Critical Judgment (1996) (38 page)

Kelly felt her heart beating in her chest as she approached the mouth of C Concourse. She had never been foolhardy in any sense of the word, although she did have an adventurous streak that revealed itself in her love for scuba diving and rafting. Now she felt a bit frightened, but also keyed up and not a little angry. She had left a perfectly decent job with the Forestry Service to move to Patience and Colstar. What in the hell had she been doing here all these years? Had she really been just a shill—the frontman for a lie? Had her repeated, earnest denials of the allegations of the Alliance been just what Quinn or some of his cronies had brought her there to do? Soon she would have the answers.

Her plan was to drive along on a routine inspection tour, then to leave her golf cart inside one of the storage rooms at the end of C Concourse and make her way on
foot to the rear of the area. Second shift was now well under way. Foot traffic was almost nil. Dan Gibson, a foreman Kelly knew well, passed by in a golf cart and waved cheerfully. Kelly hoped she looked more relaxed than she was feeling. There was no one around when she reached the first of the doorways to the warehouse area. They were all wide enough to fit a forklift and wooden pallet, and more than wide enough for the golf cart. She turned left through the second one, then immediately right into a room used to store cleaning supplies. She could hear men’s voices coming over the top of the walls, but there was no one in sight. The blueprints with the partition walls drawn in did not include the staircase, so she was constantly forced to go from 1945 to 1968 to 1985 and back as she made her way through the maze of rooms toward the very rear of the factory.

“Can I help you?”

Kelly whirled, badly startled.

A young man in coveralls confronted her from about ten feet away. She had never seen him before. She took a moment to catch her breath and forced a smile. The man did not seem to recognize her, which was somewhat strange. There was a two-hour health-and-safety talk she gave to each shift every four months dealing with various topics including toxin containment, evacuation procedures, and even first aid. And although she had no way of knowing all the twenty-four hundred or so Colstar employees, they almost all had reason to know her. She moved close enough to see the man’s ID badge and to give him a look at hers.
Jeff Kidd, Warehouseman
.

“I’m Kelly Franklin, environmental health and safety,” she said, steadying herself with one hand against a wall until the rubberiness in her knees firmed up. “Just doing a routine walk-through of this section.”

No glimmer of recognition from Kidd. But he did read her badge and nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve only been here a couple of months, and I’ve never seen you before.”

Kelly tried unsuccessfully to remember when she had last given her talk to the second shift.

“No problem,” she replied. “I’ll be giving a talk to your shift real soon. You’ll get to know me then. I’m going to be wandering around here for the next half hour or so. I don’t need anything, so you might as well go on about your business.”

The man met her gaze levelly—perhaps more self-assuredly than she might have expected from a relatively new warehouseman confronting a company VP.

“If you need anything or you get lost, Ms. Franklin, just holler. I’ll probably hear you over these walls.”

“I’ll do that.”

Kelly moved slowly toward the next area, inspecting the overhead ventilation ducts. She sensed that Jeff Kidd was still watching her. And, in fact, only when she risked a glance in his direction did he finally turn and head off. Unsettled by the encounter, she came close to going back to her office. Instead, she wandered slowly from room to room, feigning an inspection. Except for Jeff Kidd, no one seemed to be around, although from somewhere she could hear a forklift whine. She checked the blueprints again. Just one more doorway to get through. Again, she glanced about. No one. She rolled up the blueprints and stepped into the last room. It was large—perhaps forty feet square—broken up by a network of floor-to-ceiling shelves containing boxes of nonflammable chemicals, packaging supplies, and paint.

Listening carefully for footsteps, Kelly worked her way to the west wall. According to the drawings, the staircase should have been almost at the midpoint. Right where she expected the door to be, there was a forklift, facing the wall, piled high with empty pallets. The ignition key was in place. Kelly had to peer between the adjacent shelves to see beyond the pallets, but the door was there—metal, unlabeled, not unlike hundreds of
other doors throughout the plant, except that every one of those other doors had been opened by her at one time or another. If it was locked, she ought to have the key. She backed away to where she could view the entire room and separated the appropriate master from the other keys on her ring. Then she turned on the forklift and backed it away from the wall just far enough for her to squeeze in past the pallets. If anybody needed to come through that door, they would have to call someone in the warehouse to move the pallets. Was that someone Jeff Kidd?

