Authors: Joseph Garber
Hadn’t you better drop that line of thought, pal? The lady’s already had to deal with one masher today
.
Marge kept her back to the wall and her eyes fastened on Dave. She edged around the perimeter of the room until she reached the door. Once she had her hand firmly on the knob she spoke again. “I guess I’m supposed to thank you or something. I mean about that slob Greg. So thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Dave glanced down at his once white shirt. He brushed at its coating of dirt. No improvement.
She looked at him, cocked her head, and put her hands on her hips. “That’s it? You say, ‘You’re welcome,’ and that’s it?”
“Pretty much, I guess.”
Soft’y, soft’y, catchee monkey
.
“You come up out of the floor like some Stephen King thing, kung-fu lover boy here, and then heigh-ho Silver and who was that masked man, is that what you’re saying?”
Time for a boyish smile. Come on, pal, make her believe you
.
He sighed and looked down. “It sounded like you needed a hand. With Greg, I mean. And …” He looked up and grinned. “… anyway, I needed to do something to … I don’t know … cheer myself up or prove I’m a nice guy or something. So … maybe the reason I belted him is … that I sort of did it as much for myself as for you.”
“What?” she growled. “Do you always solve your self-image problems by punching people out?”
“Can’t say. I haven’t had any self-image problems until just today.”
She studied him. The way she did it was almost clinical, inch by inch, top to bottom. Dave suspected she was trying to decide what he looked like beneath his coating of grime and filth. Finally she spoke. “Are you in … I don’t know … some sort of trouble or something?”
He heaved another sigh. “An understatement.”
She put her hands on her hips, puffed her cheeks, and cocked her head. Dave found her expression utterly adorable. “Okay. I know I’m going to regret this, but okay. I suppose I owe you something for …” She waved a disdainful hand at Greg’s prone form.
Perfect. Now give her one last out
.
“Marge, I need a hand. I’d like to ask you for it. But I don’t want you to feel like you owe it to me.”
Marge blew out between her lips. “Okay, Mr.… what did you say your name was?”
“Elliot. Dave Elliot.”
“All right, Mr. Dave Elliot. You’ve got five minutes, wall clock time. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”
She tapped her foot on the tiles and fingered her lower lip. Finally she spoke, “I’m supposed to believe this, huh?”
Dave shrugged. “There’s a phone on the wall there. Call Senterex. My extension is 4412 and my secretary is named Jo Courtner. Her extension is 4411. Tell her that you’re my dentist’s assistant and that you’re calling to reschedule the appointment I had for tomorrow. The dentist is named Schweber, by the way. See what happens.”
“What’s the main number?”
Dave gave it to her. She dialed, asked for extension 4412, and spoke. “Good afternoon. This is Marge from Dr. Schweber’s office. Mr. Elliot has an appointment tomorrow that we need to change.” She paused, listening. “Oh. Well, do you have any idea when he’ll be back?” Another pause. “Several weeks. Well, why don’t I call back the middle of next month? Okay. Good. Thank you and have a nice day.”
She set down the phone. “You’re out of town. Family emergency. No one knows how long you will be away.”
“Now call my brother. If there was a family emergency he’d be back in Indiana too. Say you’re calling from my attorney’s office—Harry Halliwell is his name—and you need to speak to him about the revocable trust I set up.”
Marge made the call. Her eyebrows arched as she heard the answer. After hanging up the phone she said, “Your brother says you’re on a business trip to Tokyo. He says you won’t be back for a month.”
Dave turned on his best, his warmest smile. “I sure could use some help, Marge.”
She shook her head and stared down at the floor. “Look, I’m just a simple working girl. People with guns … Mafia or whatever … and besides, you’ve … I mean … you’ve hurt people.”
Marge stopped speaking, licked her lips, and glanced at Greg’s unconscious form.
Careful, pal, you’re losing her
.
Dave brushed his fingers through his hair. “Only to stop them from hurting me.”
Her eyes were still on Greg.
“Do you know anything about guns, Marge?”
Her lips thinned. “When I was eight, my family moved to Idaho. NRA country. Everyone’s a hunter. I’ve seen every kind of gun there is.”
