Matt plunged around behind the row of file cabinets. Relief flooded through him: the gun was no longer in sight. This lasted one second. The gun was still out there. Now he couldn’t be sure where.
Carleton Nairn was silent. Straining his ears, Matt caught (he thought) the sound of light footsteps. But it was only the gentle creak of the roof beams. Wasn’t it? He set his back against the back of a file cabinet. This left him with his back to the gun. He jerked around, his head snapping left and right to check for the gunman. If only Nairn had gone on talking….
Matt took two steps forward. Repressing the urge to clear his throat, he whispered, “You killed Jerry Silberwetter!”
Did the footsteps stop? Had there been footsteps? Matt strained to hear…nothing. Squeezing sideways between a defunct shredder and an obsolete copy machine, he broke from the file of cabinets and plunged straight back into a maze of cardboard, tall columns of boxes draped with torn and dusty plastic sheeting that guarded against roof leaks. He could at least put some distance between himself and the approaching gun.
No answer from Nairn. That was no good. Trying to remember anything at all from the voice-throwing booklet George bought two decades ago, Matt spoke as quickly as he could.
“And you took the cameras and pictures to make it look like roblery…burgary.”
The sound of styrofoam being crunched underfoot was joined by the grinding of Matt’s teeth. Had he kept his mouth shut, he could have pinpointed Nairn’s position without giving away his own.
“Oh, those cameras! He took pictures even all the time I was talking to him! He thought I wouldn’t have the balls to shoot.”
Matt slid along the plastic wall, trying not to rustle the dangling shreds. The crunching styrofoam was way too close.
“You won’t make that mistake, will you, Benz? You should have seen the picture he got of his own face when I proved him wrong.”
Easing around a corner of the cardboard labyrinth, Matt felt a foot catch between bits of jetsam. He jerked it loose and started to hurry on, but a glance of curiosity sent him diving to the floor.
“I took the skull, too. Figured that’d give ‘em more to think about. Didn’t do a damn bit of good. Silberwetter had copies of everything, but Operation Parking Permit already had the originals.”
The projector was heavy. Matt wondered if catching it had dislocated his shoulder or just strained a muscle. He started to set it back down, and realized it had tipped because a chair leg was loose. He checked the floor for a spot out of the way. Brainstorms thundered.
As quickly and silently as he could, he dragged both artifacts to the end of the row. They fit perfectly into the gap. Nairn, coming up that way, would assume it was impassable, and follow Matt to the next aisle. Matt hurried to the other end of this row; once he was between the gun and the exit, he had a chance.
Best to keep luring Nairn forward. “So that’s why the pictures weren’t used for a while. You were in prison.”
“You’re swift, Benz. Walter’s going to miss you. I bet he misses Geegee. Geegee had that librarian brain. All those pictures were cross-referenced in a cardex, all with dates on who and how much and how often. If he’d had as much business sense as librarian sense, he could have bought out his stepfather in no time.”
Matt caught movement: a shadow passing across a little gap. He chewed his upper lip. Stupid to assume Nairn was following him exactly, step by step. The gunman was moving the wrong way along the file cabinets, and would come face to face with his prey any moment.
Matt spun around and started back the way he’d come. Aiming for speed and silence, he gave very little thought to distance. When he did recall he had just blocked that exit, he had gone too far and built up too much momentum to stop.
Pens and pencils shot from his pocket across the floor. Disentangling one foot from the projector hood, he dropped to all fours to retrieve them.
“Operation Parking Permit did me one good turn. They came for me so soon after the murder that no one suspected me of it. As long as no one knew about the blackmail, there was no motive.”
The voice was closer. Matt sat up on his haunches and counted the pens and pencils. One short.
“And the pictures never came out, because I’d stashed them here. No one who hadn’t actually been touched knew Geegee was in the picture business. That saved HIS reputation, even if it didn’t do much for mine.”
The missing pen was on the seat of the broken chair. Matt snatched it up and looked around the warehouse. Despair washed through him. It wasn’t just the vast maze and the approaching gun. He saw suddenly the hundreds, thousands of City employees who had worked long hours under unreasonable deadlines, whose lives came down to boxes of stacked pages in a forgotten building.
“I think of it as a blow for reform. We don’t really want a blackmailer like Geegee in our civic administration. Blackmail is a sleazy crime. Nothing’s too bad for a blackmailer.”
“Why did you get into it, then?” Matt slid a hand under the plastic dustcover on the projector.
There was no pause. “I needed the money.”
Matt tried to get a foot in among the boxes. From the top of the stack he could jump down on Carleton Nairn, or drop something on Carleton Nairn, or, best of all, watch Carleton Nairn go by, jump down and make a beeline for the exit.
The boxes were too firmly stacked. He couldn’t find any foothold and gave it up, jumping past the chair and projector to take a right, and then another. He found himself dodging among a jumble of boxes and barrels and tall metal cabinets. On the way with many a look behind him, he took to ripping up lids, wrenching open doors. Something smaller than a box but larger than an envelope was all he needed. Something solid, something compact, that wouldn’t offer much wind resistance. He had seen this scene too many times of Late Night Sci Fi Flix: the expendable character who screamed and threw something utterly inadequate at the mad scientist/bogey beast pursuing him.
A box of old address labels offered nothing. Those hefty antique adding machines wouldn’t carry far enough. He dashed away cobwebs and decades of dust. Maybe he could uncover a box of glass ashtrays, and form a slingshot from that garter belt.
