Riley Thorn and the Corpse in the Closet by Lucy Score
40
12:05 p.m., Tuesday, August 18
Nick hated tight places. But he didn’t have much of a choice. He’d shimmied his ass into the air duct that Mrs. Penny had crawled into from the side of the building. He was a man on a mission.
“Don’t freak out, Santiago. So the walls are a little close, and you couldn’t roll over if your life depended on it. So there isn’t any fucking air left in this goddamn tomb. It’s no big deal.” His pep talk wasn’t working. The only thing that kept him moving forward was thinking about Riley somewhere inside, scared out of her wits, waiting for him to save her.
“I’m coming, Thorn. Hang in there,” he muttered.
He elbow-crawled his way to the first T and, after a beat, crawled into the dark on the right.
His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he nearly dislocated a shoulder digging it out.
“What?”
“Santiago, where the fuck are you?” Weber snarled in his ear.
“I’m a little busy right now,” Nick grunted. He was sweating like a greased-up WWE star.
“If you’re where I think you are, I’m going to add another body to the count, and I won’t even mind the paperwork,” Weber said.
“This is your fault. If you would have let me play delivery guy, I wouldn’t have had to stuff my ass into this duct,” Nick reminded him.
“Get your ass out here now.”
“Climb in here and make me.” Nick hung up and started to crawl again but paused when he heard something up ahead.
It sounded like a fart.
Smelled like one too.
“Mrs. Penny?” he called.
“Pipe down!” an elderly voice hissed.
Nick used his nose to turn on the flashlight on his phone and shined it in the direction of the voice.
A pair of orthopedic shoes clogged up the duct ten feet in front of him.
“Are you stuck?”
“No, I’m not stuck, dingus! I’m listening to our friendly neighborhood murderer’s live broadcast and waiting for my moment.”
“Your moment to what?”
“To jump down onto the news desk, kick him in the face, and then shoot him with my Beretta.”
Maybe a highly trained nineteen-year-old parkour athlete with soft bones could execute a plan like that, but not an octogenarian with a cane. He was trapped in an air duct with a delusional woman with gas and a weapon. This was not the day he’d set out to have.
“How exactly are you going to jump down?”
“Haven’t figured that part out yet. I’m kinda wedged in here around the hips.”
He felt a little lightheaded. “So you’re stuck?”
“It’s not my fault the ducting got smaller.”
She was stuck in an air duct with nowhere to go. The very thought of it had Nick scrambling back a foot before he remembered he had a job to do. Little black dots floated before his eyes. If he passed out, Mrs. Penny would definitely die in here.
“I don’t know about you, Penny. But I don’t want to die like a hamster in a habitat trail.”
“Ten-four,” she acknowledged. “So what’s your plan?”
His plan?He hadn’t thought much beyond getting into the building.
Good thing he was Nick fucking Santiago and Nick fucking Santiago was fast on his feet and his belly.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to shimmy up behind you and grab you by the ankles.”
“Keep talking.”
“I’ll pull you backwards, and then we’ll back out of the tomb and go through the first air return we find.”
“Let’s find the snack room. I’m hungry, and they’re talking about food down there.”
“My girlfriend is being held hostage by a rampaging murderer, and you want a snack,” he repeated.
“I shoot better when I’m not hungry.”
The duct gave a creak beneath him. The duct supports probably weren’t designed to hold the weight of two adults.
“You must always be hungry,” he grumbled, shimmying closer to the orthopedic shoes in front of him.
“Real funny, boss. Hey, wanna hear something even funnier?”
“Sure. Why not,” he said, grabbing her by the ankles and wondering how he was going to get the leverage to pull her backwards if he was stretched out flat like a tapeworm.
“Pull my ankles,” she said.
Nick gave them a hard tug, and Mrs. Penny let out a loud fart. He smacked his head off the top of the duct. “Ow!”
“Hehe,” Mrs. Penny chuckled. “Pull my ankle. Get it?”
“Hilarious. God, you smell like Burt.”
“We eat a lot of the same things. Am I unstuck yet?”
“Does it feel like you’re unstuck?” He pulled his shirt over his nose for protection and reached for her feet again.
Nick’s phone vibrated, and he let go of her ankles. “What?”
“Get the fuck out of there now,” Weber enunciated in his scary cop voice.
The duct creaked ominously.
“Listen, I’m doing my best not to get teargassed in an air duct while rescuing a civilian.”
“There’s a fucking bomb in the studio. The captain just had us push the barricades back another block. You need to find a way out. Now.”
“I’m not leaving without Riley.”
“I had a feeling you’d say that,” Weber said, sounding resigned.
“Then why waste the call?”
“We’ve got someone on the inside. We sent someone in to deliver the food.”
“Who?”
“Gabe.”
“You sent the biggest pacifist in the Western Hemisphere into a hostage situation?”
“We had no one else. This Neudorfer kid said no cops. Somehow he got access to the PD’s human resources database. Gabe was the only other option.”
“What’s he going to do? Sit on Neudorfer?”
“We put a wire on him and hid a gun in a carton of Chinese food.”
“Are you trying to get him killed?”
“Look, just get your ass into that studio and get everyone out before that countdown clock starts running.”
“Fuck.” Nick disconnected the call and banged his forehead off the duct a few times.
“Keep it down back there,” Mrs. Penny grumbled. “I’m trying to eavesdrop.”
A gunshot rang out beneath them.
He froze, mid-head bang.
“Well, that wasn’t good,” Mrs. Penny announced.
