The Ragman's Memory (43 page)

He collapsed sprawling onto the catwalk. “Jesus H. Christ. That was close.”

“Radio,” I whispered weakly.

He shook his head in anger. “Damn,” he said, and grabbed a portable from his pocket. As soon as he turned it on, we heard Audrey saying, “He’s gone back in. Joe? Duncan? You there? Come in.”

Fasca keyed the mike, “Audrey. You see Lenny? He clobbered us and split.”

Still flexing my right hand, I turned on my own radio and added, “Call for backup. Aggravated assault of an officer. Is he still in the building?”

“Yeah,” Audrey answered. “He came barreling out the front door, saw me, and ducked back in.”

“Okay. Stay put till reinforcements come, then check out the lobby and foyer. Duncan and I’ll start working down from the grid.”

I directed Duncan to the nearby ladder running down to the stage below, while I returned the way we’d come, sweeping the area as I went with my penlight. By the time I reached the short ladder to the staircase, my arm, though painful, had regained its feeling and mobility.

I first checked out the control room at the top of the stairs, where I found people manning computers and lighting equipment, and from where the stage could be seen through a row of thick glass windows. No one there had seen Lenny go by.

Returning to the mezzanine, I quickly ran up the aisle alongside the deserted seats, looking for anybody who might be curled up on the floor. After finding myself alone, I used the radio again. “Audrey, it’s Joe.”

“Go ahead. The lobby and foyer are clear.”

“Same with the grid, the control room, and the mezzanine. Is the building sealed off?”

“People’re coming from all over. I have an idea, though. Meet me just inside the performance hall doors.”

I quickly descended the last flight of stairs and found her standing by a small hatch, much like the one we’d taken to the grid, mounted halfway up the wall.

“Where’s this lead?” I asked.

“It’s like the grid in reverse-they call it the plenum. It’s a crawl space between the floor and the dirt, used to circulate air—1930s ventilation technology. It’s got fans big enough to replace all the air in the building in three minutes.”

She pulled on the handle and swung it open. Immediately, I heard and felt the rush of a steady wind sucking by the door. “And it’s unlocked, which it shouldn’t be.”

She hopped up onto the threshold, reached inside and hit a light switch. Before me was an enormous concrete chamber, gray, featureless, and about four feet high, stretching away in a downward curve as far as I could see. The dirt floor, covered in thick plastic sheets, alternated between broad avenues leading in the direction of the stage, and six-foot deep trenches that ran alongside.

“Those are for any water run-off,” Audrey explained, “in case of flood or whatever. I bet my butt he went through here. There’s a door connecting it to the fan room.”

I hesitated, although I liked the notion that I couldn’t fall any distance from here. “Are the two of us going to be enough?”

She was already swinging her legs inside. “Sure. It’s wide open and well lit.”

I climbed up beside her as she updated the others by radio. It was true that by simply walking the entire breadth of the building stooped over, we could check on the ditches just as I had the rows of seats in the mezzanine—and with similar results. The difference in environments however, was considerable. Where the first had been lofty, dark, elegant, and filled with music, the plenum was claustrophobic, starkly lit, and energized by a dry, odorless, virtually soundless wind. I felt I’d stepped from an opulent prior century into the vision of a lifeless future.

Audrey eventually led the way downslope to the chamber’s back wall, and to another door next to a large wire mesh window. Here the wind was at its most powerful, being sucked from around us in a steady, dull cyclone, lifting our hair and riffling our clothes, drawn through the opening by an enormous, ancient impeller fan that moved in a blur, but emitted no more sound than the element it was consuming.

Audrey drew open the door, ushered me through, and followed me into a bare cement room dominated by the fan. Over our heads, in place of a ceiling, was a louvered panel through which the air was pushed through the rest of the building. We left the room through a solid steel door and found ourselves standing, incongruously disheveled, in a brightly lit, silent, cement-walled hallway.

Audrey spoke in a whisper. “The way things stand now, the top, the bottom, and the front of the building have been checked. I’ve sent people in to clear the main hall and business offices. Duncan and Jonathon’re covering the area above and behind the stage. That leaves this area,” she gestured around us. “Three floors of hallways, dressing areas, utility rooms, and Christ knows what else, all tucked under the stage. We’re at the bottom now. I figure if we just head up floor by floor, room by room, we can squeeze him between us and the people up top.”

I merely nodded as she radioed the others, enjoying being a part of someone else’s attack plan. I assumed the pain in my shoulder would disappear in time, but I was happy to be one of the soldiers for once. Audrey’s strategy worked well for the floor we were on. It had a single staircase heading up at the far end of the hallway, so we were able to cover one another during the room-to-room search. The next floor, however proved another matter.

Reaching it, Audrey explained, “Two halls, two staircases, a shit-load of rooms. This and the one above are where most of the action is when things are up and running. I’ll take the far end and work this way. You start from here and meet me. Keep your radio handy.”

I was too slow reacting. I didn’t like her proposal, and knew it wasn’t necessary. If Lenny was stuck between us and the others, it meant time and patience were on our side. Flooding the next two floors with people as they became available was the prudent course. But fatigue had kicked in, creating a numbing submissiveness. I merely watched her trot down the hall and vanish through a fire door without saying a word.

