In his line of work, Andrew Livingston had done some disturbing things, but he had never held a dying woman in his arms.
Until now.
After this, could he really go through with the rest of the job?
A frigid wind whipped across the parking lot, bringing with it a slice of sleet. The predicted snowstorm wasn’t far behind. When he looked down at her alabaster face, he shuddered. But it wasn’t from the cold.
He had to make sure she couldn’t be found, not right away anyway, so he gently lifted the woman’s body and carried her down into the ditch that bordered the south parking lot. He knelt and folded her hands over her chest, then rose to his feet, clasping one gloved hand in the other.
He climbed out of the ravine and crept around the perimeter of the parking lot to the massive connected buildings that made up the Discount and Value Network offices, warehouse, and studio. They loomed
dark and shadowy through the now falling snow.
When he reached the north door of the administrative offices, housed in the smaller of the two buildings, he checked his watch. He was late for playing his role as Kenny the janitor.He pulled his glove off. His finger hovered over the security keypad. His mind fogged. Because the cleaning crew was supposed to enter from this door, his boss Orville had given him the code. Andrew shook his head. He couldn’t remember the numbers.
What was happening to him? He never got the sweats or the rock- ’n’roll heart pounding when he was on a job. Not him, not Mr. Smooth.
His fingers growing colder, he struggled to pull the numbers from some buried place.
Melting snow trickled down his cheeks. He had memorized maps, architectural plans, and endless streams of numbers.Why couldn’t he come up with the six simple digits he’d been punching in night after night?
He closed his eyes. Two. The first number was a two. He let out a pent-up breath as the others came to him. He punched in the code, pushed the door open, and grabbed his janitor cart, the only one left in
the closet.
He raced toward the first floor administrative area, stopped in front of the door that said Phoenix Cosmetics, and pulled a lock-pick kit from his equipment bag. Though the hallway was dark, he glanced up and down out of habit. The lock on the office door was an old pin and tumbler type. Too easy.
His contact had given him good information. He hated working with other people, having to rely on them. This time, though, his contact seemed to have the inside track. Good information was the difference
between success and failure on this kind of setup.
He stepped into the office.
“Ken…Kenny?”
Andrew stiffened. He stuck his head out. It was too dark to see the man in the hallway, but he recognized the voice. Orville, the other janitor.
He tried to fade into the shadows, but it was too late. He could not be caught in here. A lowly worker bee wasn’t authorized to be in the Great Piper Phoenix’s office. He looked around for an escape route.Too
late for that too.
“Ken, are you down there?” Orville’s voice bore down on him like an incoming missile.
Andrew shrugged on his janitorial persona and padded toward the door in the dark, careful to veer around the file cabinet and the oversize planter by the door. The whole office smelled like a perfume bottle.
Orville was always checking on him. The two days of training had been excruciating.How many guys had to be shown how to mop a floor?
Orville yelled his name again. He was getting closer. Andrew slipped through the office door and closed it without making any noise. He hadn’t lost it. He was still Mr. Smooth. When Orville aimed his flashlight down the long hallway, Andrew stood beside his janitor cart. La-ti-dah. So casual.
“So what gives?” He slipped the equipment bag behind a package of toilet paper.
“What are you doing here in the dark?” Orville’s hulking silhouette was visible at the end of the hallway.
“I was on my way to clean the studio.”He grabbed his carpet sweeper off the cart and ran it back and forth. “I noticed this mess the other night. I just wanted to get it done quickly. Guess I didn’t think to turn on the lights.” Andrew smiled at the cleverness of his story.
“Good for you.” Orville shifted his weight, causing the flashlight to jerk up and down. “Came looking for you ’cause I got some cookies in my lunch box. My girls made them. Our break is coming up. I’d love
to share them with you.”
Orville was always trying to be his buddy. Made him nuts. None of the usual “I don’t want to be your friend” signals worked. In his line of work, emotional attachments, however minor, were a bad idea.
“No thanks, man, I was late getting in.” He clicked on his own flashlight. “I think I better skip my break.”
Andrew did his dumb-guy shuffle around the cleaning cart, head bobbing.
Orville stood at the end of the hallway, not moving, not responding. Andrew couldn’t see the janitor in the dark, but he imagined his look of confusion. He couldn’t resist rolling his eyes. Orville wasn’t the shiniest rock in the tumbler.
Might as well give himthe push he needed. “You go on,Orville. I’ll just finish this up and get to the studio.” His heart was still drumming pretty hard, but his voice was steady.
He didn’t want to sit with Orville; small talk always made him anxious.
“All right then.” In the bobbing illumination of the flashlight,Orville lumbered down the hall and around the corner. Andrew touched his chest again. He knew what this rapid heart rate was really about, and it had nothing to do with Orville, interrupting him. Glitches were glitches. But what had happened to him tonight was way more than a bump in the road.
Don’t think about her.
He set the sweeper back on his cart. It would look suspicious if he spent too much time in the administrative area of the Discount and Value Network. No doubt Orville would check on him after his break.
Orville had homemade cookies. Andrew couldn’t recall ever having eaten homemade cookies. Oreos suited him just fine. Grams wasn’t a cookie maker, but she had made the best ham and potato soup he'd ever tasted. The memory made his mouth water. He hadn’t thought about that soup or Grams in years.
