Overkill

“What’s that supposed to that mean?”

“That I have absolutely no idea,” he admitted.

She tried calling out for a while, alternating between “Help!” and “Hello there!” She tried banging on the walls, stomping on the floor, and shaking the elevator back and forth. It turned out to be well insulated, padded and impervious to shaking.

Jaywalker took off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. Placing his back against the wall of the elevator, he allowed himself to slide down until he came to a sitting position. “Relax,” he said. “You’re using up too much oxygen.” A moment later he felt her join him. Not quite felt her, but sensed her closeness.

“Seriously,” she said. “How long before we run out of oxygen?”

“I once read you don’t die of oxygen starvation,” he assured her. “Carbon dioxide poisoning kills you first.”

“That’s comforting,” she said. “Hey.”

“Hey, what?”

“That was a great summation.”

“Yours, too.”

“No,” she said. “I really mean it. By the time you sat down, half of me was rooting for your kid.”

“Right. And then you got up and blew us out of the water.”

“I was only doing my job,” she said.

“Well, you did it very well. For a rookie.”

He felt an elbow jab him in the ribs. Or maybe it had been a fist; in the dark it was hard to tell. But he readied his hand to catch it next time, just in case.

“How did you get those clowns to show up in Oakland Raiders outfits?” she wanted to know.

“I swear I had nothing to do with that,” he said. “I ran into a former client, and he wanted to know all about the case. So I told him. He must’ve figured it out on his own that it might help if they were to make a cameo appearance.”

“Jaywalker the innocent.”

“Always.”

“And this is for making a fool of Detective Fortune, who just happens to be married to my neph-”

He caught her on the word this, or pretty close to it. And it must have been a fist, because he caught her by the wrist. It was surprisingly thin, thin enough for him to wrap his hand completely around it and hold on. And it must have been the wrist farther from him, because when he pulled on it, the rest of her came with it, across his body and onto his lap. They kissed, or at least he did.

“That was my eye,” she told him.

He tried again.

“Better.”

But if making out in the dark on the floor of an elevator was Jaywalker’s idea of a good time, it apparently wasn’t Darcy’s. “We have to get some air in here,” she insisted, “before we die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Carbon dioxide poisoning.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No you didn’t,” he said. “You said-”

“Whatever. Get us some air, Jaywalker.”

As much as he hated to get up, he did. This time he reached upward, for the ceiling. He figured there had to be a removable panel somewhere up there. Didn’t all elevators have one, in order to get at the cables? But the ceiling was too high. He crouched low and jumped. Nothing.

“What are you doing?” Darcy wanted to know.

“Trying to get you some air.”

“By doing jumping jacks?”

He explained his thinking to her. It was she who came up with the idea of climbing up on his shoulders, as he would remind her several times over the days to come.

The first impediment, as they quickly discovered when she placed one foot atop his extended knee, was her heels. The result was painful, but easily enough remedied. Not so her long narrow skirt, which made it difficult for her to bend her own knees and would have made sitting on his shoulders all but impossible.

“Don’t look,” she warned him.

Don’t look?

He heard a faint zipping sound. Make that an unzipping sound. Though in the dark, it turns out, they’re hard to tell apart. A moment later her foot was back on his knee, this time heel-less.

The physics of climbing onto another person’s shoulders are not that complicated. The climber, after placing one foot securely atop the climbee’s horizontally extended upper leg, swings the opposite leg over the climbee’s back and shoulders. Holding that first foot with one hand, and now grasping the second foot with his free hand, the climbee straightens himself up and into a standing position, all the while maintaining not only his own balance but that of the person comfortably perched atop his shoulders, as well.

And that’s all there is to it, except for the rather obvious caveat that in order to achieve success, the first two steps must have been properly executed.

If you’ve ever ridden a horse, you know how absolutely essential it is that in the initial process of mounting the animal, you place the correct foot in the stirrup. It doesn’t take all that much in the way of imagination to predict the outcome when the wrong foot is used instead. Now in all fairness to Katherine Darcy, it is true that horses are generally mounted-at least when humans are doing the mounting-in the daytime, or when sufficient ambient light is present to determine which way the animal happens to be facing.

Katherine Darcy did not have that advantage.

Which explains why, when she finally came to rest perched securely upon Jaywalker’s shoulders, the two of them were facing in very different directions. One hundred and eighty degrees different, to be precise.

Even in the dark, they both recognized the problem immediately, though problem is hardly the word Jaywalker would have used to describe the situation. But as easy as it had been to get there, no ready solution presented itself for correcting things. Think back to the horse-and-rider analogy, if you will, and imagine the rider, saddled up but suddenly facing the tail end of the beast, attempting to turn around. Okay, now try to imagine it with Jaywalker’s head in the way.

“What now?” asked Darcy.

Jaywalker tried to answer, but his words came out unintelligible even to him. And it was no wonder; he was talking directly into what could discretely be described at Darcy’s lower lower abdomen, and every time he opened his mouth his lips kept getting stuck on bare flesh. He tried tilting his head back as far as he could. The result was substantial pain in the back of his neck and significantly less fun for his lips. But it did enable him to speak out loud.

“Just a minute,” he said. “Hold on tight.” And he let go of her with one hand, in order to free it.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked, her weight shifting suddenly as he bent at the waist, trying to, well, make an adjustment of sorts.

“Nothing,” he said.

“What nothing?”

“Relax,” he said. “It’s a guy thing.”

He straightened up, resumed his two-handed grip and told her to reach up and feel around above her. “There should be a panel right in the middle of the ceiling,” he told her. “Either it’ll push up easily, or there’ll be screws to loosen it.”

“I need you to move,” she said.

“Which way.”

“To the left.”

He moved one step to the left.

“No,” she said. “The other left.”

Another complication that came with facing-in-opposite-directions syndrome, as they soon discovered, was