Christmas at Timberwoods - Fern Michaels [40]
Charlie sidled up to a small group of young women, who ignored him, giving him the chance to listen to their conversation.
“I don’t see any police,” one of them complained. “They always have police if there’s a bomb threat. I’m not leaving—I have too much shopping to do! Do what you want. I’m staying!”
Charlie walked away, stunned. It appeared the whole complex was on red alert. She happened to be wrong—right now he could see several plainclothes officers aside from the usual security guards. He was sweating profusely by the time he rounded the corner to the stairway leading to the lower level. Bomb scare! He stumbled over to a bench and dropped heavily onto the hard wooden planks.
A little girl stopped to stare at him. “Are you sick?” she asked, but her mother grabbed the little girl’s arm and yanked her away.
“Don’t bother people, Marcey. He’s probably just tired from all this Christmas rush. C’mon, we have to find Grandma.”
Charlie stared straight ahead, dimly aware of the woman taking the little girl away. Christmas rush—she had that right. Security and the police would crawl all over the complex like ants at a picnic. They would look and look and snoop and snoop and never find anything. The last time it happened someone had leaked a photocopy of the threatening letter and it had been posted for about five minutes on the employee bulletin board before someone else had taken it down. A lot of hours had been spent cutting words and letters out of newspapers and magazines to compose the thing—his brief glance told him that. He’d played detective in his mind that day. The big letters were from the covers of common magazines, the ones everybody got. Nothing unusual. But he’d recognized a few letters right out of the sales circular from Skyer’s. From someone at the mall, maybe? Someone like him?
Kind of ironic. And hard to fathom. Right now it was most likely the dumb shits were looking for a standard bomb—sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock. Tick tick tick. He laughed.
He reviewed his plan.
His mind flipped back to two weeks ago. The weather had been cold and dry then, perfect for mending the roof. The maintenance crew had come down to the employees’ cafeteria for lunch and Charlie had overheard them discussing the procedure for patching the roof where the rain was seeping in. When the talk got around to using propane for heating the tar vat, Charlie’s ears had pricked up—propane? Up on the roof? The information had lodged itself in his mind.
He hadn’t said anything, just hummed along with the music being piped into the cafeteria. Thinking about the guys there on that day, he wondered if anyone besides him had been harboring a grudge. An outsider, who wanted to belong . . . if not in life, then in death.
Maybe even someone contemplating suicide, the last lonely act a man could perform. Charlie could understand that. He himself was sick of being lonely, and Christmas was a particularly bad time—the worst of all. It seemed everyone had someone to love but him. He had no family, no friends . . . no one at all. The only people he talked to were the guys he worked with, and he hated them. It would serve them all right if he or anyone else, even one of them, took down the whole freaking mall with one big bang. They were always ribbing him, waiting for him to make a mistake, to lose his balance and fall down—anything was reason enough to ridicule him.
Yeah, that fit. It wasn’t impossible that someone besides him was thinking of rigging a whatchamacallit—an IED, improvised explosive device—with that propane. Charlie shrugged. He sure as hell wasn’t going to be a hero and find out who. He didn’t owe anyone favors. But it could be a golden opportunity to pin the blame on someone else after the fact.
Kaboom. Point the finger. Lie low and eventually file that