“Good. Look at this.” Dave reached behind his back and removed one of the pistols hidden beneath his shirt. He squatted, placed it on the floor, and sent it spinning toward Marge. “I took it off of one of Ransome’s men.”
She bent down and picked the weapon up. She held it with the respect of an experienced marksman. After a moment or two of studying it, she nodded. “High-tech stuff, right? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Dave didn’t say anything. He simply waited for her to make up her mind.
She did. She checked the safety on the pistol, turned it butt first, and walked away from the door. She held out the gun to him. “I think you’re in real trouble, mister.”
He took the pistol and slipped it beneath his shirt. “I need some help. Just a little. Nothing that could get you involved. I promise. Word of honor.”
Liar!
“No, I
…”
“Three things. That’s all I ask. One: find me a roll of duct tape or something—whatever it is you guys use to wrap the wire under the floor. Two: find me a tape recorder or a dictation machine. Three: watch in the hallway while I go to the men’s room and wash up and change.”
“Use the ladies’.”
“Pardon?”
“The only women on this floor are in this department. They’re all in a meeting now. The ladies’ will be safer.”
Dave—freshly washed, materially less odorous, and dressed in the amorous Greg’s slacks and shirt—was back in the computer room.
Marge eyed him approvingly. “You look like a computer nerd. Lopsided glasses, pants too short, shirt untucked. All you need is one of those plastic pocket protectors.”
“Thanks. If I had white socks and a pair of sneakers, my disguise would be perfect.”
Even though Greg was two inches shorter than Dave and one waist size larger, his clothes weren’t a bad fit. The looseness of the shirt was a definite plus. It made the guns easier to conceal. Greg’s shoes, unfortunately, were another matter. They were too small. Dave was still wearing his obviously expensive Bally loafers. He wanted to get rid of them.
Marge hefted the handheld dictation recorder that Dave had given her. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
“I hope so. It’s my best shot.”
“And you’re certain you’ve got this radio set right?”
Dave had taken two radios—the first from Carlucci and the second from the man he had shot in the Prime Minister’s Club. While hiding beneath the computer room floor, he had examined them. Both had small, removable panels on their backs. Once the panels were taken off, Dave found a row of miniature red LEDs displaying what were undoubtedly encryption codes. A bank of toggle switches was set directly below the LEDs. It had taken him only a moment to reset the second radio to the same codes as those displayed on Carlucci’s radio—the radio that Ransome had said he would use to call Dave.
“Yes, Marge, the radio is the way it should be.”
“So all I do is I push down this transmit button and play your tape?” She pointed with a long, slender finger. Dave liked long fingers. He hated stubby ones. Marge, he thought, really had excellent fingers. Other things too. She was, he thought, the very antithesis of his wife—
pleasantly rounded where Helen was New York thin; petite where Helen was, well, let’s face it, too tall; street-smart where Helen was coolly sophisticated; and unabashedly sexual where Helen …
Hey, pal! Yeah, you!
He forced his mind back to the business at hand. “Right. As soon as you hear a voice—any voice—you play the tape. But only if you’re out of the building. If you hear a voice while you’re in the building, just ignore it. If Ransome calls before you get out of here, I’ll have to come up with another plan.”
She took a deep breath and flashed him a smile. “What about Greg?”
Nice smile!
“Somebody will hear him sooner or later. Either that, or the janitors will find him tonight when they’re cleaning up. Until then he isn’t going anywhere.”
She studied her shoes. “By the way, I meant to ask you—why did you wrap so much of that stuff around … well, you know … his little thingie?”
“When it comes time for someone to pull the duct tape off that bozo, I want him to say ‘ouch.’ ”
She giggled. “You’re a mean guy, Mr. David Elliot.” Her grin lit up the room.
And she had a look in her eye. Or at least Dave thought she had a look in her eye. Or rather, perhaps it was that he
hoped
she had a look in her eye. “Yeah,” he smirked, “that’s me, mean as a junkyard dog.”
She tilted her chin up. The tint of her cheeks brightened. “But not mean to everyone?”
