Where All Paths Meet, page 13
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
Chapter 14
How Stupid Are You?
“Yeah, actually,” I said as I caught up to him in the Scorpio lobby. It was empty today except for the guard manning the security gates, and the sound of our steps ricocheted against concrete and glass. “I’d love to know what Maggie thinks. I’d prefer to do it without walking into a building where she has her own private army who tried to shoot us last night.”
“Then wait in the truck,” Holmes said.
I wanted to say something back to that, something that would hurt him just as much. Instead, I swallowed and kept pace with him.
When we got to the gate, the guard gave us a cursory glance. He was one of those chipmunk-cheeked white guys, hair thinning on top, and he immediately went back to his phone as Holmes produced an ID badge and tapped it to the sensor.
The gate buzzed, and the guard’s head came up again.
Holmes tried the card again, and he got another buzz.
“Did you program it yourself or something?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m nominally employed by Zodiac; I have access to every facility. The gate is malfunctioning.”
“Sir?” the guard called.
“The gate is malfunctioning,” I said.
Holmes shot me a sidelong look and stepped to the next gate.
When this one buzzed too, the guard said, “Sir, may I help you?”
“Why have the gates been deactivated?” Holmes asked.
“Sorry about that, sir. If you’ll join me at the desk, I can see what’s wrong with your badge.”
“Uh huh,” I said in a low voice.
Holmes darted another look of suppressed fury at me. Then he stalked over to the security desk.
The guard accepted Holmes’s ID badge, tapped it against a sensor on his desk, and read something on his computer screen. His face changed, and I knew that look—it was halfway between oh shit and gotcha.
I wrapped my hand around Holmes’s wrist and whispered, “H.”
H tried to shake me off.
“We have to go,” I whispered. “Right now.”
“Sorry about that, sir,” the guard said with overbearing good humor. “Gotta reprogram it. Give me a minute.”
For a single heartbeat, annoyance stained the glass indifference of Holmes’s expression. Then the mask broke, and I saw the flurry of processing as he made sense of what I’d seen too: the gates that didn’t respond; the guard’s surprise; the bad lie, the weak excuse.
Holmes nodded to me, twisting his wrist to free himself. I took a step toward the front doors, angling my body so I could look past the gates; I wanted a good line of sight when the stormtroopers charged us.
That’s why I was a beat too late with Holmes.
He used his good arm to hop up and sit on the counter, and for a moment, the pose, with his legs dangling over the side, made him look relaxed, almost like a kid.
“Sir, you can’t sit—” the guard began.
“H, no!” I shouted.
Holmes spun, bringing his legs around to the guard’s side of the desk, and kicked the man in the chest.
The force of the blow drove the man back. He stumbled into his chair, which rolled out from under him so that the guard landed on the floor. I couldn’t see him, but he wheezed for air. I winced; I’d taken some kicks to the solar plexus from Holmes. One time, I swear I could taste my own lungs.
Holmes slid off the desk, landing where the guard had stood moments before. He slapped a button, and the closest gate opened.
“Are you out of your damn mind?” I shouted.
“Perhaps. Either come along or leave, Jack.” He bent, and when he stood again, he was holding a gun. “I don’t have time to chat.”
From deeper in the building came the sound of heavy steps, and a moment later, two men in dark suits appeared at the far end of the lobby. They paused, taking in the scene: Holmes with a gun, the fallen guard, the open gate, and me, Jack Moreno, dumber than shit.
Holmes sprinted for the elevators, and an instant later, I raced after him.
Shouts came at us from the guards: “Stop!” and “Don’t move!” and even “Halt!”
That kind of stuff didn’t work on Holloway Holmes, and since I was apparently incapable of doing anything but following him like a dumbass, it didn’t slow me down either. Steps hammered the lobby’s concrete, moving quickly toward us. My blood pounded in my ears. But I’d done all that conditioning with Rowe, running until I puked, swimming until I puked, and then running and swimming some more. For the first time, I found myself not only keeping pace with Holmes, but outdistancing him. I even had to tap the brakes a little. I still reached the bank of elevators first, and I hit every button I could reach.
