The front doors to the office building had been chained shut, but the junkies had pulled the boards off a window. The door to the basement and the doors to the elevator shafts were a different beast. The metal had been welded to the jamb. This hadn’t put a damper on the party. The lobby was riddled with broken glass and pieces of steel from fractured desks and chairs. The building was old enough to be built from wood and not concrete. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t burned down. Fires had been started on the asbestos tile floors and the smoke had blackened the asbestos tile ceilings. Urine stained the walls. Everything of any value had been broken or carted off long ago. Even the copper wires had been stripped out of the walls.
The structure was ten stories, almost perfectly square. Will gathered that each of the floors was divided into twenty offices, ten on each side, with a long open cubicle area down the center and two bathrooms at the back. The layout was less like a maze and more like an Escher drawing. Some of the rooms had makeshift stairs built from stacked crates and desks that led to rotted holes in the ceilings. These wobbly stairs led to locked doors or smaller rooms on different floors that needed to be searched after he finished the one below. Will felt like a pinball banging from one side of the building to the other, up some creaky stacked crates, down some shifting stacked desks, prying open cabinets and lifting downed bookcases and kicking over piles of paperwork that had been left to rot for decades.
Angie.
He had to find Angie.
Amanda had wasted almost an hour of Will’s life, making him wait outside the governor’s office while she briefed the man on what little they had so far in the Dale Harding murder investigation. Will had spent the time convincing himself that she was right. He couldn’t look for Angie. He couldn’t be the one to find her. The press would latch onto the story and Will wouldn’t just see the end of his career, he would probably see the inside of a prison cell. He could ruin Amanda’s life in the process. Faith’s. Sara’s. The damage would be irreparable.
Unless he found Angie alive. Unless she was able to tell the story of what had really happened inside Rippy’s club.
That was when Will had walked outside the state capitol and hailed a cab.
Forty minutes had passed since then. If Sara was right, if Angie only had a few more hours, then he might be too late.
But he couldn’t stop looking.
Will pushed open the last door to the last office on the third floor. There were no boards on the windows. Sunlight drenched the small room. Will pushed a desk away from the wall. A rat darted out. Will jumped back. His foot went through a rotted floorboard. He felt the skin along the back of his calf rip open like a zipper. He quickly wrenched his leg out of the hole, praying a stray needle or piece of broken glass hadn’t infected him. His pants were torn. Blood streamed into his shoe. Nothing he could do about either right now.
A set of stairs was at the end of the hall. The concrete treads ran up the structure like a spine, broken windows on every other landing shooting blinding light into his eyes. Will grabbed the handrail and swung himself up to the next flight. His knee almost buckled on the landing. His leg might be hurt worse than he’d originally thought. He could feel blood pooling into the heel of his shoe. His sock made a squishing noise as he climbed to the next floor.
‘Hey.’ Collier was waiting for him. The yellow hard hat was back on his head. He was leaning against the door jamb. His arms were crossed over his chest. ‘End of the line, buddy. You gotta get outta here.’
Will said, ‘Move.’
‘Your boss lady shit a brick when I told her you were here. I literally watched it pinch out between her legs.’ Collier grinned. ‘Guess she’ll pinch out another one when she finds out I’m in here too.’
Collier didn’t move, so Will shoved him aside.
‘Come on, bro. This place ain’t safe.’ Collier had to jog to keep up with Will’s longer stride. ‘I’m in charge of the search teams. If you fall through the floor and break your neck, that’s on my record.’
‘I already fell through the floor.’ Will strode up the hallway. He entered the first office. Dingy carpet. Broken chairs. Rusted metal desk.
Collier followed him, standing in the doorway, watching Will search the room. ‘What’s your deal, bro?’
Will saw the edge of a mattress. Newspapers covered the surface. He could make out a shape underneath. He used his foot to kick away the papers, breath caught in his chest until he saw that the shape was a blanket, not Angie.
Collier said, ‘This is some crazy shit, man.’
Will turned around. Collier was still blocking the doorway.
Will asked, ‘Where’s your partner?’
‘Ng’s ball-deep in missing persons reports, plus he’s waiting for our domestic from last night to get out of surgery. He won’t see sunshine for days.’
‘Why don’t you go help him?’
‘’Cause I’m helping you.’
‘No you’re not.’ Will towered over him. ‘Move, or I’ll move you.’
‘Is this about before with your girlfriend? Mistress? Whatever?’ Collier smirked. ‘Lookit, dude, you should’a told me you were seeing her. Handle it like a man.’
‘You’re right.’ Will reared back his fist and punched him in the side of the head—not just for Sara, but for being an asshole and being in the way.
Collier’s hands went up a second too late. The blow was harder than Will intended, or maybe Collier was just one of those guys who couldn’t take a punch. His eyes rolled back in his head. His mouth fished open. He dropped like a sack of shit thrown from wherever it is you throw sacks of shit from, knocked out cold before he hit the floor.
Will experienced five seconds of sheer bliss before he came back to his senses. He looked down at his hand, startled by his own sudden act of violence. He flexed his fingers. The skin had broken over two of his knuckles. Trickles of blood slid down his wrist. For a moment he found himself wondering if the hand had acted of its own accord, some kind of possession he couldn’t control. This wasn’t him. He didn’t just haul off and punch people, even people like Collier, who deserved it.
This was Angie’s real power over Will: she brought out the very worst in him.
Will untucked his shirt. He wiped the blood off his hand. He tucked the shirt back in. He leaned down. He grabbed Collier by the shoulders and propped him up in the doorway. Then he walked across the hall and continued searching for Angie.
Another office. Another desk. Another overturned bookshelf. A shopping cart with an old IBM Selectric. He turned around. There was a metal cabinet by the door. Every other office seemed to have one. Six feet tall. Three feet wide. Eighteen inches deep. Unlike the others, the doors were closed.
Will wiped the sweat off his palms. He wrapped his fingers around the handle. He tried to turn the latch. Rust kept it from moving. He put his shoulder into it, practically lifting the cabinet off the floor. There was a loud pop. The door squealed open.
Empty.
She might hide in a cabinet. Angie liked dark places. Places where she could see you but you couldn’t see her. The basement at the children’s home was her favorite retreat. Someone had dragged a futon downstairs and laid it on the cold brick floor. Kids would smoke down there. Do other things. Mrs Flannigan, the lady who ran the home, couldn’t handle the stairs. Her knees were old. She carried a lot of weight. She had no idea what was going on down there. Or maybe she did. Maybe she understood that physical comforts were all they had to offer each other.
Will took out his handkerchief. He wiped the back of his neck.
He would never forget being down in the basement with Angie. His first time. He wasn’t shaking so much as vibrating with excitement and fear and dread that he would do it wrong or too soon or backward and she would laugh at him and he would have to kill himself.
Angie was three years older than Will. She’d done a lot of things with a lot of boys, some other things with a lot of men, not always her choice, but the fact was that she knew what she was doing and he did not.
Just the touch of her hands made him shiver. He was clumsy. He forgot things, like how to unbutton his own pants. At that point in his life, the only people who had ever touched Will were either hurting him or stitching him up. He couldn’t help himself. He started crying. Really crying. Not like the hot tears streaming down his face when his nose was broken or when he cut open his own arm with a straight razor.