Would he worry about me passing on what I know to someone else? Maybe to his TV station? No, because once I blackmail him, I become complicit in his crime. What I’m counting on most is his confidence. His arrogance. Why wouldn’t he be confident and arrogant? He’s been getting away with this for a long, long time.

But my friend Bill taught me to always have a backup plan. “Belt and suspenders, Holly,” he’d say. “Belt and suspenders.”

If he suspects I mean to kill him instead of blackmail him out of three hundred thousand dollars, he’ll try to take precautions. What precautions? I don’t know. Surely he must know I have a firearm, but I don’t think he can get one in because he has to assume the metal detector would alert me. He may use the stairs, and that could be a problem even if I hear him coming. If that happens, I’ll have to play it by ear.

[Pause]

Bill’s .38 is my belt; the package I taped to the elevator ceiling is my suspenders. My insurance. I have a picture of it. He’ll want it, but there’s nothing in that package but a tube of lipstick.

I have done the best I can, Ralph, but it may not be enough. In spite of all my planning there’s a chance I won’t come out of this alive. If that’s the case, I need you to know how much your friendship has meant to me. If I do die, and you choose to continue what I’ve started, please be careful. You have a wife and son.

8

It’s 5:43. Time is racing, racing.

That fracking traffic jam! If he comes early, before I’m ready…

If that happens I’ll make something up to keep him downstairs for a few minutes. I don’t know what, but I’ll think of something.

Holly powers up the reception area’s desktop. She has her own office, but this is the computer she prefers, because she likes to be right out front instead of buried in the back. It’s also the computer she and Jerome used when they got tired of listening to Pete complain about having to climb to the fifth floor. What they did certainly wasn’t legal, but it solved the problem and that information should still be in this computer’s memory. It better be. If it’s not, she’s fracked. She may be fracked anyway, if Ondowsky uses the stairs. If he does that, she’ll be ninety per cent sure that he’s come to kill her rather than pay her.

The desktop is a state-of-the-art iMac Pro, very fast, but today it seems to take forever booting up. While she waits, she uses her phone to email the sound file containing her report to herself. She takes a flash drive from her purse—this is the one containing the various photos Dan Bell has amassed, plus Brad Bell’s spectrograms—and as she plugs it into the back of the computer, she thinks she hears the elevator moving. Which is impossible, unless someone else is in the building.

Someone like Ondowsky.

Holly flies to the office door with the gun in her hand. She throws the door open, sticks her head out. Hears nothing. The elevator is quiet. Still on five. It was her imagination.

She leaves the door open and hurries back to the desk to finish up. She has fifteen minutes. That should be enough, assuming she can remove the fix Jerome figured out and reinstate the computer glitch that had everyone climbing the stairs.

I’ll know, she thinks. If the elevator goes down after Ondowsky gets off, I’m okay. Golden. If it doesn’t…

But it’s no good thinking about that.

9

The stores are open late because of the Christmas season—the sacred time when we honor the birth of Jesus by maxing out our credit cards, Barbara thinks—and she sees at once that she won’t find parking on Buell. She takes a ticket at the entrance to the parking garage across from the Frederick Building and finally finds a space on the fourth level, just below the roof. She hurries to the elevator, looking around constantly, one hand in her purse. Barbara has also seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages.

When she arrives safely on the street, she hurries to the corner just in time to catch the walk light. On the other side she looks up and sees a light on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building. At the next corner, she turns right. A little way down the block is an alley marked with signs reading NO THROUGH TRAFFIC and SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY. Barbara turns down it and stops at the side entrance. She’s bending to tap in the door code when a hand grips her shoulder.

10

Holly opens the email she’s sent herself and moves the attachment to the flash drive. She hesitates for a moment, looking at the blank title strip below the drive’s icon. Then she types IF IT BLEEDS. A good enough name. It’s the story of that thing’s fracking life, after all, she thinks, it’s what keeps it alive. Blood and pain.

She ejects the drive. The desk in the reception area is where they do all their mailing, and there are plenty of envelopes, all different sizes. She takes a small padded one, slips the flash drive into it, seals it, then has a moment of panic when she remembers that Ralph’s mail is going to some neighbor’s house. She knows Ralph’s address by heart and could send it there, but what if some mailbox pirate grabbed it? The thought is nightmarish. What was the neighbor’s name? Colson? Carver? Coates? None of those are right.

Time, racing away from her.

She’s about to address the envelope to Ralph Anderson’s Next Door Neighbor when the name comes to her: Conrad. She slaps on stamps willy-nilly and jots quickly on the front of the envelope:

Detective Ralph Anderson

619 Acacia Street

Flint City, Oklahoma 74012

Below this she adds C/O CONRADS (Next Door) and DO NOT FORWARD HOLD FOR ARRIVAL. It will have to do. She takes the envelope, runs flat-out to the mail-drop near the elevator, and tosses it in. She knows that Al is as lazy about collecting the mail as he is about everything else, and it may lie at the bottom of the chute (which, to be fair, few people use in this day and age) for a week, or—given the holiday season—even longer. But there is really no hurry. Eventually it will go.

Just to be sure she was imagining things, she punches the elevator call button. The doors open; the car is there and the car is empty. So it really was her imagination. She runs back to Finders Keepers, not exactly gasping but breathing hard. Some of it’s the sprint; most of it is stress.

Now the last thing. She goes to the Mac’s finder and types in what Jerome titled their fix: EREBETA. It’s the brand name of their troublesome elevator; it’s also the Japanese word for elevator… or so Jerome claimed.

Al Jordan adamantly refused to call a local company to fix the glitch, insisting that it had to be done by an accredited Erebeta repairperson. He invoked dire possibilities should anything else be done and there was an accident: criminal liability, million-dollar lawsuits. Better to just close the elevator’s eight floor-stops off with yellow OUT OF ORDER tape and wait for the proper repairperson to show up. It won’t be long, Al assured his irate tenants. A week at most. Sorry for the inconvenience. But the weeks had stretched into almost a month.

“No inconvenience for him,” Pete grumbled. “His office is in the basement, where he sits on his ass all day watching TV and eating doughnuts.”

Finally Jerome stepped in, telling Holly something that she—a computer whiz herself—already knew: if you could use the Internet, you could find a fix for every glitch. Which they had done, by mating this very computer to the much simpler one controlling the elevator.