Elevator, The (24 page)

Isabel presses her lips together and watches the two women at the front of the elevator. The wife is no longer crying, though her eyes are red and her chin still wobbles. The younger woman wears a blank face, but beneath the smooth surface Isabel can see a suggestion of movement and flowing, as though a hidden spring is trying to break through.

They must hate her. They are calm now, each woman grappling with her thoughts and feelings, but they will turn on her after they are rescued. The wife will tell the authorities that Isabel stole the bracelet and murdered her husband; the younger woman will say Isabel killed her unborn baby’s father. The authorities will believe them, because they are rich and American, and they will take Isabel and lock her away forever.

She glances up at the ceiling, where the large opening looms overhead. If she could, she’d climb up to the roof and jump off the car. But she can’t climb alone, nor can she push her way to the front and try to open the doors. The
gringas
guard the door, and they are strong. They will want her to pay for her crime, to die for murdering the rich American businessman.

The old feelings of terror surface in Isabel’s consciousness; like a powerful rip current they pull her into the deep well of memory and loss. She lost Rodrigo because she tried to refuse Ernesto; she had to walk away from her mother because she did not heed
Mamá’
s warning. And now, because she came to work when Carlos urged her to stay at home, she will lose him and Rafael….

She eyes the dark line at the front of the elevator. The younger woman was not able to open the doors earlier, but she is not as strong as Isabel. If she applies all her strength, she might be able to break through the latch holding the doors together. She could jump into the lobby and roll backward, sparing Carlos and Rafael from all the terrible things that will happen once the world knows what she has done.

She bites her lip, then stands on wobbly legs, hesitating only an instant before rushing the doors. The younger
gringa
automatically moves her legs out of the way, but gasps when Isabel slides her fingers into the space between the bronze panels.

“What are you doing?”

Isabel doesn’t answer. A gap as wide as her hand appears, but it will not widen. She keeps pulling, convinced she can break whatever is holding the doors in place, while Michelle continues to yell. “Isabel! Stop it!”

“She’s snapped,” the older woman says. “She’s gone crazy.”

Hands fall upon Isabel’s shoulders, strong hands that tug her away from the front of the elevator and turn her around to face brown eyes that are troubled, compassionate and still. Isabel searches those eyes, looking for signs of condemnation, but finds only understanding.

Suddenly she is caught in an embrace, and she and Michelle are sinking to the floor in a flood of tears and whispered comforts.

When Isabel has calmed down, Michelle offers the girl another tissue from her purse, then folds her hands. “What were you trying to do?”

Isabel blows her nose, then crumples the tissue in her fist and lowers her gaze. “I don’t know.”

“I think I know,” Michelle answers. “You wanted out—but what you had in mind is not the way out, Isabel. You heard what Eddie said.”

Reluctantly, Isabel looks up. Michelle meets her gaze and smiles, determined to prove that she understands what neither of them wants to say.

“Listen—” she grips Isabel’s hands “—when we get out of here, I will go with you to report what happened upstairs this morning.”

Isabel swallows hard. “To report…don’t they already know?”

“Why would they know?”

“Because of the computers. Ernesto told me that American offices and buildings are filled with computers and cameras that see and hear everything. He said they would watch me, that they would always see me, and it would only be a matter of time before the authorities found me and put me in prison.”

Michelle listens with rising bewilderment. “Oh, Isabel, no! Those were lies, all lies! Yes, there are some cameras in this country, but you have nothing to fear. You were the victim of a criminal. If you tell the police what happened and how they can find Ernesto, they’ll probably give you a medal. They will keep you safe.”

Isabel’s eyes widen. “I cannot go to the police. I am too afraid—I am a coward. They will see my tears and know I have done something terrible—”

“You are not a coward.” Michelle squeezes Isabel’s hands with each word. “Were you a coward when you hid from the drug dealers in the airport? Even if you were afraid, Isabel, you did the right thing and that takes courage.” She smiles, finding comfort in her own advice. “I think you may be the bravest woman I know.”

