When the Flood Falls. J.E. Barnard

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СКАЧАТЬ but illicit entrants would not. Those top four high-security cards could override that rule and call up the elevator to some other level, trapping intruders until police arrived.

      “It’s almost more anti-vandal defence than anti-burglary,” Wayne said, handing up a screwdriver as she balanced on a small plastic stepstool to adjust the angle on the camera above the elevator door. “That protester outside could be the visible tip of a lot of local resentment. Who knows what some shine-swilling bush hermit might try for his fifteen minutes? Since Mayerthorpe, nobody takes chances with disgruntled farmers.”

      Lacey nodded, although she thought Wayne was overstating his case. Mayerthorpe, Alberta, was where four RCMP officers had been picked off by a mean man with a grudge. The bright, touristy environs of Bragg Creek seemed a different universe from that of such men. In reality, the two small towns were hardly a half day’s drive apart, and there was plenty of bush around here to harbour angry nutters. The lone protester didn’t look angry enough to worry about, but then, some of the worst mass murderers in history had seemed nice enough to their neighbours.

      When the two lobby cameras were cable connected and their angles adjusted to his satisfaction, Wayne unlocked the vault with his key card and a numerical code and pulled the shining door open. A wave of deeper chill flowed out, reminding Lacey of a morgue fridge. Peering past Wayne, she caught her first glimpse of the inner sanctum: ten metres by fifteen of white walls and floors under a six-metre-high ceiling, with lighting so intense it bleached out every shadow. One side of the room held bare, open shelving of varying depths and widths, the other a long frontage of vertical panels, each half as wide as a standard door, with a drawer pull in the middle and three slots for labels above that.

      Lacey gestured. “What’s behind those?”

      “You, in a minute.” Wayne lifted a remote control from a wall mounting and pushed a button. With a hiss of hidden hydraulics, one panel moved smoothly out into the room. Behind the polished metal front was attached a rigid-mesh construction half as long as the room and almost as high, with a handful of movable hooks hanging randomly from its expanse. “They’ll hang pictures on these for storage,” he added. “All computer hydraulics, and the software programmer is the biggest pain in the ass I’ve met in five years.” It was the most personal commentary he had let slip so far. He pushed another button to send the massive rack back to its resting place.

      “Where do we start?” Lacey set down the plastic stepstool and tugged her tool belt into position. They tested and focused the motion-sensor camera over the door, a second camera facing along the shelving, and a third aimed along the front of the hydraulic racks.

      “One more,” said Wayne. “Take everything and go tight up against the end wall.”

      When she was in position, he pointed the remote. The rack closest to the wall rolled out with a whisper of steel wheels and a hiss of overhead cables, cutting off Lacey from the rest of the vault and giving her a long moment to either panic or admire the posters taped up on the mesh, presumably by the construction crew. Jayne Mansfield’s cleavage made a change from the hockey players on either side, but none of it distracted Lacey from the claustrophobia that was never far below the surface ever since the underwater incident all those years ago. She concentrated on breathing steadily. There would be no panic, no sign of weakness, not when Wayne was finally showing signs of accepting her. At least she could see through the mesh. A solid wall would have sent her through the roof.

      When the motion stopped, she sidled along the rack to its back end. The plastic stepstool’s feet bumped along the mesh behind her, bouncing away only to rebound off the cement wall and back again. She wiggled past the rack’s cold steel end plate, reached back for the stepstool, and angled its leading legs into the gap. It stuck. Ignoring with difficulty the visual weight of all those other mesh monsters pressing in on her, she yanked. The stool moved a bit. The rack moved too. It rolled in toward Lacey, dragging her plastic stepstool sideways, pinned between the end plate and the wall. She shoved hard against the endplate but the rack kept coming, cutting off her only exit. She backed away, yelling for Wayne.

      If he answered, his voice was lost between the overhead hiss of hydraulic cables and the underfoot whisper of the rack’s wheels. The stepstool collapsed with a whine of tortured plastic.

      Her butt bumped the rear wall and still the rack came. She squeezed sideways, trying to fit between the end wall and the next rack. There wasn’t enough room. Nowhere to go.

      “Wayne!”

      The rack reached her hands, flat out at arms’ length. She leaned on it with all her might, but still it came.

      Her elbows bent. Her wrists were bending …

      The hiss stopped.

      The steel behemoth stopped, too, so close that she went cross-eyed at the blur that was her reflected nose. Her hands pulled back from the panel as if it were electrified. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, each quiet breath a victory against screaming.

      Wayne’s voice came from a long way off. “McCrae? Are you okay?”

      Deeper breath. And another. She tested her voice and heard it say calmly, “Yes.” Just a bit stressed by nearly being crushed to death in an enclosed space, but she couldn’t say that out loud. In Wayne’s book that would be whining. Ex-RCMP officers did not whine.

      “I won’t risk turning the power back on,” he called. “Can you push?”

      “It weighs a ton.”

      “It’s balanced like a dream. Once started, it will roll like a baby stroller. Now push.”

      He was right, sort of. It took a lot of will for Lacey to put her hands against the rack again. But with him pulling from the front end and Lacey’s feet braced on the wall behind her as she pushed, the monster began to move. She kept pushing as it rolled smooth and slow, unwilling to wait even a step behind the first chance of freedom. When it cleared the opening, she slipped out of the gap and past the pin-up posters to the widest spot in the vault’s corner. If she’d had Jayne Mansfield’s cantaloupes on her chest instead of these fried eggs, she wouldn’t have fit back there in the first place. She swallowed a hysterical giggle.

      “I’m clear,” she said. “Next time, you take the back, okay?”

      “Nobody’s going in there again until the installer adjusts the auto-close. It should take a good shove to get this to move. Not like a CD player.”

      “CD players only pinch your finger.” She might have been crushed, and even if she’d survived, she’d have been out of work for ages. Was she eligible for workers’ comp in Alberta? She wasn’t an official resident yet, just a temporary migrant from B.C. without a Calgary address or an Alberta health card. And here she’d thought the threats to life and limb had been left behind with her RCMP uniform. Deep breath. And another. She wasn’t crushed. No whining. “Do we put it back by hand, too?”

      “Nope. Go turn the power back on. We need to know if it’s one rack or all of them.” He pushed buttons and watched the immense racks slide out into the room.

      Lacey took her turn tapping the racks to start the auto-close sequence, pushing her fingers past the fear of touching those polished plates. The merest tap was all it took to start the racks. Nothing stopped them once they started except cutting the power at the switch box in the elevator lobby. Anyone hanging up a painting could get dragged sideways and mangled, like the stepstool.

      Wayne wore his old impassive ex-cop’s expression, but the flint in his eyes matched the steel vault СКАЧАТЬ