An elevator door dinged open, and I grabbed Holmes by the shirt and dragged him into the car with me. I smacked the button for the tenth floor, and nothing happened. Then I saw the badge sensor mounted below the buttons.
Holmes was already moving, though, pressing an ID badge against the sensor.
“It won’t work—” I began.
But Holmes jabbed the button for ten, and it turned green.
“Mr. Holmes, stop right there!” The security guard’s voice couldn’t have been more than a few yards away, but the doors were already sliding closed. I had a glimpse of him—a big guy with a flushed face, hand outstretched to catch the doors—and then the doors shut, and the elevator car began to move.
I slumped against the wall, sucking in air, adrenaline making me feel like I was buzzing. Holmes knelt, face pressed against the metal paneling, shoulders heaving.
“H?”
He made a noise. When I carded his hair, he shivered, and then some of the tension in his body relaxed, and he slumped against me. He couldn’t be that out of shape, could he? We’d run maybe fifty feet, and while we’d done it at a full-out sprint, I’d seen Holmes burn a lot more energy than that and not be fazed. But then, how long could anyone do it? How long could anyone not eat, not sleep, not relax, not ever, not for a minute, because you had been trained to expect more of yourself? And how long could he do it now that he’d given up the addies? One night’s decent sleep and a solid meal weren’t going to repair months and years of pushing himself beyond human limits.
Holmes shivered again and, using his good arm on the grab bar, pushed himself to his feet.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
“Your badge didn’t work,” I said, which sounded so inane and stupid and pointless that I wished I could call it back.
“I took the guard’s.”
And then the rest of it caught up with me, and I said, “What the hell, H?”
He stiffened. He folded his good arm across his chest. “My actions may seem precipitous—”
“Precipitous? You attacked that guy! And you didn’t tell me you were going to do it. You didn’t tell me anything, H! You didn’t even tell me you wanted to talk to Maggie, not until we got here.”
The elevator car whispered as it rushed up the building. I could feel its speed in my knees, in my ankles.
“It seemed prudent to avoid an argument—”
“Oh no you don’t. No. No fucking way.”
“I knew how you would react.”
“Too bad! You still have to talk to me! You still have to tell me, and I still get a chance to react, even if you think you already know what I was going to say. Maybe I was going to tell you it was a good idea. Maybe I was going to tell you I was thinking the same thing, you stupid, self-absorbed, candy-assed dummy!”
He was breathing hard, but he didn’t say anything. I was breathing hard too. The elevator hummed around us.
“Would you have told me it was a good idea?” he asked quietly.
“No. It’s a fucking terrible idea. But I still get to be involved. We still have to talk about things. This is about me, too, H. It’s about me, it’s about my mom. It’s not just another fucking game you and your messed-up friends and family are playing. Even if it weren’t about me, I still get to be involved because I care about you, dumbass!” At the end, my volume rose again before I could wrangle it. I had to stop and thump one of the metal panels, and it boomed hollowly under my fist.
When the sound faded, Holmes said in a small voice, “I thought you hated me.”
“I do hate you. That doesn’t mean I can’t care about you too. God, H, how stupid are you?”
He looked up at me, meeting my eyes again, and I didn’t know what I was reading in his face. I thought, maybe, it was a question. I thought maybe it was the question I’d been waiting for him to ask me for five months now.
Then the elevator slowed abruptly, and I stumbled, one arm going around Holmes to steady myself. We rocked in place as the elevator came to a halt. The doors slid open. Holmes adjusted the gun against his leg, but an empty hallway greeted us.
The doors began to close.
“Fuck,” I said and shouldered them open again. “Quick. They’re trying to recall it.”
Holmes slipped under my arm, and I followed him. The doors shut behind me. On the display above the next set of elevator doors, the number was rising steadily.
