“I’m a pharmaceuticals executive,” Gus said.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Shawn said. “I took this job because I thought we were going undercover together. But I’m keeping it because I’m not going to let you be the next victim.”
“I can’t be the next victim, because there haven’t been any previous victims,” Gus said. “There’s just been a series of unfortunate accidents, which is not that surprising when you consider how many thousands of people Benson Pharmaceuticals employs worldwide.”
“And one suicide,” Shawn said.
“And one suicide,” Gus agreed. “If it makes you feel better I’ll promise not to put on a cheerleader’s outfit and hang myself in my mother’s basement.”
“That’s good, because you really don’t have the legs for it,” Shawn said.
Gus stopped as they reached the corner of Market Street. He pointed at the long escalator that descended to the subway stop under their feet. “Here’s the BART station,” he said. “You can take that right back to the airport.”
“Only if you come with me,” Shawn said.
“I’m not coming back,” Gus said. “I’ve got a life here.”
“Sure, but for how long?” Shawn said.
“Shawn, there is no danger at Benson Pharmaceuticals,” Gus said. “How can I convince you?”
“You can start by explaining that.”
Shawn gestured down Market to the glass-and-steel tower that housed Gus’ office. A thick crowd of people had formed outside the lobby doors. As Gus watched, a steady stream of onlookers squeezed forward to get a better view, then pushed their way out of the crowd, looking sick. One woman threw up on the curb.
Gus was running before he knew he’d meant to. His flat shoes slapped on the bricks of the sidewalk and sent a sharp sting of pain through his feet with every step, but he barely noticed. He reached the edge of the crowd and let his momentum carry him through the close-packed bodies. He could feel the onlookers push back against him, but he kept going, using knees and elbows to clear any obstruction his combined mass and velocity couldn’t move. After what felt like an eternity he broke through into a clearing, a wide, empty space on the sidewalk, ringed by spectators.
But that space wasn’t completely empty. The first things Gus noticed were the clear pebbles that littered the sidewalk. He realized he’d been walking on them since before he’d entered the crowd; some of them were still stuck in the soles of his shoes. They looked like the bits of windshield that were left on the highway once a serious crash had been cleaned up.
Gus could easily have spent the next few minutes thinking about the marvels of safety glass, wondering what kind of technology was required to make it shatter into beads instead of jagged shards. It was thicker than normal glass, true, but was that enough? Or did it have to go through some kind of chemical process? Gus had heard it referred to as tempered glass, but he had no idea how you would go about tempering something. And could a sheet of glass lose its temper the way a person could? That would make a kind of sense, since a person who lost his temper would fly into a rage, and a pane of glass that lost its temper would fly into jagged shards. Maybe this was just an etymological accident. Or perhaps Gus had stumbled onto some great truth about glass or emotions or flying into things.
Gus wanted to explore all these ideas in detail. All he had to do was turn around and push his way back through the crowd. Then he could walk around the corner to the Drumm Street entrance, take the elevator up to the sixteenth floor, lock himself in his office, and spend the rest of the day in rapt concentration. He might have to ignore the cold wind blowing through the corridors, but he was willing to do that, because the alternative was so much less appealing.
That alternative was to focus on what lay in front of him, spread out on the sidewalk. And that was the last thing he wanted to do. The last thing, but the only thing.
Gus forced his eyes to look down at the ground. He tried to avoid taking in the whole picture and instead to focus on the tiny details. Like the cracks in the bricks where the shock wave from the body’s landing had rippled out across the sidewalk. Or the brown loafer that had come off either in flight or on landing and now lay by its owner’s head. Or the tie. That hideous floral tie he had spent so much of the morning staring at across the conference table. The one Steve Ecclesine put on whenever he planned to engage in an act of corporate brutality, as if the cheery flowers could hide the cruelty of his actions.
There were short bloops of police siren from the street behind him, and Gus felt the crowd jostling as a pair of uniformed cops muscled their way through to the body lying on the ground.
“Okay, let’s move on, people,” a gruff voice said from behind him. “There’s nothing to see here.”
How wrong that voice is, Gus thought. There were things to see in every direction. If you looked down, there was the body. If you looked up, you could see the hole in the building where the window had popped out of its sixteenth-story frame. And if you looked to your left, you could see Shawn looking right back at you.
“So,” Shawn said. “We still working on that string-of-unconnected-accidents theory?”
Chapter Twenty-nine
“I quit,” Gus said.
“A bold statement,” Shawn said. “Forcefully spoken. Brief and yet eloquent. If I could give you the tiniest smidge of advice, I’d just say that it would be more convincing if you weren’t on your knees while you said it.”
Gus looked back over his shoulder at Shawn, who was spread out over one of the sofas in his office. Then he turned back to the carpet in front of him and pulled another stretch of silver duct tape off the roll. He laid the top half of the tape along the bottom edge of the closed curtain, then pressed the bottom of it against the floor.
“As long as I’m within ten feet of this window, I’m keeping low to the ground,” Gus said. “The lower my center of gravity, the less chance I’ll plunge to my death if the glass falls out.”
“First of all, if the glass does fall out a strip of duct tape and a curtain won’t stop you,” Shawn said. “If Goldfinger could get sucked out through that tiny airplane window, there’s no way you’re not going out a hole the size of a billboard.”
“That would be true if we were two miles in the air,” Gus said. “As it is, explosive decompression is just about the only thing I don’t have to worry about.”
“You also don’t have to worry about whether you’re such a man that one romp in the hay is enough to make a criminally oriented lesbian aviatrix turn straight in both ways,” Shawn said. “And also you don’t have to worry that the glass will come out,” Shawn said.
“Says the company’s chief safety officer,” Gus said.
“Exactly,” Shawn said. “I commissioned an inspection of every window in these offices, and they are all firmly glued. Or however they’re stuck in there.”
That was at least partially true. There had been an inspection and it had cleared all the windows, although it had been performed by engineers working for the building’s owners and their insurance company. The fact that they still had no explanation for the sudden failure of Steve Ecclesine’s window did tend to undercut Gus’ confidence in the security of his own, however.
Gus pulled another strip of tape off the roll and overlapped it on the piece holding the curtain to the carpet. “That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.”
“Then this should,” Shawn said. “The killer hasn’t repeated himself yet. Skiing accident, electrocution, suicide. I don’t think he’s going to feel that the window gag was so good he needs an encore.”
“That’s great,” Gus said. “As long as there really is a killer. I’m still not convinced this isn’t one more in a tragic series of accidents.”
“Yes, you are,” Shawn said. “You just don’t want to be.”
Gus got up on his knees, then hurled the roll of tape directly at Shawn’s head. Shawn ducked and the tape bounced off the wall behind him.