Once she was gone, however, doubt became apprehension. All the standard protocols had been overwhelmed by spontaneity and a crisis mentality. I knew that with extra personnel already spreading throughout the building, calm would soon be restored, probably with the arrival of a senior officer. I’d been beaned by Lenny’s spotlight barely fifteen minutes ago, after all, not long in the life of an emergency. I could even hear the music still reverberating throughout the building.

But as I began going from door to door, my discomfort grew.

I was pulling open the third door along the hallway when I heard a distant thump, dull enough to be barely noticeable. I stood stock-still, waiting for something more. Then I tried the radio. “Audrey? You okay?”

The dead silence sent me running.

I found her struggling to get to her feet in the hallway beyond the fire door. “You all right?”

She pushed me away, already staggering toward the distant staircase. “Son of a bitch jumped me. Went up.”

I grabbed her arm to steady her, noticing a smear of blood and a large swelling by her temple, along with a look of determined rage. It never occurred to me to try to get her to sit down. I did, however, update everyone by radio.

The stairs led straight up to stage level, dark, grandiose, and reverberating with music. After the bright, bland corridors below, the contrast was disorienting. Stepping onto the stage itself, I saw people with flashlights running down the aisles from the front of the theater, and heard, for the first time, the orchestra begin to falter.

A sonorous crash indicated why. Springing from beneath the scaffold-like risers on which the rearmost musicians were seated, Lenny Markham made a dash for the opposite side of the stage, using the middle tier of the orchestra as a shortcut. Like a football player with the crowd cheering him on, he pushed and shoved his way along, scattering bodies and instruments to an accompaniment of shouts and curses, with Audrey and me in close pursuit.

But Lenny had the advantage. Following in his destructive wake proved slow going, and by the time we reached the other side, he’d disappeared into the wings.

By now, people were converging from every corner. Audrey ignored them all. With her knowledge of the building’s details and her passion to nail the man who’d made her look bad, she steamrolled her way past everybody and disappeared through a door in the far wall. The most I could do was ride shotgun.

We descended another set of stairs to a hallway much like the one we’d just left—well-lit, empty, and utterly quiet.

“You sure he came down here?” I asked.

“He didn’t have a choice,” she answered, checking the first door.

It led to a large, dark, ghostly room with two oversized furnaces squatting in its middle like prehistoric monsters. We walked around them, sweeping the corners with my small light.

I was headed back out when Audrey stopped me. “Hang on. There’s one other place.”

She stepped up to a door I hadn’t noticed, about three feet tall, mounted flush to the building’s exterior wall. “It’s the old coal bin,” she explained. “Used to feed the furnaces before they converted to oil.”

She crouched and grabbed the door’s handle. At that moment, it flew back and smacked her in the forehead, sending her spread-eagled on the floor. I glanced at her quickly as I stepped past and saw her weakly reach for her head. I huddled by the side of the door and pushed it wide open with my foot, gun in hand. “Lenny, this is the police. Come out with your hands up.”

I heard a frantic scrambling, as from a huge rodent struggling to run up a gravel hill. Gun and penlight held as a unit, I swung around the corner to look inside.

What confronted me was a room so vast and dark, and so filled with cloying dust, it virtually swallowed what little glimmer my small light could put out. I could barely discern, as if through a fog, a slight, pale distant blur, at which I shouted, “Stop,” to predictable results.

I stepped inside the room, aiming to give chase.

It was then the meaning of the strange noise I’d heard became clear. My ankles disappeared into a crunchy quicksand of loose coal, throwing me off balance and pitching me forward. The bin, long abandoned, still housed a half load of fuel, probably dating back decades, and it was through this that I had to pursue the pale figure up ahead, stumbling, slipping, and choking on a cloud undisturbed for years.

Half way across the bin, a sudden flash of light made me instinctively leap to one side. The acrid, dust-choked tomb was abruptly filled with diffused sunshine, sparkling off millions of dark airborne particles like a perverse parody of a religious revelation. I squinted at its source and briefly saw the haloed outline of Lenny Markham as he scrambled into the light, and escaped to freedom.

My headache returning with a vengeance, I slowly reholstered my gun.

Over the years, Archer Mayor has been photographer, teacher, historian, scholarly editor, feature writer, travel writer, lab technician, political advance man, medical illustrator, newspaper writer, history researcher, publications consultant, constable, and EMT/firefighter. He is also half Argentine, speaks two languages, and has lived in several countries on two continents.

All of which makes makes him restless, curious, unemployable, or all three. Whatever he is, it’s clearly not cured, since he’s currently a novelist, a death investigator for Vermont’s medical examiner, and a police officer.

Archer has been producing the Joe Gunther novels since 1988, some of which have made the
Ten Best
or
Most Notable
lists of the Los Angeles and the New York Times. In 2004 Mayor received the New England Booksellers Association book award for fiction.

Open Season
Borderlines
Scent of Evil
The Skeleton’s Knee
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
The Dark Root
The Ragman’s Memory
Bellows Falls
The Disposable Man
Occam’s Razor
The Marble Mask
Tucker Peak
The Sniper’s Wife
Gatekeeper
The Surrogate Thief
St. Albans Fire
The Second Mouse
Chat
The Catch
The Price of Malice
Red Herring
Tag Man

This digital edition (v1.11) of
The Ragman's Memory
was published by MarchMedia in 2013.

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Copyright © 2012 by Archer Mayor.

ISBN: 978-1-939767-07-3

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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