He frowned into a box. The shape was familiar, but clouded in his brain because he hadn’t expected to see it.
“He wasn’t even that good a blackmailer.” The voice was newly muffled, as if the speaker was separated from the quarry by rows of cardboard. The shape came into focus and Matt decided he had to believe in it. It was a gun.
“You have to do know how to do these things. It’s a game of skill: like chess.”
Not a chance in a million that the thing was loaded. Matt put a hand on it. The cold metal was a shock. He drew in a long breath.
“Yeah, chess: a game where the queen is just another piece.”
It was heavy in his hand. Too heavy? Maybe it was rusted. Too dark to see. If he pulled the trigger, would it fire, or explode, or just make a click? Maybe it was too rusty for the trigger to move at all.
“You should have left it the way I was running it. I wouldn’t have milked her quite dry. When I saw the Personal she put in the Reader, I thought I had her over a barrel.”
Matt looked up from the gun, distracted by a vision of Ada Silberwetter being milked over a barrel. He decided the image was not right for “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers” and looked down at the object in his hand. Knowing whether it worked and whether it was loaded would simplify deciding what to do with it. If he pulled the trigger and it did go off, he of course had no way of knowing whether it contained more than one bullet. Still, the sound would give Carleton Nairn something to think about. He braced himself.
“Then she started hanging out with you and that mystery writer. I couldn’t tell what you three musketeers were up to, but this operation’s going to be too big got me to let her screw it up. There’ll be bigger fish than Ada Silberwetter I this net. It was you talking to Marshall that got me antsy. Marshall’s not who he used to be, but he’s still somebody.”
Matt opened his eyes and regarded the rotted silk flag that had once said “Bang!”. It had been that sort of day from the outset.
Matt dropped the gun back where he had found it and left the scene. He seemed to hear Nairn’s footsteps: time for distance, not armament. But the warehouse was less efficiently stacked here. He figured someone had brought in all this stuff more recently and just dumped, rather than arranged according to the rules of decades before. There were no paths, no corridors in this jumble; he dashed in and among little clusters of leftovers. None of these was much higher than three feet. Matt saw himself dead and laid out a dozen times.
Scrambling on all fours, he reached the end of even this shelter. Now he saw shadowy concrete stretching ahead, clear, open space to make him a fine target. Thirty yards away, a couple of cardboard monoliths sat on wooden lifts. Those must be the most recent detritus, just rolled down the ramp to await distribution among the rest.
There was a ramp. He peered at it. It ran up to a big rectangular shadow. A smaller shadow was below, to the right of the ramp.
Matt looked back, and looked ahead. He looked back again. Twice he jerked forward but pulled himself back. He listened for the footsteps and now, of course, heard none. Putting his head down, he lunged across the open concrete.
The only sound was that made by his feet, and then by the doorknob as he rattled it.
“Ever been to this warehouse before, Benz?” called a voice from back among the cartons. “I have.”
Matt let go of the doorknob. Of course there was only one unlocked door. Carleton Nairn would know that; Carleton Nairn would be careful to stay between any possible exit and Matthew Benz.
Matt pulled into the shadow of a recent monolith, and rested against the stack of boxes barely taller than he was. There had been no need to dread a bullet in the back while he ran. Carleton Nairn was not the kind of man who shot someone in the back. No, Carleton Nairn wanted him trapped for a face-to-face, gun vs. no-gun. That was the kind of man Carleton Nairn was.
Cold air washed into Matt’s nostrils. He wiped some of the sweat from his face. He felt a lot better. If there was nowhere to run, he was left with just the one choice: fight and die, or give in and die. He could hardly believe his luck. Things were seldom so simple.
“Hardly anyone comes here. There’s nothing to see.” Matt peeked around the shelter to find the man approaching through the jumble of recent miscellanea.
“You’ll have lots or privacy. And I’ll have lots of friends on the Force, with all the pictures Geegee left me. Even if somebody does find you, say in August when you’re getting ripe, no one will ask any questions.”
Matt lifted a dusty box down from the top of the stack. Where did they find this? Nothing useful, just a batch of browned stationery headed Blank, Nineteen-Fifty-Blank.
“Ada Silberwetter will never know why you never showed up at Hildegarde’s. I’ll just take the money and hand her the negative I promised. Were you going to set a trap, by the way?”
Matt paused in closing the box. Maybe two could play this. “Think about it,” he said.
The voice was closer. “Doesn’t matter. I can do it either way. I can go straight home instead and write another Personal. You know what women are like. If she has to wait another week, she’ll be panting to hand over the cash.”
Matt hefted a box of stationery. He knew how the extras in those horror movies felt: this was better than nothing. Would it be better to run at the gun and try to take it, or go for escape? Doesn’t matter, he told himself: you’re going to trip anyhow.
“This home base, Benz?” The voice was really close. Matt reared and heaved the little box of stationery over the stack.
It exploded on the concrete, spraying bits of cardboard and sheets of paper into the air along with the dust. The lid of the box was perforated twice before Nairn recognized the mistake and whirled, his arm describing a circle as he fired. Matt crossed agonizing miles and dove among the crates and furniture.
The roofbeams rippled overhead. The sound of the gun had been so loud, Matt had assumed for a moment the roof was caving in, but, with regret, he realized it was exactly where it had started. A massive collapse would have been so nice: no more decisions to make.
