I had said these words so many times already. Others had come and gone. Charlie’s heartbroken parents, our colleagues bearing flowers, cards, the doughnuts they knew he loved, which at the end of each day I took out with me and distributed to the doctors and nurses. Poor Laszlo’s, Charlie’s brother, had come every day, come and sat silently beside me for hours after his own shift was through.
Technically, I had little to apologize for. I had told Charlie not to return to that warehouse. Indeed, I had not only warned him but ordered him not to. He knew that it would be my duty and my responsibility to take the steps necessary to shut it down: an Off Record house could not be countenanced, and I had to act.
He knew we would be going in there, and that we would come in with weapons blazing.
And yet when the decisive day came, and we swept in with the full force of the State, there he was, still undercover, skulking among the conspirators, unable to free himself from the idea that there was a monster left for him to find.
He had been caught in the cross fire. Shot six times, including twice in the stomach and once in the chest—a bullet that pierced the lungs and brought him perilously close to dying right there, off the Record, on a dirty warehouse floor in Glendale.
And perhaps that would have been better, I thought with sadness as I listened to the machines breathing for him. As I watched the medicine dripping into his arm. Drip, drip.
“Arlo?”
I had fallen asleep, I suppose. My eyes opened to find his looking into mine. Charlie, dear Charlie. He spoke, clearly but with difficulty. “The monster,” he said, and I closed my eyes. Still. “I have to…” He cleared his throat. Turned his head to one side.
“Goodness, Charlie,” I told him. I opened my eyes, leaned forward and took poor Charlie’s hand. “I wish you would take pleasure in your success.”
“Success,” he murmured. “Success.”
It was like he could not accept the word. Like he was rolling it around in his mouth, tasting it, unsatisfied. The machines beeped and hummed.
“Yes, Charlie,” I said. “Success. Numerous arrests were made. A grave assault on the Objectively So was ended. All because of you, Charlie. Because of you.”
“The monster—could be anyone.” He couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t. My old friend, still in the thrall of this wild idea. What was to be done? He looked up at me. Desperate that someone believe him. “What if it were an Expert, Arlo? What if it were someone from the Office of the Record?”
“Or”—I stood up, wiped my hands, leaned as far over his bed as I could, whispered as quietly as possible—“a Speculator?”
23.
All four of them are dead, each with a single neat bullet hole through the center of the forehead.
The duty team, caught unawares by a familiar face. I recognize them all, Librarians who worked the entrance of the Record, rigorous and polite and efficient.
The first is just inside the door, thrown back against the wall, still wearing a stunned expression, blood in a frozen trickle from the bullet hole down into the line of the eyebrows.
The second is centered in the lobby, slumped at the wanding station, thrown across the small desk with one hand outstretched, clutching his weapon as if caught just before he could fire.
The third is at the elevators, between the two shafts and just beneath the keypad, and she sits with legs outstretched and arms slack, and her face turned toward the elevator just to her right, where the fourth of them is wedged between the elevator door and the wall of the car itself, half in and half out, keeping it from closing, inviting me in.
The lights in the elevator car are dim but I can see the button panel, and there is a dark red fingerprint on the button marked 9, a clue so glaring and egregious it has to have been purposeful. A taunt.
Subbasement nine. That’s where you’ll find me. Come along, now… down we go…
I push the button gingerly with my forefinger and it comes away tacky.
At the last minute, though, I don’t take the elevator. I step off before the door can close, step around the fallen bodies of the Librarians, and take the spiral stairs instead.
I go down slowly, one floor at a time with my weapon drawn, and listen at every floor. Pause at sub four, where Silvie’s offices are tucked away. Pause again at sub five and then again, halfway between six and seven, where I hear or think I hear the minute click of a file drawer shifting open. The blood button was 9 and that may be where he is, or it may have been another artful misdirection, another signal rigged to catch my eye and hold it while worlds move in shadow all around me.
One more clue for me to find, one more part of the trap that was set for me, for my clumsy feet to stumble into.
With each footfall the ornate structure of the staircase shimmies beneath my heavy frame. The metal stairs are very old. There is gold detail at every balustrade.
I breathe heavily as I descend.
“I can hear you, Mr. Ratesic. Laszlo.” The, low and wavering in the stillness of the Record. “I can hear you coming.”
I’m halfway down, between sub eight and sub nine, and I stop and perch on the edge of a stair. His gentle creak of a voice echoes from somewhere close by.
“You were never one for sneaking up.”
There are no offices on sub nine, as Silvie’s office sits on four. Just endless intersecting hallways, file rooms, and review rooms. The hallways are dim, lit only by the cool red emergency lights of the Record after hours. Helpless to do otherwise, I go in the direction of Arlo’s voice. And it is even easier than
