The Falling Away (34 page)

Only clear, cleansing water.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks, as always, to a God whose hands are there when I fall. Thanks to Nancy, Jillian, and my whole family for being with me every step of the way. Thanks to Lee Hough, LB Norton, Amanda Bostic, Allen Arnold, and everyone at Thomas Nelson for bringing it all together. And a special thanks to reader Steve Gilbert, who loaned his name to the character of Sergeant Gilbert.

Excerpt from
The Unseen

Perched on top of the elevator, Lucas peered at the woman below and created an elaborate history in his mind.

Elevators and their shafts were easy places to hide. Easier than utility chases. Much easier than ductwork, popularly portrayed in movies as cavernous tunnels through which a man could crawl. Lucas knew better; most ductwork was tight and narrow, and not solid enough to hold 150 pounds.

But elevators. Well, the film depictions were pretty accurate with those. You could indeed crawl through the small access panel in the ceiling, sink a sizable hole with a hand drill, and then watch the unknowing people below as they stepped through the bay doors all day long. Provided you bypassed security, of course. And did your drilling outside of regular office hours.

Most of the time he preferred to work in DC proper, but with height restrictions on the buildings, he never got much of a chance to do elevator surfing; for that, he had to move farther away from the city, where skyscrapers were allowed.

He returned his attention to the dark-haired woman who was currently inside the car with four other less interesting people. In his history, she was a widow. True, she was probably in her early thirties, if that, but her stern look, her rigid posture, suggested overwhelming sorrow in her past.

Lucas recognized such sorrow.

So she was a widow. She had moved to Bethesda from her rural home in Kansas after losing her husband, an auto mechanic who had been crushed by a car in a tragic mishap.

Below Lucas, the dark-haired woman moved to the side for another person entering on the eighth floor. As she did so, the overhead light in the elevator car flickered a moment, then returned to full strength.

Puzzled, the dark-haired woman raised her eyes to the ceiling and looked at the light. It happened. For a moment, she stared directly at him, directly at the secret peephole he'd carefully drilled in the ceiling, directly at the constricting pupil of his own eye.

Then she dropped her gaze back to the other people in the elevator with her, offering a little shrug of the shoulders.

She had looked, but she hadn't seen. Like so many others.

When she had looked toward the ceiling, his heart had jumped. He had to admit this. Not because he was worried about being discovered, but because the
knowing
had started—the long, taut band of discovery that stretched between his eyes and the eyes of a dweller, then constricted in a sudden snap of understanding.

The Connection, he liked to call it.

Once he'd spent several weeks holed up in an office center on Farragut Square; during that time, his favorite target had been the reception area of an attorney's office. A one-man show named Walt Franklin, the kind of attorney who chased ambulances. And so, Walt Franklin was chased by people with grudges.

Lucas's observation deck in that office was one of his most brilliant ever: the lobby coat closet, a small cubicle not much bigger than an old telephone booth—something, unfortunately, he didn't see much of anymore. The closet had an empty space behind its two-by-four framing and gypsum board, leaving enough room for him to stand. An anomaly in the construction, one of many he'd seen over the years.

But what had been so wonderful about this space, this anomaly, was its perfect positioning between the reception desk and the lobby waiting area. By drilling holes on two opposite sides of the small space, he could simply turn and view the woman who usually sat at the front desk—a large, red-haired woman with a genuine smile—or the people in the reception area. No need to change positions; he could simply turn his head and watch whoever seemed the most interesting.

Over the several hours he'd spent cramped in that space, he'd seen dozens of intriguing dwellers—people with complex, magicfilled histories, he knew—sit in the lobby's molded plastic chairs and wait to speak with Walt Franklin. Their savior.

Once he'd experienced a Connection with the large, red-haired woman who sat at the desk. One minute she was working away, doing some filing. The next moment she simply stiffened, then looked nervously around the room.

“Whatsa matter?” he heard a man's voice ask from the lobby area. Lucas turned quietly and looked through the peephole at the man. White hair. Too much loose skin under his chin.

Back to the redheaded receptionist. “I . . . don't know,” she stammered. “I just feel like . . . someone's watching.”

The jowly man in the reception area half snorted, half laughed. “Wouldn't doubt it, the kind of stuff old Walt's involved in. Either the mob's watching him, or the CIA. Or both.” He offered another snort-laugh.

The receptionist didn't share his humor, obviously, but she smiled at him. Except, Lucas could tell, this wasn't her usual smile. Her normal smile. Lucas was a student of the smile, and he knew this particular one was forced; it barely turned the corners of her mouth.

She hadn't seen Lucas. But she had sensed something of his presence, and his mind kept returning to that. Returning to all the people, maybe a dozen in all, who had made the Connection and intuited his presence in a closet. Under a floor. Above a ceiling. Hers was all the more special because she hadn't actually seen any evidence of him. She'd only felt it.

I just feel like someone's watching.

As Lucas left his daydream and returned his attention to the dark-haired woman in the elevator below, now staring at her feet, he wanted her to make that Connection too. He liked this woman; he wanted to feel something more than the typical subject and observer relationship. He wanted the Connection.

Instead, she lifted her face toward the doors, caught in midyawn, as they chimed and opened on the twenty-third floor. She slipped through and into the offices beyond.

So much for Connection.

Still, he would wait. It was early morning, and he'd have another half hour of steady traffic. If no other interesting dwellers stepped on the elevator before then, he'd choose the dark-haired woman. She was, after all, the only one who had inspired a secret history in his head all morning. That had to count for something.

Maybe, just maybe, this dark-haired woman with the full lips and the eyes like bright marbles and the overwhelming grief at the loss of her husband would pull him back to the twenty-third floor. Maybe she would make the Connection after all.

He could wait.

For more, read
The Unseen

About the Author

T.L. Hines writes “Noir Bizarre” stories, mixing mysteries with oddities in books such as
Faces in the Fire
,
The Unseen
,
Waking Lazarus
, and
The Dead Whisper On
.
Waking Lazarus
received Library Journal's “25 Best Genre Fiction Books of the Year” award.

Visit
TLHines.com
for contest details, media downloads,
and all of the latest “Noir Bizarre” news.