Isabel pulls away, murmuring something about getting some rest, and Michelle allows her to go. From her corner, Gina says nothing, but sits with her knees bent and her hands over her face. Michelle can’t tell if the woman is mourning her husband or exulting in his demise.

She leans against the wall and closes her eyes. A wave of pity threatens to engulf her, but she pushes it back.

She will not feel sorry for herself or her baby. Instead, she will take the advice she offered Isabel—starting today, she will live an honest life. She will come clean about her past and when this ordeal is over, she will go through her accounts and offer a refund to any client who was not happy with the performance of Tilson Corporate Careers.

A new life waits outside this elevator…if she can claim it.

She shivers as a gust blows down the shaft, bringing a touch of rain in its breath.

“More windows have blown out,” Gina says, wiping moisture from her face. “The outer offices must be totally ruined.” She picks up the diamond bracelet, a shining jumble on the floor, and absently drapes it over her wrist. “So much for the perk of having an office with a view.”

Michelle turns toward Isabel. “Would you turn on the radio? Just for a minute, so we can hear what’s happening out there.”

Isabel smooths her wet hair, then pulls the pink CD player from her pocket and slides the earbuds into her ears. After turning the dial she halts, her eyes focusing on nothing as she listens with an intent expression on her face.

“The man says Felix is seventy-five miles away. Waves are high, the bay bridges are underwater.” Concern and confusion mingle in her eyes. “How can the bridges be under water? The hurricane is not yet here.”

“Storm surge,” Michelle explains. “The wind pushes waves ahead of the hurricane, so the inland waterways fill up and overflow. I know they were worried about—”

“MacDill Air Force Base,” Isabel interrupts, lifting her hand, “is almost underwater. The barrier islands are submerged. Pinellas County is an island.”

Michelle meets Gina’s wide eyes. More than nine hundred thousand people live on the Pinellas peninsula. Thousands of the residents are retirees who’ve come to Florida to enjoy mild winters and escape a state income tax.

Eddie Vaughn, Michelle remembers, lived in Pinellas County. If he hadn’t come to rescue them, he’d be safe, but now he’s at the bottom of the shaft and his poor dog is roaming through a dangerous building.

“Never,” Gina whispers, her hand at her throat. “I’ve lived here all my life and never expected anything like this to happen.”

“In downtown Tampa,” Isabel continues, a thread of panic in her voice, “water is over the seawalls and in the streets. No cars can get in, no rescue trucks—”

“So no help is coming.” Gina hugs her knees, then lets her head fall against the wall. “We’re going to be here for a while. Several days, probably. Maybe forever.”

Michelle rests her hand on Isabel’s arm. “Maybe you should turn the radio off so we can save the battery.”

Gina looks at Michelle with eyes that have dulled under a film of indifference. “What does it matter? You were foolish to hope your mechanic could get us out. If we’re lucky and the storm doesn’t snap the cables holding us up, it’ll be days before we’re rescued. If we’re rescued.”

“We’re going to be okay,” Michelle insists, struggling to resist the spirit of pessimism that has invaded the car. “We have to keep our spirits up.”

Gina folds her hands in a pose of weary dignity. “‘Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me; the carriage held but just ourselves and Immortality.’”

Michelle listens through a vague sense of unreality. Gina has given up. The fiery, determined woman who wasn’t afraid to threaten her husband like Dirty Harry no longer cares if she lives or dies.

She must have loved him and his faults…which is more than Michelle can say about Parker.

Michelle glances at Isabel, then gives Gina a grim smile. “Thanks for the poetic moment, but I’m not ready to die today. I’m not going to sit here and hope somebody comes to rescue us.”

Isabel lifts her head. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure,” Michelle says, standing. “But you know what? Eddie Vaughn gave his life to save ours, so I can’t ignore his sacrifice. I’m not dying today.”