He slipped back into the Phoenix Cosmetics office, slinging the equipment back over his shoulder. He bolted to the antique desk and pulled his lock-pick kit and thin gloves out of his bag. He slipped into his gloves and jiggled the keyhole as he worked it with the lock-pick tool.
His contact had described Piper Phoenix as a “granola with the business sense of Oprah.” Apparently, she was hot stuff in the lipstick and rouge world. He’d never seen her or heard her name until his contact
had approached his handler.
He pressed his fingers around the brass knob and pulled. The slide glided over the wood track of the drawer. Piper thought she was about to move up in the world. He swept the light across the drawer. There it was, the binder his contact had told him about. Now, with what he was about to take from Ms. Phoenix, the move would more than likely be down. She’d be handing out perfume samples at Kmart before the week was over.
A picture of a model surrounded by Phoenix Cosmetics was pasted to the wall.The caption in the poster said Beauty Reborn.The blonde was pretty, probably looked good in a swimsuit. He wiped that thought
from his brain.
The last thing he needed in the world was a woman hanging on him, talking about her feelings. He worked alone. He lived alone. He liked it that way.
Piper thought she was protecting herself by not putting any of this on computer. Boy, was shemistaken.He preferred the low-tech jobs. All those social engineers who did their stuff with a phone or through a
computer network were wimps. He liked being on the ground, in the fray of the fight with the enemy breathing down his neck.
With gloved hands, he flipped through the book until he came to a spreadsheet on page seventeen. Andrew focused the camera on the formulation for something called Stardust Renewal, whatever that was. None of it made any sense, but his client knew its meaning, and his client was the one paying. He took five pictures, making sure the words and numbers were in focus.
Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, Andrew stepped back and did a quick survey of the office. He hadn’t disturbed anything. He slipped the notebook back in place, relocked the drawer, and made it to
the door in two strides.
He pushed the cleaning cart to the studio, then he stopped and penned: This job is too hard. I quit. Kenny. If the theft was discovered weeks from now, they would never link it to a former janitor. Some
people in his line of work liked to ease their way into positions of power, thinking that gave them better access to info. Not true. The lower you were on the food chain, the more invisible you were.
He bolted toward the warehouse on the south side of the complex where he would be less likely to run intoOrville or one of the other night crew.He hadmemorized the blueprints for this place as well as the cleaning habits of the other janitors. Right now one of the female janitors was vacuuming the hall on the second floor of the administrative area. The other woman was on the opposite side of the building working on the lobby and visitor welcome area. And good old Orville was cleaning the Discount and Value store. All were on the north side of the complex of connected buildings.
Andrew checked his watch. He had another eleven minutes before Orville and the other two brought their cleaning equipment to the warehouse. They always did the warehouse last, and they always did it
together.
He entered the security code on a pad by a metal door and stepped into the huge warehouse where merchandise was stored.The ceiling soared to what had to be fifty feet, with rows of boxes stacked nearly as high. Irony of ironies, the security to protect all this replaceable junk was tighter than the security on the information that couldn’t be replaced. People could be so stupid sometimes. It had taken him less than a day to get the security code for this door. If he had stuck around a few more days, he probably could have figured out passwords and pulled customer lists, which always turned a nice profit.
His feet tapped across the concrete. The wind hit him hard when he stepped outside. A light snow swirled out of the pitch black sky. He hurried past the ditch where he had left the dead woman. He buttoned his wool coat to the neck. He was halfway across the parking lot when the honey colored glow of two headlights flashed in his field of vision. He would have heard a vehicle pull in; someone must have just started it up. He turned up his collar and leaned a little closer to his pickup. Andrew watched as a man in a green coat slipped out of the truck’s cab, lifted a box fromthe ground and placed it on the truck bed, then positioned himself behind the wheel.
The network didn’t broadcast between two and six in the morning. That meant that between two-thirty and five. only the cleaning crew was in the building. Andrew checked his watch again. Four o’clock.The
man in the green coat wasn’t Orville. He’d recognize his hulking mass from a mile away. The other two on the night crew were stout females, and neither wore a green jacket.
Andrew clicked open the door of his old Silverado and tossed his equipment bag on the passenger seat. The other truck pulled away.
None of it was his business. Andrew slipped behind the steering wheel.When he pulled his gloves off, his hands were shaking. He had stayed with the woman until she stopped breathing.What
else was he supposed to do?
Someone would find her. If he had phoned it in, there would have been police statements and delays and questions asked. It had taken him a month to set up this job. He squeezed his eyes shut until they
hurt.
Focus, Andrew. Focus and forget her.
He turned the key in the ignition of his battered truck. The vehicle chuggalugged but didn’t start. This thing was on its last legs. He turned the key again. This time the engine fired to life. He pulled out of the
parking lot. He would hand off the photos to a courier who would deliver them to the client. E-mail was always a bad idea. Anyone could hack into that. Might as well put up a billboard that said, “I stole your trade secrets.” He closed his eyes and pushed aside any thought of the woman. He could still hear the soft lilt of her voice. He bit his lip until it bled.
Forget about her.
The snow slashed out of the sky in straight hard lines.Windshield wipers swished across his field of vision. His truck swerved on the icy road.
Now all he had to do was get out of Denver.How hard could that be?
Continues...
Excerpted from Death at a Discount by Sharon Dunn Copyright © 2009 by Sharon Dunn. Excerpted by permission.
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