.
“She deserves it, too, believe me. Just call out where you are, and
you and I can be on our way to the Cayman Islands to drink rum
tonics on the beach for the rest of our lives.”

Yeah, right, I thought.

I heard him grunt with effort, and then
another crash. More partitions toppled.

“
Listen to me, both of
you,” he said, his voice taking on a harsher tone. “You’re smart
girls. Think. Think hard. You can’t get out of this alive. Not
unless I let you.”

We’d sidled up to a wide pillar, and I
fought an exclamation of pain as I bumped against metal. David
might have heard the sound of my hitting it, but I thought not. I
looked at the mounted item, close-up. A fire extinguisher.

I lifted it from its hook, released the
safety pin, and held the nozzle in my right hand, the tubing
leading from the nozzle to the can I held in my left.

I kept close attention to his positioning,
using the elevator corridor as the twelve on a clock to keep my
bearings. We were at about the four, moving counter-clockwise
around the maze of desks. He followed us, moving the same
direction. I placed him at about the eight, maybe the nine. A few
more steps around, he’d be behind us and we’d have our only chance
to run.

He must have come to the same conclusion, at
the same moment, because he stopped kicking the cubicle and I heard
quick footsteps head toward the corridor.

We didn’t wait. We didn’t think.

We ran.

In the darkness, with all the strewn rubble
from his kicking tantrum, he must have misgauged a step. I heard,
rather than saw him trip, but not fall.

“
Go,” I shouted to Maya,
then turned and aimed the nozzle at the open doorway we’d just
left. David appeared and I sprayed him, directly in the
face.

His hands flew up to his eyes in a futile
effort to protect them from the onslaught of chemicals. I’d gotten
him straight in the face. He bent over, coughing, retching. Some
wafted my way and I tasted the chalky, yellow bitterness of the
powdered spray, even as I turned to run.

Maya hadn’t moved from behind me, so I threw
the heavy fire extinguishing can aside and grabbed a handful of her
leather jacket as I made for the wall buttons that would be our
salvation.

My feet moved slow-motion, my left hand
reached, like a Stretch Armstrong toy I remembered from my
childhood, for the button that would open the waiting elevator
doors.

It opened. Thank God.

We were inside before the doors fully
spread, pressing the “close” button with four frantic hands. I
heard Maya pray aloud, and I listened for movement from the
corridor.

The doors weren’t closing.

Because we hadn’t picked a floor.

“
Down,” I shouted,
pressing the button for the ground floor.

Whatever computer controlled the system gave
us an indifferent click-reply, and ever so slowly, the doors slid
shut. We stood, motionless, panting, not making any other
sound—willing the golden panels to close. Now. To keep us
alive.

Five inches.

Two inches.

Fingers thrust through the rubber linings,
grabbing for Maya’s coat. She jumped backward, fell to the floor,
sobbing, eyes wild.

For a time-stopping second, I thought the
doors, having encountered resistance, would make the faithful
response and open again.

They didn’t.

His fingers must not have hit the safety
mechanism sufficiently, because the flexing digits yanked back just
a fraction of a second before the elevator locked itself and made
ready to begin its downward trek. I heaved a sick-to-my-stomach
groan and, nearly blanking out from shock, dropped to lean against
the inner wall. My mind flashed back to fourth grade when a boy I
liked told me about a man who’d been decapitated by a set of
elevator doors and how the body had danced around for long minutes
before it finally died. Back then I’d believed that those door
edges were sharp enough to chop through a man’s neck. Right now, I
wished to God those buggers had sliced David’s hand right off.

Relief rushed through my body; there was no
way he could beat us down by taking the stairs. I allowed myself to
breathe again.

But our elevator stopped again, almost
immediately. Maya pushed to her feet.

I stared out the glass walls for a
split-second, trying to impel us to move by sheer force of will.
The ground below remained immobile. The button we’d hit and lit up
had gone dark now. I reached for the floor buttons, pressing “one”
again and again, hoping to kick the computer into gear.
Nothing.

I pressed “two, three, four.”

We weren’t going anywhere.

Maya stood transfixed, her eyes on the
digital readout that indicated our floor. It was dark, too. As
though the elevator system had been shut off completely.

“
How?”

Maya blinked, shaking her head. “There’s a
control box on every floor.”

“
Shit,” I said, then
thought to ask, “Does it control all the elevators, or just this
one?”

Maya blinked in concentration, looked up
when the answer came to her. “All of them,” she said. “If we’re
stuck, he can’t use any of the others.”

“
Okay,” I said, trying to
make sense of our situation, trying to see how we could possibly
survive.

Movement caught my eye, and I turned.
Through the glass walls that faced the atrium a half-floor above us
now, I could see David heading away from our position, back into
the loan department. “What do we do?” I asked Maya.