The master key turned easily, and she pulled the door open an inch. Beyond it she could see only darkness. There was no way to get the pallets back in place. If anyone checked, they would know someone had gone down the stairs. The part of her that was urging a retreat until she could return with someone—perhaps Abby—who could stand guard, was outflanked by the part that was desperate to know what lay beyond the door. With a final check of the room, Kelly slipped inside, stepped onto the first of a flight of stairs, and closed the door behind her.

The darkness and the silence were total. The air was musty and damp. Kelly leaned against the wall, which seemed to be a mix of solid stone and cement. She felt air hungry. Her pulse refused to slow. It was the same panicky sensation she had experienced one hundred feet down on her first deep dive. Finally, a few slow, deep breaths helped her regain control. She clicked on her flashlight and panned down the concrete steps. There were thirty or more of them, steep and straight, ending at another door. Almost certainly they went beyond the basement floor of the factory.

Kelly walked halfway down the narrow flight, then shone her light back up at the door. There was still a chance to retreat—to try another time with more preparation and some help. She hesitated for a few anxious seconds, then headed down to the lower door.

The lower door was unlocked. She opened it a crack. Beyond it, as with the other, was only stygian darkness. But there was also a waft of cool, damp air. She opened the door a foot, slipped inside, and let it close silently behind her. Even in the dark she knew she was in a vast, open space—the uppermost cavern of the Patience Mine.

Cautiously, she panned her beam about. The space was rectangular, about 50 feet wide by 150 long, and only 7 feet or so from floor to ceiling. The walls were irregular rock as far as she could see. Ancient timber pilings, the size and shape of railroad ties, gave some added strength to the ceiling. Engineers must have determined that the rock could hold the massive weight of the factory, forty feet above. There were lightbulbs connected by metal tubing spaced out all along the ceiling, but nothing else that she could see.

Immediately Kelly began searching for the stairway to the deeper level. It took just a few minutes to find it—an open doorway, about twenty yards in the direction of the cliff face. The staircase, narrow and circular, seemed to be hewn into the rock. It was much longer than the upper flight and reminded her one moment of the stairways in medieval castles, and the next of a childhood trip she had taken up and down the stairs of the Statue of Liberty. But this stairway was pitch-black. Reluctant to switch on the flashlight, she kept one hand on the damp rock wall and cautiously worked her way down.

The air coming up from below seemed cool now, and clean. There was a hum that she at first thought was the response of her ears to the dense silence. Now, she realized, it was a machinery noise. Once again her pulse began to accelerate, this time as much from the excitement of imminent discovery as from any sense of danger. The machinery drone grew louder, and she knew she was reaching the lower cavern. According to the drawings in the Patience Mine book, she was nearly one
hundred feet beneath the factory—level with the floor of Patience Valley, or even a bit below that.

As she rounded a bend in the spiraling stairs, she spotted light, spreading out from under a door. Six more steps and she was there. Suddenly she sensed movement behind her. She started to whirl, but a man’s powerful hand clamped roughly over her mouth and pulled her tightly against his broad body. There was a sensation of cold metal pressing against her neck, followed almost immediately by a soft pop and a sharp sting at the spot. In seconds the world began to dissolve into a swirling haze. Her panic exploded, then vanished, as her vision blurred. Inexorably, her eyes closed. The single word she heard before unconsciousness swept over her was growled by a voice she knew well.

“Stupid,” was all it said.

Y
ellow rings
. Josh had examined his face in the bathroom mirror a dozen times over the last day alone. Granted, he looked like hell. But if there was anything wrong with his eyes, he’d damn well have seen it.

