When No One Is Watching(85)
Theo’s big hand presses into my back as we climb, right over the growing knot of tension between my shoulder blades. “Don’t forget the tunnels are underground, so it’s going to take time to reach ground level. There will be a door. We just have to keep climbing.”
I nod.
Finally, finally, we reach a landing with a metal door. Light seeps out from the space where it doesn’t meet the ground, and ugly office lighting never looked so good.
Theo tries the ID card on the scanner, and the lock mechanism whirs and releases. We crack the door and enter another level, which looks entirely different from the underground tunnels. It’s clearly still under renovation, but the medical center closed relatively recently. This floor is still pretty ugly, but twenty-first-century ugly, with bright lights embedded in gray-speckled drop tile ceilings and bone-white walls.
The murmur of voices can be heard down the hall, and the scent of coffee fills the hallway, though I can’t shake the smell of that first corridor we’d encountered—what would be the last corridor for people approaching from inside the building.
My insides are quaking but my hands are steady as I pull out my second gun. Theo shakes his head, leans down to whisper. “That only works in movies, Syd.”
A spurt of frustration goes through me, but I tuck it away like I do the gun. He’s right, and I’m used to Mommy’s gun anyway.
We creep down the hallway, toward the sound of a man talking loudly. Confidently. I don’t know who it is, but I know the type—the guy who expects to get what he wants, and does.
“Okay, we have some live view from the street here, via the drones and the doorbell cams,” the voice says. “Look at this mess. I told those idiots to be mindful of property damage. This should have been done in the middle of the night not at the beginning of it, and it should have been done tomorrow, during the block party and leading into the parade.”
Theo places a hand on my shoulder, leans down to whisper again. “Kim’s dad.”
I realize something. Up until now, this has not been personal for him. Yeah, Con Dead had been fucking his ex, but he hadn’t walked in on them or anything. He hadn’t known the cops attacking us and had barely known the people on the street.
Now it’s about to get real personal.
My thoughts start racing again.
Theo is on my side. But Drea was on my side, too, wasn’t she? Until money made her betray me.
Theo said he likes me, but if I keep it real, I’m his rebound hookup. He was with Kim for how long, and we’ve only known each other a week. I hate Marcus and haven’t spoken to him since the divorce was finalized, and I’m not sure I could walk into a room and point a gun at him for any reason, though I’ve fantasized about it a lot.
I’m frozen as Theo moves ahead of me, gun at his side.
“Wait,” I say, but my whisper doesn’t leave my mouth, like I’m in one of the bad dreams again. I could leave, run, but I’d be caught in the melee outside and have no idea who would believe me enough to come back to the hospital with me. I might get arrested or killed, or put into one of the rooms downstairs and tested on, before I can do anything.
I want to trust Theo because he’s come this far with me, but I don’t. I don’t trust anyone, or anything, except the fact that I have to end whatever is going on, and if I run now that won’t happen.
I start walking, too, steeling myself for whatever’s behind the door in this conference room. For the fact that just because Theo didn’t turn on me before doesn’t mean he won’t now.
“The rejuvenation is not going as smoothly as planned, but if it continues as it is, then by daylight we’ll have a new neighborhood under our umbrella.”
“Did we really have to be so blunt about it?” another man asks. “I still think we should have moved more subtly, like with the Williamsburg and Park Slope projects.”
Theo is standing beside the door now, his back to me.
“The carafe is empty,” someone mutters, and gets shushed.
“Subtlety is no longer necessary. This neighborhood is ours. We had to get ahead of the other developers trying to move in,” Kim’s father says, voice hard. “This is no time to get squeamish. Inching slowly toward rejuvenation isn’t an option anymore, and with the police, the media, and the government on our side, there’s nothing to worry about. Even with any destruction and bribes, the cost of getting this over and done quickly is negligible.”
A woman’s voice cuts in, her tone glib. I recognize it from when she threatened to call the cops on me. “When you add the incentives we’re getting from the city, this latest project will gain us billions of dollars to get back land that we could have paid untold amounts of money for otherwise. We totally pulled a Stuyvesant.”
She laughs.
“Well, hopefully we manage things a bit better than our forebear,” her father says. “On the next slide are the projected earnings for the eventual addiction cure. Methadone has such a negative connotation, and the new drug crisis sweeping the country calls for a hipper, funkier product. Something that can appeal to a family in the heartland and an urban millennial family.”
“Our online monitoring teams have started to spot stories linking our production of opioids and our getting paid to find the solution, but nothing is sticking so far,” a deeper voice chimes in, the brownnosing in his tone apparent. “They’re mostly getting written off as crackpot conspiracy theorists.”