If they wanted to find somewhere nice together, they were going to need money.
Eleven thirty. Six and a half hours to go.
Frigging hell!
If he’d been asked to draw a picture of what he’d expected from private security work, Cal Fenton would have drawn it big. There’d have been manual combat training; utility belts, Kevlar vests, Tasers. And driving, too: rubber-shredding take-offs and sharp cornering. He’d have had one of those earpieces with a hands-free mic attached, a necessity in the adrenalin-rich world of the security consultant, where you never knew what the next second might bring. That was what Cal Fenton had had in mind. Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence.
Instead, he had a uniform that was too small, because the last guy in the job had been a midget, plus a rubber torch with a fading battery. And instead of riding shotgun in an armoured limo, he had a nightly trudge up and down half a dozen corridors, calling in every hour on the hour; less to reassure management that the facility was still standing than to prove he was awake and earning his pay. Which was so slightly above minimum wage that if you split the difference, you’d have change from a quid. A job was a job, his mum never left off saying, but flush with the wisdom of nineteen years on the planet, Cal Fenton had found the flaw in this argument: sometimes a job was a pain in the arse. Especially when it was eleven thirty-one, and there were six hours twenty-nine minutes to go before you were out the door.
Speaking of which …
Cal was on ground-level, pacing the facility’s east-side corridor, and the door at its far end was open. Not hanging wide, but not firmly closed … Either someone had opened it since Cal’s last circuit, or Cal hadn’t closed it after his cigarette.
Cal and only Cal, because night shift was a one-man job.
Reaching the door, he pushed it gently. It opened with a creak. Outside was an empty car park bordered by a mesh fence, beyond which a pot-holed road disappeared into the shadow of the West-way. The building opposite used to be a pub, and maybe hoped to be a pub again one day, but for the time being was making do with being an eyesore. Posters for local DJs peeled from its boarded-up windows. After watching for a moment, Cal pulled the door shut. He stood in silence, aware of his heartbeat. But there’d been nobody outside, and there was nobody inside either, himself excepted. Eleven thirty-four. He stepped away from the door and checked the office.
Office. Facility. You could get away with words like that, if you weren’t exposed to the reality.
Because the office was a glorified broom cupboard, and “facility” an up-itself name for a warehouse: windowless brick on ground level, then wood for the second storey, like they’d run out of bricks halfway. It was newer than whatever had stood in the same place previously, but after that, you ran out of compliments. Like the once and future pub across the road, the whole place was basically counting out time until the area hit an upward swing, but that figured. DataLok was a cut-price operation, and what you got was less than what you saw. Especially if what you’d been looking at was the company catalogue.
Cal swung the torch in big, forgiving loops. There was nobody in the office. Least of all a guard dog, which a sign on the main gate warned patrolled the premises 24/7, but the sign came in at $4.99, which was a lot less than a 24-hour guard-dog presence cost.
And then he heard something along the north corridor. A scuffing noise, as if a heel had kicked against the tiles.
Cal’s heart phoned in loud and clear. Lub
Twenty-four minutes until his check-in call. Which he could make early, of course, on account of being totally spooked.
And here’s how
“I think I heard a noise.”
“You think you heard a noise.”
“Yeah, along the corridor. Like there might be someone there. But I haven’t looked to see. Oh, and the door was open, but I might have left it open earlier when I nipped out for a smoke. Do you wanna send reinforcements?”
(With combat training, utility belts and Kevlar vests.)
But even a pain-in-the-arse job was better than none, and Cal really didn’t want to lose out on paid employment because a squirrel had wandered in. He weighed his torch in the palm of his hand. It felt solid enough, baton-like, and suitably reassured, he stepped out of the office and into the north corridor, at the end of which was the staircase.