She shook her head.

I tore open the brass control box inside,
hoping to find some master command that would allow us to start
moving again. There it was. A bulls-eye shaped keyhole, surrounded
in red. White letters telling me that this was what we needed.

I grabbed Maya’s arm. “You still have that
key?”

Her face crumpled; she shook her head. She
pointed back toward the loan department. “In my purse.”

David was back in less than a minute. He
strode past the windows on his way to our glass prison, looking
neither right nor left. A man on a mission. He held something long
and shiny in his hand, like a pointer from a business meeting.

It dawned on me what he needed it for.

Every set of elevator doors had a small hole
just above eye-level. In the event of an emergency, poking a long
straight object inside would open the doors automatically. He’d
have us then.

I looked up.

These fancy elevators had plastic-square
dropped ceiling tiles. I jumped, pushing them aside with my hand,
until I spotted the escape hatch, exactly where I thought it would
be. “Boost me,” I said to Maya.

With a stricken look on her face, she
complied, wrapping her hands together and pushing my planted foot
upward. We worked well together, Maya and I, and some auto-pilot
part of my brain processed that nugget even as my fingers skimmed
the square, knocking the small door off-center.

“
One more time,” I
said.

This time my fingers strove for purchase
over the edge of the open hatch, and I got it. Exerting muscles I
didn’t know I owned and pushing those harmful thoughts about my
lack of upper body strength out of my head, I pulled myself
through, using my right elbow as leverage. Once I had my left elbow
pulled up and set, I shimmied upward with relative ease, working
around vertical metal struts on the elevator car’s roof. Thank God
we were both slim, I thought.

The moment I made it to my knees, I reached
back for Maya’s outstretched hand, pulling. No luck.

We both heard the sound of metal against
metal as the poker David used tried to find the doors’ release
level. I laid flat on my stomach, giving me the best control I
could muster. “Come on,” I said.

We locked hands, and she pressed a foot
against the sidewall railing. It was enough, and once she’d gotten
her torso through the opening, I grabbed her by her waist and
hauled her the rest of the way in.

I looked around. We hadn’t dropped far at
all. I could see only the very top couple of inches of the
tenth-floor doors, where, from the sound of things, David Dewars
was having difficulty opening them.

I hate elevator shafts. I’ve always hated
them. Looking upward in an elevator shaft terrifies me. As a little
kid I’d visited a building on State Street with cage elevators that
were open everywhere—side-to-side, up and down. I’d buried my head
in my mother’s stomach and didn’t move till my dad gathered me in
his arms and carried me out. As an adult, I recognized my
irrational fear as a phobia. I lived with it—believing that such an
oddball phobia wouldn’t ever seriously impact my life.

Now, my life depended on me beating it.

I came through the small opening with
nothing but survival on my mind. As I stood, in the worst of my
nightmares, I froze. I wouldn’t look up. I couldn’t.

But there was no way to go down.

Maya pointed at the wall near the doors. “A
ladder.”

Panic manifested itself in a cold flush that
seared through my body, making my heart hurt from its pounding,
making my eyes see bright lights.

We heard a thud.

Those top two inches showed the tenth-floor
doors wide open.

And David was inside the elevator.

“
Go,” Maya said, pushing
me toward the ladder.

I followed her, working too many things in
my brain at one time. I told myself not to look up. I repeated it
like a mantra, hitting the words over and over as my feet clanged
the stacked rungs. Maya stopped at the eleventh-floor doors,
reaching.

She tried to force the panels open, but her
center of gravity was off, and the doors wouldn’t budge. Another
memory flashed in my mind. Forcing open the windows in Mrs. Vicks’
house during that storm, because she’d been locked out. This was
how everything had started. If I hadn’t helped her that night, I
wouldn’t be here now.

With a start, I realized that life moments
were playing before my eyes.

I clenched them shut even as I put one hand
above the other, climbing upward into the sum of all my fears. I
couldn’t let my childhood terrors be what stopped me now. I
couldn’t let David win that easily.

Looking down, I saw his head crown the
opening. He’d be on top of the car any moment now.

We had enough light from the glass shaft
surrounding us, but that meant that David would be able to see us
just as easily as we could see him.

I looked up.

I thought my heart would explode from the
sight of the dreadful abyss above me. I knew it only extended about
two floors above us, but the panic attack had begun. My heart went
into a long series of palpitations and my breath came out in fast
pants. I would not lose control. I couldn’t. I didn’t have my
father to carry me to safety. I had to do it myself.

I did the only thing I could do at that
point. I closed my mind to all but the feel of cold steel rungs in
my hand and the muscles in my legs propelling me upward. I forced
myself to envision blinders and from then on, I saw nothing else
but the path up the ladder.