H
er eyes are brown, the shade of milk chocolate. Eddie notices the color despite the shadows around that perfect face, probably because those eyes are smiling up at him as if he just finished hanging the moon.

“We’re snug,” she says, the corners of her mouth lifting. “Snug as bugs in a rug.”

Heaven help him, he’s smiling, too. Not a good thing to do, no sir, not today, maybe not ever. He hasn’t time to smile at brown-eyed women today, no matter how appealing they might be, because he has to do something important…but what was it?

He lifts his heavy eyelids and blinks, then stares into darkness and tries to grip something solid in this sea of confusion. He inhales, then winces as a stabbing pain attacks his rib cage. He is lying on his right side atop something solid, something hard. He raises his left arm and moves it in an arc, then his fingers encounter a metal beam behind his body. It is smooth and square, cold and wet beneath his fingertips.

A crosshead. He’s on a rain-spattered elevator, so the ridge beneath his right elbow must be the handle of a hatch cover.

How in the world did he land here?

His senses are slowly recovering, but anxiety runs at the front of the pack. Forcing himself to be calm, he retraces his steps: he had driven to Tampa, climbed stairs and found the elevator. He’d climbed onto the roof and opened the cover; he’d tossed his harness down to the women (stupid move!). They’d heard a noise and he’d stood to check things out. And then—

The wind. A maelstrom had roared across the landing, tossing chairs and plants and prying pictures from the walls.

His breath catches in his lungs. He’s been blown down the shaft.

Eddie presses his hand to his forehead as comprehension seeps through his shock. He’s alive. He’s on the top of an elevator cab. So the missile that knocked him from his perch must have pushed him aside, allowing him to fall onto the adjacent car.

He takes another deep breath, winces at another stab in the chest. Broken ribs, probably. Maybe a concussion, too. He wriggles his fingers, feels both hands respond. His left arm is mobile, so he reaches for the sturdy beam of the crosshead and wraps his arm around it.

So far, so good. He bites his lower lip and struggles to pull himself up. Pain strikes his midsection, sending a shower of needles through his gut, but he doesn’t stop until he is leaning against the cross beam and his lip tastes of blood.

He steels himself for the pain at his ribs, then gulps air into his lungs. He needs oxygen; he needs to think. The elevators in this shaft are express cars; they only open to the lower parking levels and the upper floors. If he can stand—

“Arrrrgh!” He lowers his hand to his right leg as pain rips along his calf and slices at his knee. His nerve endings are snapping at each other, an unrivaled agony that resulted from the simple act of trying to turn his foot.

Okay, then, he’ll sit for a while. He grits his teeth. A broken leg bone—the tibia, if his memory can be trusted—is not so good when a man is facing a walk of a thousand stairs, but at least he has the use of both arms.

He props his left elbow on the crosshead and peers upward. Nothing but thick darkness above and to the left, but a thin gray gleam to the right.

Many feet up and to the right.

He sags against the steel beam as reality crashes into his consciousness. He’d been working with the women near the twenty-eighth floor. The first openings in the express shafts are on the twenty-fifth. Which means he fell at least thirty feet, maybe more.

Please, God, don’t let it be more than that.

Taking care not to move his right leg any more than necessary, Eddie grips the crosshead with both hands and faces the front of the car, then waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Is that a door in the wall? He blinks, then leans forward until the pressure proves too much for his injured ribs. He can see a rectangular shape, so perhaps this is the twenty-fifth-floor landing.

Stepping over the crosshead would ordinarily be a simple matter, but he can’t risk the maneuver with a broken leg. Summoning all his strength, Eddie ducks under the wide beam and drags himself toward the front of the car. On his belly, he spits dust from his lips—somebody’s not keeping their cars clean—and crawls forward. Pain rises inside him like a wave, sending streamers of agony in every direction, but he perseveres until he’s within reach of the dark rectangle.