His fury growing with every step, he stalked out of the Ghost Ranch Saloon and across the busy road without checking for cars. Horns blasted at him, but he didn’t notice.

The sparkling lights had begun again.

Josh raced back to the motel. There was still time, he was thinking. Time to do what God had been telling him to do. Time to end the pain once and for all. The shimmering diamonds of multicolored light snapped against the inside of his eyes like hailstones. He fumbled with the lock, then threw the door open and snatched the rucksack out from beneath the bed.

“Not this time,” he said out loud.

This time there would be no headaches. There would be no begging God to take him. This time there would be only vengeance.

“Bricker … Golden … Gentry … Forrester …”

He recited the names in a litany as he once again checked the two weapons.

Ever so slightly the flickering lights began to dim. It was a sign. The path he had chosen was the right one. He grabbed the rucksack and ran from the room. It was three or four blocks to the main entrance of the company. Five minutes, if that.

Josh started out the front door of the Fremont Motel, then stopped short as a police cruiser glided slowly past. He moved back into the entryway and waited. Minutes later a second cruiser drove by in the other direction, just as slowly and deliberately as the first. They were trying to look routine, but he knew they were searching for someone—almost certainly for him. How could they know? The only possible answer was Abby. She had been worried about him all along. Now she had broken into the house on Orchard, scanned through his computer, and found the letter he had written to her but never sent. Why hadn’t he just erased the damn thing? Now Bricker and the rest would be on alert, and the police must have the description and plate number of his Wrangler.

He pressed himself deeper into the shadows. Abby had been wrong to try to stop him. As always, she probably meant well. But once again they were pushing against one another. He wondered how in the hell they had gotten so messed up. When did he make her the villain in his life? When did she stop giving him the unconditional love that she had always claimed meant everything to her?

He found himself wondering, too, about her relationship with Dr. Lew Alvarez. Frightened of the consequences of his nearly striking her, he had followed her to Alvarez’s farm one night. Then he parked by the road, walked up the long, unpaved driveway, and spied on the two of them, sitting with two other people in Alvarez’s den. After a time he had returned to his car and waited
until Abby drove out and headed home. Alvarez was movie-star handsome and had impressed her with his work in the ER. Were they lovers? He felt his jaws clench. Was that why she was trying to get him caught here in Fremont?

Once Bricker and his cronies were taken care of, he would have to confront her and demand some answers to those questions. She wouldn’t lie. Lying just wasn’t in her. Her fidelity would be rewarded with the life they had always dreamed about. Desertion? …

He glanced down at the rucksack and feared that he would be spotted if he tried to lug it to Seradyne. One semiautomatic under his windbreaker—that’s all he would be able to get away with. But, then again, that was all he would need. Reentering the motel, he exited through the rear to the lot where the Jeep was parked. The early evening was quite dark, and a fine rain had begun falling. He tossed the rucksack onto the floor and took a screwdriver from the tool kit. In seconds he had changed license plates with a van from Colorado. His headache was steady, but much less severe than he would have expected at this point.

He tucked the MAK-90 beneath his arm, zipped his windbreaker up, and headed away from the main drag. There were back streets and an alley he could take to get to the Seradyne building. Security there was always fairly tight—probably more so now. But he had no intention of entering the building. The parking garage made much more sense. He might get only Bricker, but that would be a hell of a start.

A cruiser passed by on the street ahead. He sensed they might have noticed him. He cut down a narrow alley. When he hit the street again, he was just a block from the garage. The Seradyne executives all had assigned parking slots there. One more year, maybe less, and he would have had one himself. His attitude and performance had gotten consistently superior ratings.
But in the end superior ratings didn’t matter. What mattered was that Nancy Golden was sleeping with Pete Gentry.
Some corporate restructuring
.

Bricker’s Infiniti would be in his designated spot. A sexmobile, he had once called the car. With Bricker everything came down to sex. It would be relatively easy to make it up the back stairs and wait behind a nearby car. If the Infiniti was gone, he would search out Pete Gentry’s Land Rover.