“They’re coming.”
Holmes nodded. He checked the slide on the gun and started down the hall.
This was Maggie Moriarty’s private kingdom, the AI lab, and even on my third visit, it was creepy as shit. The blank walls. The long stretches of corridor unbroken by doors or windows. We headed for Moriarty’s office, the corner unit at the end of the hall. The only sound was our shoes scuffing the high-traffic carpet.
When we reached the door to her office, the lights were on. Holmes put his good shoulder to the door. His finger moved once, hovering inside the pistol’s trigger guard before he moved it safely outside again. He checked my face, and I nodded.
Holmes threw the door open, and I darted inside.
And crashed into someone.
We both went down, and I rolled and twisted and tried to get free. The other person—a man, my brain registered—was almost as fast as I was, and he knew what he was doing. In less than a moment, he had my arm behind my back, my face planted in the carpet. I let out a muffled, “Get the fuck off!”
And then the pressure on me lifted, and I flopped over and stared up into the face of Detective Rivera of the Utah County Sheriff’s Department, who squeezed his temples and said, “You have got to be kidding me.”
Chapter 15
Everyone’s Best Interest
“You’ve got to help us,” I said as I scrambled to my feet.
Rivera looked like he always did: muscular and squat in a cheap gray suit, one cauliflower ear he’d earned as a wrestler, his skin a darker brown than mine. His partner, Detective Yazzie, wore the same boxy glasses she always did, had the same bob of red hair that came straight out of a box, still looked more like the lady who would show you “the master bedroom of your dreams” instead of a detective. They traded a look, and Rivera opened his mouth to say something.
Then the thunder of stormtrooper steps reached us.
“Please,” I said.
To my surprise, Rivera shot Yazzie a look. She grimaced and said, “Holloway, get over here. And give me that.”
Holmes surrendered the pistol as Yazzie shepherded him to the far side of the room. Rivera was less gentle, prodding and shoving me until I stood next to Holmes. Then the detectives made a wall in front of us. I had just long enough to take in the state of Moriarty’s office. The black velvet chairs had been moved from where they normally stood. The glass desk was covered in fingerprint powder. The tray of acid and ’shrooms was gone, taken by some lucky deputy, I guessed. The skull vase had been emptied of its dead roses. The painting of a woman’s hand in a slave bracelet had been taken down and now leaned against the wall. Everything was like that. What I couldn’t tell—what I wanted to know—was if Rivera and Yazzie were the first to search it, or if someone else had been here first. But before I could think about it any further, the stormtroopers arrived.
The first two wore suits, and they were the ones from the lobby. Six more men crowded behind them, and these were dressed in tactical gear. Nobody was carrying anything bigger than a pistol, but I wanted to know what kind of gear they’d left in the break room.
Rivera, being Rivera, didn’t miss an opportunity to be a hardass. “Took you long enough.”
One of the guys in the suit, with a sunburned nose and on his way to jowly, said, “Detective Rivera—”
“This is the kind of security we’re dealing with? Jesus Christ. No wonder this place keeps getting tossed.” Rivera grabbed my arm and jostled me. “These little shits walked right in here, did you know that?”
“Detective—”
“What the fuck kind of hayseed operation are you running?”
By then, the jowly guy had marshalled himself, and he barked, “Detective Rivera, those boys are trespassing. My men will take custody of them now.”
Holmes tensed next to me. I gave a tiny shake of my head.
“What’d you say to me?” Rivera said.
But Jowly didn’t back down. He moved forward, breaching Rivera’s space, and made a move to grab my arm. “These boys are trespassing on Zodiac property—”
Rivera didn’t even pretend it was anything but what it was: he slapped the guard’s hand away before he could reach me. Jowly flushed until his whole face was red and his sunburned nose looked like a signal flare.
“These boys,” Rivera said, painstakingly slow, “broke into an active crime scene. My crime scene.”
