The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [75]
Feeling as if every passerby were staring at him, Ellis nervously positioned his hand to cover the bag’s throat and walked rapidly toward a turnoff he’d passed on the way, leading to a cul-de-sac with three closed doors. There, his back to the central corridor, he fumbled to tear off the tag, ripping part of the plastic in the process.
Now breathing through his mouth like a sprinter, fully expecting alarms, shouts, and the appearance of armed men, Ellis followed the signs to the central waste management area in a near daze. He entered a two-story-high room as big as a warehouse, complete with a yawning loading dock door looking out onto the hospital’s rear delivery lot. All around, in orderly piles, were garbage bags, cardboard boxes, recyclables, returnables, bundles of office paper, and all the other paraphernalia of a major municipal trash-handling plant.
But he had eyes only for that open door.
As he was halfway across the room’s vast concrete floor, however, the alarm he’d been dreading finally went off—a blood-chilling, hair-raising Klaxon that cut right through his skull. Ellis stopped dead in his tracks and waited for the command to drop the bag and fall to his knees.
Instead, all he heard was an explosive oath from a fat man stationed near a ceiling-mounted, cylindrical trash chute in the far corner.
“Stan!” the man shouted to a colleague, pointing at the chute’s latest deposit. “We got a glow-in-the-dark special.”
Ellis watched the two men converge around a bag like the one in his hand, scoop it up, and drop it into a lidded wheeled cart. It had appeared from the chute, presumably from one of the upper floors, and had triggered an alarmed sensor right by the large man’s station, which was also near where Ellis had been planning to exit from the building.
“Shit,” he muttered, realizing that his plan was now in tatters. How the hell was he supposed to get out of the building without tripping a similar sensor?
He retreated from the cavernous room and stood in the hallway, thinking. What, exactly, had happened? he wondered. Something inappropriate had apparently been introduced into the normal trash stream and had been intercepted according to protocol. Judging from the reaction he’d witnessed, this was not a rare event and had been handled in a routine fashion. No doubt, people on the floors above were expected to screw up now and then and mix lightly radiated waste in with regular trash.
So what did that mean for him?
He rubbed his forehead, trying to think this through, striving to ignore the certainty that the longer he stood here, the greater were his chances of being caught.
Finally, shaking his head in frustration, he retraced his steps back to the central corridor and returned to the stairwell. Better to be brazen and get this over with than simply get busted for standing around. He remembered Mel once telling him that the best way to overcome this kind of roadblock was simply to walk through it as if you owned the place. He didn’t worry about the irony that the very reason he was doing this was to dispose of the source of such wisdom.
Ellis reached the main floor, took a deep breath, stuffed the bag high up under his arm as if it were so much bundled laundry, and strode purposefully toward the front entrance.
He made it, feeling like a man treading through waist-high water, the target of a hundred invisible tracking monitors, all linked to a central room filled with TV sets and eager federal agents.
By the time he reached his parked car in the lot, into which he tossed his hard-won trophy with relief, he was drenched in perspiration. Now all he had to do was return to his mother’s room, pretend nothing had happened, and hope that her usual ability to see right through him had succumbed to her medications.