“Um,” he said.
“Five seconds,” Sherry said, the elevator almost to the thirty-third floor.
“Guy works at a factory that makes clocks but one of them is actually a time machine!” he blurted. He let out a long breath, then took one in.
“That’s it?” she said.
“No!” he said. “There’s more! But to try to explain it in—”
“What the hell?” Sherry said, but not to him.
The elevator had not stopped at her floor. It shot right past thirty-three, and then glided right on by thirty-four.
“Crap,” said Sneaker Girl. “That’s me.”
The two women both reached out to the panel at the same time to press the button for their floors again, their fingers engaged in a brief bit of fencing.
“Sorry,” said Sherry, who’d managed to hit the button for her floor first. She edged out of the way.
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As the elevator continued its ascent, Business Guy grimaced and said, “Guess I’ll join the club.” He put his index finger to the “37” button.
“Someone at the top must have pushed for it,” Sneaker Girl said. “It’s going all the way up first.”
She turned out to be right. The elevator did not stop until it reached the fortieth floor.
But the doors did not open.
“God, I fucking hate elevators,” she said.
Stuart did not share her distress. He grinned. The elevator malfunction had bought him a few extra seconds to make his pitch to Sherry. “I know time travel has been done a lot, but this scenario is different. My hero, he doesn’t go way into the past or way into the future. He can only go five minutes one way or the other, so—”
Business Guy said, “I’ll walk back down.” He pressed the button to open the doors, but there was no response.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
Sherry said, “We should call someone.” She pointed to the button marked with the symbol of a phone.
“It’s only been a few seconds,” Stuart said. “It’ll probably sort itself out after a minute or so and—”
With a slight jolt, the elevator started moving again.
“Finally,” Sneaker Girl said.
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“The interesting angle is,” Stuart said, persisting, “if he can only go five minutes into the past or five minutes into the future, how does he use that? Is it a kind of superpower? What kind of advantages could that give someone?”
Sherry glanced at him dismissively. “I’d have gotten on this elevator five minutes before you showed up.”
Stuart bristled at that. “You don’t have to insult me.”
“Son of a bitch,” the man said.
The descending elevator had gone past his floor. He jabbed at “37” again, more angrily this time.
The elevator sailed past the floors for the two women as well, but stopped at twenty-nine.
“Aw, come on,” Business Guy said. “This is ridiculous.” He pressed the phone button. He waited a moment, expecting a response. “Hello?” he said. “Anyone there? Hello?”
“This is freaking me out,” Sneaker Girl said, taking a cell phone from her purse. She tapped the screen, put the phone to her ear. “Yeah, hey, Steve? It’s Paula. I’m gonna be late. I’m stuck in the fucking eleva—”
There was a loud noise from above, as though the world’s largest rubber band had snapped. The elevator trembled for a second. Everyone looked up, stunned. Even Stuart, who had stopped trying to sell his idea to Sherry D’Agostino.
“Fuck!” said Sneaker Girl.
“What the hell was that?” Sherry asked.
Almost instinctively, everyone started backing up toward the walls of the elevator, leaving the center floor area open. They gripped the waist-high brass handrails.
“It’s probably nothing,” Stuart said. “A glitch, that’s all.”
“Hello?” Business Guy said again. “Is anybody there, for Christ’s sake? This elevator’s gone nuts!”
Sherry spotted the alarm button and pressed it. There was only silence.
“Shouldn’t we be hearing that?” she asked.
The man said, “Maybe it rings someplace else, you know, so someone will come. Down at the security desk, probably.”
For several seconds, no one said anything. It was dead silent in the elevator. Everyone took a few calming breaths.
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Stuart spoke first. “Someone’ll be along.” He nodded with false confidence and gave Sherry a nervous smile. “Maybe this is what I should be writing a—”
The elevator began to plunge.
Within seconds it was going much faster than it was designed to go.
Stuart and Sherry and the two others felt their feet lifting off the floor.
The elevator was in free fall.
Until it hit bottom.
One
Barbara Matheson was impressed by the size of the crowd. The usual suspects, more or less, but the fact that they’d turned out meant her story had made an impression.
This was a TV event, really. Get the mayor walking out of City Hall, lob a few questions his way, get video of him denying everything. The Times, the Daily News, the Post could all write their stories without being here. But NY1 and the local ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates had crews waiting for Richard Wilson Headley to show. He might try sneaking out a back way, or leaving in a limo with windows so deeply tinted you wouldn’t know whether he was inside or not. But then the evening newscasts would say he made a point of avoiding the media, imply that he was a coward, and Headley never wanted to come across as a coward.
Even if he could be one at times.
Barbara was here on the off chance that something might actually happen. And yes, she was enjoying the shit she’d stirred up. This show of media force was her doing. She’d broken the story. Maybe Headley would take a swing at somebody who put a camera in his face, although that seemed unlikely. He was too smart for that. The TV stations were here for a comment, but she’d already gotten one and put it in her column.
“That’s a load of fucking horseshit,” Headley had said when Barbara ran the allegations past him. Her editors at Manhattan Today printed the response without asterisks to disguise the profanity, but that was hardly daring these days. The Times still avoided curse words except in the most extreme cases, but even The New Yorker, that staid institution, didn’t blink an eye about f-bombs and hadn’t for years.
“You really put his dick into the blender this time.”
She turned. It was Matt Timmins, instantly recognizable by his multidirectional black hair and glasses thick enough to see life on Mars. He worked for an online site that covered city issues, but she knew him back when he worked for NBC, before he got laid off. He had a phone in hand, waiting to take video, which would be good enough for the political blog he wrote.
“Hey, Matt,” Barbara said.
“Wearin’ Kevlar?”
Barbara shrugged. She liked Matt, vaguely remembered sleeping with him nearly ten years ago when they were both in their early thirties. The local press had been camped out in front of the house of a congressman in the midst of a bribery scandal. Barbara and Matt had shared a car to keep warm while waiting for the feds to arrive and walk the politician out the front door. After, they went to a bar, had too much to drink, and went back to his place. It was all a bit foggy. Barbara was pretty sure Matt was married now, with a kid, maybe two.
“Headley won’t shoot me,” she said. “He might hire someone to shoot me, but he wouldn’t do it himself.”