Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [128]
I approved.
And in a moment, I was beside him on the roof—crouching down to hide behind the topmost ledge. Before we left the hotel we’d had a conversation about hand signals and keeping quiet, and God bless the man, I didn’t have to reinforce or reiterate a bit of it. He was a professional from toes to top, all business. All ready to work in silence.
I loved it. Even though, if you’d asked me a month earlier if I’d enjoy working with a partner, I would’ve laughed in your face. But I liked this guy. He knew how to behave and he knew how to keep his head down.
It flicked through my mind that he might make a formidable vampire.
But it only flicked. I shook my head to loosen the thought and let it go.
While I was wrestling with my distracting thoughts, he was finding an entrance and taking a small prybar to it. That kind of can-do attitude was just what I wanted to see, so I joined him and gave the low, half-sized door a nudge that flipped it quietly open.
It wasn’t a stairwell. That would’ve been too obvious. This was a maintenance chute that allowed electricians and roofing workers to go down below the surface for repairs and renovations. I wasn’t 100 percent positive there would be an outlet down into the main body of the building, but I assumed that should we hit a dead end, we’d find a thin spot where we could cut our way down through the drywall.
Sometimes you have to wing it.
I knew for a pretty safe fact that Adrian would be happy to wing it with a flamethrower if he could’ve snuck one inside. As it was, I didn’t know how far I could really trust him once we reached the office. I didn’t believe he’d do anything dumb, but I had every confidence that he planned to wreak some havoc … if those two things can be mutually exclusive.
Like I said, I wasn’t sure.
But he knew how to move and he didn’t mind getting dirty. That much was clear when we ducked down through the maintenance chute and found ourselves stomping in old mold-smelling insulation that may once have been pink, but was now only some pale, ghastly shade in the dim ambient light from the sky outside.
My feet sank into it and I shuddered at the texture—like cotton candy spun out of glass—but I extricated my boots and found some support beams to stand on instead. I had a feeling I’d be picking that shit off my clothes for days.
Adrian was rustling through his satchel and retrieving a pair of night-vision goggles, which he’d also acquired on my dime and without my official commendation. God knows I didn’t need them, but I was glad he had them. We both needed to be able to see if we were going to rely on each other at all.
We hunted, pecked, tiptoed, and ducked our way through the ceiling crawl space—a narrow band between the top floor and the roof. It was just about high enough to allow a midsized dog to walk upright; Adrian and I, being somewhat taller, either went down on all fours or crouched painfully along, hunkering through the near pitch blackness.
I took the lead, and I led by instinct … and by virtue of my copious experience.
I headed east, toward the place where I’d perceived a main stairwell while we were outside checking the place out. If there was going to be a hatch of any kind, dumping into the building’s main corridors, it would probably be somewhere over the stairs. I had no idea why this tended to be the case, but there you have it. I’m sure an architect or an engineer could lay it out for me, but I can honestly say I don’t much care. As long as the generality would hold true, just tonight. Just this once.
It did. Sort of.
Before long we found ourselves atop a promising trapdoor that flat refused to open. So I pulled the long, slim saw out of my bag and went to town, cutting through whatever was keeping the thing from dropping and letting us out. I ended up cutting all the way around, in a full square; and when we finally got the thing to open, I understood why.