Want To Play (Monkeewrench)

off beneath the message. ‘Goddamnit,’ he whispered, then turned to Leo, his eyes wide. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, there are no firewalls. It’s a direct line. This message came from the Monkeewrench computers.’

Magozzi froze for a second and heard a roaring in his ears. ‘What are you saying?’

‘The guy’s there, Leo. Right now.’

Harley was using his shoulder as a battering ram. The door rattled in its metal frame, but it wasn’t going to give anytime this century. ‘God-damn-it!’

‘I thought you said it didn’t lock from the inside.’

Harley took another run at the door. ‘It’s not supposed to.’

‘Harley, give it up. You’re not going to break down a metal door.’

‘Any better ideas?’

‘You have your cell?’

‘Roadrunner, we’re in a concrete room inside another concrete room underground. A cell phone is not going to work.’

‘I just saw a movie where this guy is in an underground bunker in Iraq during Desert Storm and that cell phone worked.’

‘That’s fucking Hollywood for you.’ He grabbed the knob and started shaking it in pure frustration.

‘Harley?’ Roadrunner said in a small voice behind him.

‘Yeah, what?’

‘Am I bleeding? Like, a lot?’

Harley turned and saw Roadrunner touching his head where he’d run into the breaker box. ‘You have a big, red goose egg that’s starting to turn blue now, but no blood.’ He followed Roadrunner’s worried gaze down to the floor. The concrete was covered in bloody footprints.

Their footprints.

‘Oh Jesus Christ, Harley. That wasn’t oil out there,’ Roadrunner whispered.

And suddenly everything clicked – the power that shouldn’t have gone out, but did; the door that wasn’t supposed to lock, but did – Harley let out an anguished roar and pulled out his .357 and leveled it at the doorknob.

‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!’ Roadrunner screamed. ‘You can’t shoot a steel door in a concrete room, you’re going to shred us to ribbons!’

‘I know that!’ Harley’s hand was shaking; Roadrunner’s eyes followed the muzzle of the gun as it wobbled back and forth. ‘I know that,’ he said again, this time in a whisper, and when he turned to look at Roadrunner, he was crying. ‘He’s here, Roadrunner. And Grace is up there alone.’

And then they heard the elevator, rising.

‘Grace?’

‘Magozzi, is that you?’

‘Grace, do you trust me?’ He was running through the office, dodging desks, pushing aside anyone who got in his way, cell phone pressed to his ear so hard it would hurt for days.

‘No, I don’t trust you.’

‘Yes you do, Grace. You trust me with your life. You’ve got to. The killer’s there! Get out! Get out of there right now! Right this second . . . Jesus Christ goddamnit it to hell!’

‘What?’ Gino was pumping, panting behind him.

‘I lost her.’

‘Goddamnit,’ Gino echoed, and they were in the hall, down the stairs, racing for the front door because that was closest to the car, knocking over the anchor from Channel Ten, rocking a stationary camera, hitting the bar on the door so hard Magozzi thought for a minute it might go right through the glass.

He’d hit redial the second he’d gotten disconnected, and the phone at Monkeewrench kept ringing, ringing in his ear.

Grace stood frozen at her desk, phone pressed to her ear, her eyes wide and fixed on the elevator across the loft. She could hear the grind of the gears as it rose; she could see the cables moving through the wooden grate.

‘Magozzi?’ she whispered frantically into the phone, and heard nothing in her ear but dead air.

Do you trust me, Grace?

Her hand was shaking so badly that the receiver rattled when she set it down on the desk.

The killer’s there! Get out! Get out of there right now!

She heard her heart pounding against the wall of her chest, she heard the hum of the computers and the oblivious twitter of a bird outside the window.

And over it all, she heard the elevator, coming up.

Run! Hide, goddamnit! She dropped to a crouch behind her desk and in a flash she was back in that closet in Georgia ten years ago, doing what FBI Special Agent Libbie Herold told her to do. She’d heard her heart pounding then, too, and other sounds: the quick padding of Libbie’s bare feet across the wooden floor, toes still wet from her shower; the creak of a floorboard in the hall, and then a snick, snick, coming from the bedroom doorway. Through dusty louvers she saw Libbie’s bare legs wobble back into view, and then there was a flash of metal that opened her thighs in two bloody smiles that spilled a red lake on the floor. And through it all, Grace hadn’t made a sound. She’d just cowered in her laughable hiding place, eyes wide with terror as she waited for her turn, doing nothing to help Libbie Herold, doing nothing to save herself. Doing nothing.

Run and hide. It was an instinct so ingrained, so powerful, that in an instant it had overridden the exhaustive training of the last ten years. The defense classes, the bodybuilding, the target practice, all of it useless as Grace cowered now as she had ten years ago, waiting, doing nothing.

Like any prey, she tried to make herself smaller, pressing her arms tight against her sides, hugging herself, and then suddenly she felt the gun and remembered who she was. Who she had created from that ruined girl in the closet.

She glanced over her shoulder at the window that led to the fire escape. She could still make it. Out the window, down the stairs, onto the safety of the street . . .

Not this time. She closed her eyes briefly and turned back to the elevator. It was almost all the way up. Too late to race past it to the stairwell, but time enough to pull the Sig from its holster and chamber a round; time enough to dart forward to the cover behind Annie’s desk and steady the gun in both hands on the smooth wooden surface.

This is your entire world when you shoot, her first firearms instructor had lectured over and over again. Your gun hand, your target, and the path between. Nothing else exists.

She’d been in that world a hundred times, a thousand, firing fifteen rounds in a pattern so close the holes all overlapped. Ironically, the deafening noise of the target range had provided her only moments of real peace, when the world around her blurred and disappeared and there was only that narrow, sharply focused path demanding her attention.

She felt the peace settle on her now as she put pressure on the trigger and saw only her gun, and the grate of the elevator door.

She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, and waited with eerie calm to kill her first human being.

Magozzi was driving so fast the Ford fishtailed when he took the turn onto Hennepin through a red light. Pedestrians and bikers scattered in front of the wailing siren and the screech of tires. Gino was in the passenger seat, one hand braced on the dash, yelling the warehouse address into the radio, calling for ERT and backup, broadcasting a possible officer down.

Sharon Mueller wasn’t responding to radio calls.

The top of the elevator rose slowly into Grace’s line of sight, then the interior, and when it was level with the floor, it clunked to a stop.

Grace’s heart stopped with it, and then broke into a million pieces. She heard it break in her ears, and felt the clatter of all its parts against the inside of her ribs.

There was no killer in the elevator. Only Mitch, slumped against the side wall, staring at his sprawled legs