The surface is rough beneath his fingers, not smooth. Concrete, not metal. The shadows have played tricks on him.

Gasping, he rolls onto his back and stares up at the concrete slab, part of the shaft that entombs him. He clamps his jaw against the insistent pain while his breath comes through his nostrils with a faint whistling sound.

“Get a grip, Ed. Sadie’s waiting for you.” Ms. Brown Eyes is waiting, too, but he can’t say that aloud, not even here. He wipes perspiration from his forehead with the heel of his hand, then forces himself to focus.

The power is still off. He can’t rappel down without a line and harness, and he can’t cut through the wall without tools. He can’t manually pick the elevator brake because it’s in the machine room on the roof of the building, which, in his current condition, is about as reachable as Saturn. He could slide down the cables…no, he couldn’t. Not without gloves, and not in his condition.

He groans and sits up, then reaches under the crosshead to the emergency hatch, where the thick dust is damp with a layer of his sweat. He could open the exit cover, lower himself into this car, and try to use the phone, but what good would that do? He’s probably the only elevator tech working in a three-county radius. And if he enters this cab, he’ll be as trapped as the women…without anyone to help him out.

The idea persists until he realizes that a drop would force him to land on an already-broken bone. That thought, combined with the pain blazing a trail down the length of his leg, is enough to make him lie back on the rooftop and close his eyes.

Maybe he has finally finished paying for his mistakes.

Michelle feels the expectant pressure of the others’ eyes as she examines the opening in the ceiling. “I know none of us wants to think about Eddie right now,” she says, dropping her hands to her hips, “but he came out and made a way for us to escape. I think we ought to try and take it.”

Isabel gapes at her while Gina laughs. “You want us to climb up to the roof? How are we supposed to do that?”

“The same way we were going to climb up when Eddie was here. Look.” She bends and scoops up the tangled harness. “This is still attached to something up there, so you can’t fall if you put it on. Two of us will boost one up—that one will wait on the roof and help the second one. Then we’ll lower the harness again and the two of us will pull the third one up and out.”

Gina closes her eyes so tightly her face seems about to fold in on itself. “I’m not getting on top of this car. We all know what happened to that man, and conditions are even worse now.”

“Eddie was caught by surprise,” Michelle says. “We’ll know to hang on. Sure, the wind’s blowing, but everything that can fly through those doors is probably long gone.”

“What about the roof?” Gina interrupts. “The roof is blowing off, and who knows what will fall down this shaft.”

Michelle ignores Gina and gives Isabel a bright smile. “We’ll climb out, we’ll hang on to each other, and we’ll go to the stairwell, like Eddie said. We can ride out the storm there.”

Gina refuses to open her eyes, but a faint line appears between Isabel’s brows. “You think we will be okay?”

Michelle softens her voice. “I don’t know anything for sure. But I don’t think we can be comfortable here without food or water, and Gina’s right about the roof being vulnerable. The cables might hold the elevator, but they might not. Besides—” she smiles “—I would appreciate access to a bathroom. So I’m climbing out.”

Isabel glances at Gina, then shakes her head. “I am not sure.”

“What a fool,” Gina whispers. She opens her eyes and jerks her chin toward the ceiling. “What if the power comes back on while you’re walking around on the top of this thing?”

“Eddie said the car wouldn’t move as long as the cover’s off the hatch.” Michelle picks up the harness and tries to make sense of the loops. “How do you get into this getup?”

“You should stay put.” Gina crosses her arms. “That’s what I tell my kids—if you’re lost, frightened or in trouble, get someplace safe and stay put.”

“You think this car is safe?” Michelle lowers the harness and meets Gina’s gaze head-on. “Look, I know this has been a day none of us will want to remember. I know we’re upset because Parker and Eddie are dead and we’re probably alone in this building. But before we lost him, Eddie said the way out was through that opening in the ceiling. I choose to believe he knew what he was talking about.”