Marge’s voice had softened. Quite the contrary, Dave’s was husky. “No, not everyone.” He took a step forward. It was pure reflex. Marge did the same. There wasn’t anything reflexive about it. Dave observed that the air-conditioned computer room had become warmer. Not an unpleasant kind of warmth. More like a languid summer breeze.
She stood closer to him. Her eyes sparkled. Only a foot of space separated them. Either he was reading the signals
wrong, or she
liked
having him closer. He was drawn to her, and she to him. There was a magnetism—real, instantaneous, unavoidable. It was rare, but it happened. Some people call it love at first sight, although, of course, it’s not.
An especially foolish thought flashed through Dave’s mind. He liked the thought, and he liked the foolishness, and most of all he liked Marge, and so …
He brought himself up short—a jerk on his psychic reins so abrupt as to be painful. To even
think
what he’d been thinking was so utterly wrong as to be insane, if not suicidal. And to involve this woman, who was already too deeply involved …
Nice to know you’ve still got at least a few morals left, pal
.
Dave snatched Marge’s hand, shaking it as he would the hand of a business colleague. “Thanks for all your help, Marge. Really, really, really thanks. But I’d better get moving. Your friends—the other people in this department—will be back from that meeting pretty soon, I think.”
The sparkle in her eye was brighter. “Okay, but look, my full name’s Marigold Fields Cohen—don’t look at me that way, I was born in 1968 and my parents were living in San Francisco. It’s not my fault they gave me a dumb name. Anyway, I’m in the book. West Ninety-fourth Street, just off Amsterdam. When you get out of this mess, you give me a call, okay? Or you could even drop by.”
Dave smiled back at her. She was simply delightful. He was utterly beguiled. He was tempted to say something rash. Something very, very rash …
Pity you’re a happily married man. Or, then again, maybe you’re not anymore
.
Or perhaps he never was.
“Sure, Marigold.” He tried to sound sincere. Maybe he was.
“Don’t you dare call me Marigold again.”
“Never. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die. Now there’s one last thing.”
Marge nodded eagerly.
“The last thing is that I don’t want you to get in trouble over this. I don’t want anyone suspecting that you helped me. But when they find Greg, there will be questions. So, what we need to do is to give you an alibi. What I have in mind is going to be an absolutely perfect alibi. No one will even think about questioning it. You understand that your alibi has to be bulletproof, don’t you?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“This.” Dave drove an uppercut into her jaw. He caught her as she slumped unconscious, and gently lowered her to the floor. Then he took all the cash out of her purse. It was only twenty-three dollars, poor girl. He did, however, leave her a subway token so she could get home.
Bowing to the silliest sort of superstition, the organization that erected and managed Dave’s building had decided that it would have no thirteenth floor. Instead, the floors were numbered 11, 12, 14, 15—as if such gods or demons who mete out bad luck are so dull-witted as to be unable to count.
American Interdyne occupied only two floors—12 and 14. Reception was on 14.
The receptionist was crawling on her hands and knees, squinting at the carpet, and sniffling. Dave gaped at her.
She was a 1980s yuppie caricature. The hemline of her all-natural-fiber, herringbone skirt ended well below her knees. An NFL tackle might envy the shoulder pads of her matching jacket. Her white cotton blouse was so heavily starched that it seemed to crackle as she bent, and the dark burgundy bow around her neck resembled nothing so much as a large dead fowl of a statutorily endangered species. The woman’s outfit almost screamed that it had been purchased at Alcott & Andrews—and Alcott & Andrews had been out of business for quite a few years.
“Excuse me.” Dave’s tones were the politest he could
muster under the circumstances. “I’m from the phone company.”
She lifted her head, squinting in his approximate direction. “Don’t move
(sniff)
. Just stand there and don’t move.”
“Lost a contact?”
“Both of them
(sniff)
, would you believe?”
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Only if you’re careful
(sniff)
.”
“I will be.”
Squatting down, Dave began studying the carpet. He spotted a glimmer of reflected light near where the woman crawled. “A little to your left, just about eleven o’clock from where your hand is. See it?”
“Yeah, thanks
(sniff)
. One down, one to go.”
“The other one is just north of it.”
“Oh. Great. I’ve got it
(sniff)
.”