Page 32 of Rooke
“I’m…I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Better. Much better. Now. Take your shoes off.” He releases me, and the rush of blood to my head is dizzying. Slowly, I stoop down, removing the black pump first from my left foot and then from my right. I stand in my stockings, shivering despite the heat pumping from the floor vents.
“Let’s go, Doc.” The man holds my hand like he’s my lover. He guides me around my desk this time, pulling me wide of the corner so I don’t hurt myself again. His sudden care is strange, given the fact that he just slammed my head into the wall.
Out in the hallway, my stockinged feet skate on the buffed, slippery floor. The man pushes me to the left, grunting under his breath. “What’s down there?” he demands.
“En…engineering. The system controls for the entire museum. Water pumps and…I don’t know. Air conditioning units.”
He spins me around, facing me in the opposite direction. “And that way?”
“Storage. Old exhibit pieces. The servers for our IT systems.”
“What about the money?”
“They take the money off site every night. They drop it at the bank. The night deposit. They don’t keep anything here.”
“Bullshit.”
Something hard and round presses between my shoulder blades. The fear that I experience in this moment is all consuming. It brings me back into myself, making my vision finally sharpen. It’s as if the world comes back into focus, growing lighter and brighter all at once. He doesn’t want to hear the truth. Telling the truth makes him mad, which in turn causes him to hurt me. I don’t want him to hurt me anymore, so I hold my hand up, quickly speaking before he can do anything. “Upstairs. Upstairs, on the fourth floor. They keep a little money up there. And some jewelry. Some of the Egyptian artifacts that were loaned to the museum from Cairo.” The museum has never had any artefacts loaned to it from Cairo. There’s never been an Egyptian exhibition here at all. The most valuable item in the entire building are the dinosaur remains on the ground floor, probably the most famous exhibition of all, but there’s no way for him to walk out of here with a T-Rex tibia, and no way for him to make any cash on it even if he did manage to escape with it. Perhaps he knows this. Perhaps he doesn’t. He’s quiet for a moment, and then he says, “I’m going to let you into a little secret, Doc. That security guard downstairs? The pretty one with the glasses? I slit her throat from ear to fucking ear. She bled out all over the floor. I watched as she died. She didn’t do as she was told, so I had to teach her a lesson. I want you to know this, because I need you to know what will happen toyouif you don’t do as you are told. Do you hear what I’m saying to you? Do you understand?”
The ground seesaws beneath my feet. It feels like I’m on the deck of a ship that’s being pitched about in a violent storm. “Yes. I hear you. I understand.” I wish I hadn’t said the fourth floor now. There are no escape routes up there. There are no easily accessible emergency exits, and at this time of day there won’t be any security guards either. There’s nothing but meeting rooms and more storage. I may have signed my own death warrant by suggesting we go up there. It was simply the first place that came into my head.
The guy shoves me again, urging me forward. I place one foot in front of the other, holding my breath, thinking frantically. I can feel the screen of my cell phone pressing up against the bare skin of my back underneath my loose shirt. Tucked into my waistband, I know it isn’t going anywhere. I have no idea if the call connected with Ali, though. And if it did, I have no idea if she can hear anything that’s being said. There’s every chance she thought I pocket dialed her and hung up. There’s every chance that no one knows what’s going on here and I am about to die.
SIXTEEN
HEARSAY
ROOKE
You get used to the sound of sirens in New York. They are part of the sonic landscape, a staccato punctuation to the rhythm of the city. I remember just after I got out of juvi, I was laying in bed late at night, trying to sleep, and I couldn’t drift off. For hours I lay there, tossing and turning, unable to figure out what was troubling me, setting me on edge, until it came to me: there were no sirens. No ambulances. No police. No fire fighters. A heavy mantle of silence rested over the city outside my window and it felt as if time had somehow stopped, and everything was frozen still on the quiet streets below my bedroom window. I held my breath and I waited. The world, despite everything that pointed toward a darker outcome, continued to turn.
That’s how I felt when I woke up next to Sasha and remembered I have to meet with my mother this morning—as if some dark, impending sense of doom were hanging over me, and for no good reason. Meetings with Sim Blackheath are always shitty, though. Beyond shitty. If I could avoid them altogether I would, but she’s a fucking viper. She loves to interfere, and she loves to show up unannounced to wreak havoc in my life. Ridiculous, but what the fuck. Not much to be done about it. Car thieves have mothers, too. I almost laugh out loud when I imagine telling her about Sasha.
There’s ice on the boards as I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Ice on the thick metal struts. Ice caked like frosting on the lovelocks clasped tightly around the steel brackets that support the dim Victorian looking lights. Beneath my feet, traffic slowly rumbles, progress marked at a sluggish ten miles an hour. Great clouds of fog billow from people’s mouths, and on the other side of the river, in Manhattan, a melancholy chorus of sirens is waking up Wall Street. Unlike that night after I got out of juvi, I can hear them plain as day now over the thump of the music I’m listening to, the thick pads of my (supposedly) noise cancelling headphones keeping the shells of my ears warm. Even so early in the morning, and even with the biting wind clawing at people’s scarves and winding its way down the backs of people’s jackets, there are tourists planted directly in the middle of the walkway, mouths hanging open in concentration as they try to capture the perfect angle of the bridge soaring up over their heads.
I stop at the halfway point to smoke a cigarette. I’ve all but given up—I maybe smoke one cigarette a day. Two or three if I’m particularly stressed out. I’m dragging my feet toward my destination, so loitering on the bridge while I burn my way through a Marlboro seems like a prudent way to kill a minute or two. I remove my headphones, letting them sit around my neck as I rummage in my pockets for my lighter.
“…two people. Maybe three. They’ve been trapped inside the building since seven this morning. Someone saw the body laying on the ground in the foyer.”
“Why the hell would someone try to rob the place? It doesn’t even make any sense.”
Conversation swells around me as I strike the wheel of the lighter and hold the small, guttering flame to the end of my smoke.
“…cops everywhere.The road’s closed off.”
“My meeting’s been cancelled. They’re saying there’s more than one shooter in there.”
My ears prick at the sound of that.Shooter?
“I always said museums are dangerous. Crowded. So many people all over the place. A terrorist attack in a place like that would create complete chaos.”
“It’s not a terrorist attack, Mike. It’s just some drunk. They said so on the news.”
“Yeah. Right. They’re not gonna come out and say it right away, are they? That would create mass panic. They’d tell us after the fact. I heard they found these huge vats of agent orange in a disused subway station last week…”
The men talking move on. I look around, searching the faces of the other pedestrians making their way along the bridge, and it takes less than a second to realize that something has happened. Something bad. I step out in front of two women, businesswomen in thick coats with hats pulled down low over their ears, their shoulders hunched up around their ears, braced against the cold.