Gina’s brows rise, graceful wings of scorn. “You’d trust a man who couldn’t even save himself?”

“Absolutely.” Michelle bends to pick up her purse, then glances over her shoulder. “Isabel, last chance. Are you coming with me?”

The cleaning woman’s face clouds with worry, then she nods. “
Sí.
I must think of Carlos and Rafael.”

“If you love them, you’ll stay put.” Gina’s creditable attempt at confidence is marred only by the unsteadiness of her voice. “Someone will come to rescue us eventually. By now my kids have realized that Sonny and I are missing. They’ll call someone to find us as soon as the roads are passable again.” She reaches for Isabel’s arm and clings to it with surprising desperation. “Sonny and I are important people. The authorities will come for us right away.”

Isabel glances from Gina to Michelle, then lifts her gaze to the opening that leads to freedom. “I am going up.”

When Gina’s lower lip quivers, her fear becomes visible—brittle in her cheekbones and haunting in her eyes. Michelle stares at the woman across the car and realizes that Parker’s wife is terrified of being left alone. She is hard, but she is not strong. Not without her husband.

“Gina—” Michelle softens her voice “—would you please reconsider?”

Despite her fear, Gina has apparently withdrawn into a place no one can reach. “I’m not moving,” she says, crossing her arms. “I’m staying here…where I know I’ll be safe.”

Michelle swallows hard. “Will you at least help us out?”

The redhead hesitates only a moment, then she pushes herself up from the floor. “Let it be noted,” she says, woodenly stepping to Isabel’s side, “that I predicted you would kill yourselves within the hour.”

Eddie opens his eyes. He’s not dead…so he must not have outlived his expiration date.

“Why not?” he asks the darkness. “Why not take me now? This storm is probably going to usher a lot of people into eternity, so why not add me to the guest list? You haven’t left me with a lot of other options.”

He listens, but hears only the sound of the bawling wind and the flutter of debris outside the shaft.

So…the Almighty is going to hold his tongue today. This is going to be one of those work-it-out ventures. One of those experiences his grandfather would have called
soul-strengthening.

Eddie groans and brings his hand to his forehead. At this moment, his soul needs strengthening about as much as a pig needs a manicure. What he needs is a way out and the strength to rescue the women whose quandary brought him to this place.

Because gray light is coming through the open doors at the twenty-eighth floor, his eyes adjust to the gloom. The thin light outlines the women’s car first, then touches the back wall before creeping almost imperceptibly across the hoistway. There it blends with the murk of the yawning shaft overhead and submits to the greater darkness of the depths.

But it is enough. Eddie draws a deep breath and stares at the rail at the side of the car. The vertical beam, which runs from the basement to the building’s highest floor, is one of a pair designed to steady the elevator cab. With its twin, located on the opposite side of the car, the rail prevents any horizontal movement. A divider beam near every landing extends from the front wall to the back, anchoring the rails.

He’s never climbed up a rail before, but he’s heard stories of other elevator mechanics who were forced to scale them in order to escape a hoistway. In none of those daring tales, however, were any of the heroes suffering from cracked ribs and a broken leg.

Eddie wipes the dust and moisture from his palms, then grips the vertical steel beam at his side. He can’t remember the last time he tried to do pull-ups, but he figures he can do at least thirty before his arms give out. If necessary, he can pause to catch his breath on the horizontal divider beams positioned about every ten feet throughout the shaft.

If he can climb thirty feet, he can reach the narrow divider beam at the twenty-fifth floor. From there he can cross the steel rail and reach the hoistway sill, where he can stand on tiptoe and cling to the wall while he unlocks the doors.

Theoretically, it’s a credible plan. Any Olympic gymnast could manage it.

Eddie tugs on the beam, then struggles to get his good leg under his weight. He manages to place his left foot squarely on the cab, but when he strains to pull himself up, the broken bone of his right leg scrapes across the bent edge of the crosshead at the center of the car.