“Zodiac security—”
“Will what?” Rivera said. “Sit on their fucking thumbs? A bunch of fucking mall cops?”
Jowly’s shoulders inched up. He was breathing through his mouth now.
“This is still Utah County, isn’t it?” Yazzie said. “And as far as I know, Utah County still falls under the jurisdiction of the Utah County Sheriff’s Department. So, here’s how it’s going to go. Detective Rivera and I are going to take the boys back to the station, and we’re going to have a talk with them. If Zodiac wants to press charges, they can take that up with the county prosecutor.”
“My orders are to hold the boys—”
“Unless the rest of that sentence is ‘until law enforcement officers can arrive,’” Yazzie said, “then you’re talking about false imprisonment. Do you want to finish that sentence?”
Jowly glanced at his men. The second guy in the suit had an unreadable look on his face. The six in the tactical gear looked—blank. The realization felt like a punch to the gut: these guys weren’t afraid of a couple of cops. If Jowly said the word, they’d try to kill us. And since there were eight of them and four of us, they’d probably succeed. Yazzie and Rivera didn’t do anything like go for their guns, but Rivera’s fingers bit into my arm, and he held himself with a kind of coiled energy.
“Mr. Holmes has asked that his son stay,” Jowly finally said. “Would the Utah County Sheriff’s Department consider a father’s request false imprisonment?”
“I’ll let the sheriff make that call,” Yazzie said. “From the station. Get your men out of here; I deal with enough macho bullshit as it is, and I don’t need them jamming up my scene.”
In the lull, the HVAC system’s whisper was the only sound.
“You heard her,” Rivera barked. “Move!”
Jowly gestured, and the guards backed out of the room. He and his buddy in the suit followed. They disappeared from my field of view, and a moment later, the elevator dinged. I took a step toward the door to check, in case a couple of them had lingered.
Rivera yanked me back. “Are you out of your damn mind?”
Hand on her gun, Yazzie gave me a disgusted glance as she moved to the doorway.
Even Holmes was giving me a so-non-judgmental-it-was-painful look.
“I was just checking,” I said.
“You put up with this?” Rivera asked. “You deal with this every day?”
“He has a great many strengths,” Holmes said.
“For fuck’s sake,” Rivera muttered and rubbed his eyes with his free hand.
“Clear,” Yazzie said from the doorway.
Rivera got me marching with a shove; he still hadn’t let go of my arm. “C’mon. And no talking.”
“Somebody had to check the hallway,” I said. “Nobody told me it was going to be Yazzie.”
“You didn’t think maybe it should be the trained detective, dipshit? You didn’t think maybe it should be somebody with a gun?”
“Holmes had a gun until Yazzie took it away.”
“Detective Yazzie.”
“Yazzie and I are friends. I can call her Yazzie.”
“What the hell did I say about no talking?” He immediately turned to Holmes. “Are you kidding me with this?”
“He’s had a trying few days,” Holmes said in what sounded like an apology.
I decided not to talk to any of them. As punishment. The whole elevator ride.
Rivera’s iron grip tightened as he goose-stepped me across the lobby. Jowly and his partner were standing off to the side, watching us—the partner was talking into a phone. Yazzie watched them, dead-eyed; she didn’t have her hand on her gun, but you could tell from how she walked that she was ready. Holmes, of course, looked like nothing bothered him. He didn’t even seem to notice the guard at the gates, who was massaging his chest where Holmes had kicked him and glaring at us.
When we stepped outside, the sun fell on my face, and the day was warm, and the air was sweet with spring clover and fescue. Where the Zodiac landscaping ended, buffalo grass and Russian thistles and tumbleweed grew in chest-high tangles. The sound of the highway reached us even here, the rush of tires on pavement. The only other noise was our steps.
“The truck’s over there,” I said.
“Great. Give me a minute to put your head through the windshield.”
But he started walking me the other direction, and Holmes and Yazzie trailed after us.
