Ch. 46 – She Just Bought That Toy

The door to Charlene’s apartment was right there. Derrick had brought a pair of gloves in case he needed to manipulate the lock, but he never expected he’d be entering the wrong passcode on purpose.

What sort of pattern was the right choice here? Was there one that would be particularly alarming to the keypads security?

Any little kid could walk up to it and punch random numbers. Maybe punching in the wrong digits, but in an intelligent order to brute force the PIN, was the better way to go. And then, if Derrick happened to find the right PIN by accident? Well, he could just slip in and out of the room, or, if that seemed too risky, he could tell Xavier and walk away.

Derrick slipped on his gloves and started pushing the buttons. Some of the buttons were half-depressed already, and didn’t register as an asterisk on the display unless he really jammed them in.

Beep. The keypad’s LED turned red after he had entered eight digits. So eight was the maximum, but not necessarily the correct amount of digits. He kept entering in combinations in an order that would cover every permutation of eight digits.

00000000

10000000

20000000

30000000

Beep. Beep. Beep. The keypad kept sending out beeps with every eight digits that Derrick entered, until finally the LED stayed red.

“Alright, I’m done. I think it’s alarming now,” Derrick whispered to Maxine. “Do you see anything different on the network?”

“Nope nope nope.”

“Well then, we can only hope.” Derrick slowed his breathing down. There were footsteps from the floor above, but they didn’t sound particularly rushed. Otherwise, there was only the whir of the air conditioning. He inched away from Charlene’s apartment door, his steps just a faint whisper on the carpet.

It was time to hide and watch. Bettie wasn’t expecting him to still be inside the building due to his excuse about stomach pain. That meant she wouldn’t go looking for him after she finished giving Xavier the tour, but it also meant he couldn’t come across her again without attracting suspicion.

There was another thing: she would probably escort Xavier out of the building. If Xavier was outside, Derrick would have to pick up the tablet all by himself, or else figure out another way to get Xavier inside the building again. If Maxine could loop the camera’s video feed, Derrick could sneak down to the first floor undetected and let Xavier back in through the front door.

But first, he had to hide and wait for either Maxine to trick the passcode out of Charlene, or for Charlene herself to come by the apartment.

Derrick faced down towards his phone, peeking upwards every few paces, and walked down the hall with a languid pace, as if he were distracted by some social media post. The hallway in the fourth floor was just as empty as the fifth floor. There was another little alcove with an ice machine where Derrick could sit facing the wall and hide his face inconspicuously, but the halls were lacking any other places to hide. Depending on how often Charlene checked her phone, through which she’d get the security notification, he might be stuck in the apartment for a while.

Where could he hide? In the stairwell? If there was any foot traffic he would be noticed quickly. He could try hiding in plain sight in the hallways, but that had the same issue, and there were also security cameras. Maxine might be able to neutralize some of them by looping old footage, but they weren’t necessarily all using the city’s open Wi-Fi network.

“Are there cameras on every floor?” Derrick asked.

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Shit.” This hallway was a bad place to figure things out.

“Keep moving, champ. There’s a junction in front of you that’ll lead to another hallway.”

“Okay.” Derrick stopped short of the corner, illuminated by bright daylight that shone down from the other hallway. “Camera there?”

“Already got it for you.”

Derrick peeked around the corner. The bright daylight was coming from a large window in the middle of the hall. The window was located in a gap between apartment rooms, and was large enough for a fully grown man to step through comfortably.

Stepping quietly, Derrick made his way up to the window, and a view of New Shore City skyline emerged. The skyline was obscured by the local buildings, since this was only the fourth floor, but some of it peeked out, muddied by the volume of hazy air that hung over the city.

The indent between the apartment rooms was deep enough to hide him from an observer on either end of the hall, but if someone walked by—

Wait. There was a fire escape attached to the window.

The air close to the window chilled his cheek as Derrick looked down through it, holding his breath and waiting for the fog he had breathed onto it to dissipate.

The relatively untarnished fire escape ran down all four floors from the window. He and Xavier had passed by it on their loop around the building, but he hadn’t thought it’d be connected to a window that wasn’t in someone’s apartment . . .

But when New Shore City had been rebuilding in a rush, it was possible that rooms had gotten moved around, and old fire escapes had been left where they were. In fact, it probably wasn’t even considered a fire escape anymore.

Multiple footsteps rushed in a jumble past the entrance of the hallway, and Derrick crouched down, flattening himself deep into the alcove. A door clacked open, and the grinding wheels of a cart bearing something heavy moved across the carpet.

“Don’t spill any like last time if you don’t want to be in deep shit like last time.” a nasally voice growled out, enunciating every word, and ending with a huff. He got a few grunts in return.

The chemical smell from before wafted over. ‘They did a lot of cleaning,’ Bettie had said. But with these men carting around something that smelled so strongly of chemicals, and the supposed importance of the payload, it had become very clear. The stash of Afterburner that Xavier found wasn’t the whole story. There was a drug lab in this apartment building.

They had known the apartment building was full of Dixies, but the presence of a drug lab made things dangerous. Someone who seemed out of place and was loitering around the meth lab could definitely be a cop, especially since they were in New Shore City proper, where—unlike Chinatown—the cops still roamed.

In fact, the Dixies were being bold: carting meth up and down the halls in broad daylight.

It was time to make himself scarce.

Holding his breath, and trying his hardest not to grunt, Derrick eased the window open a crack, and then the rest of the way open.

“What are you up to?” Maxine asked, excitement creeping up in her voice.

“Hiding.”

Derrick swung his legs over one at a time, and pulled the window down again. The fire escape’s steel gratings rattled as Derrick sat down and leaned against the railing. The fire escape was high enough that there weren’t any cameras on other buildings pointed up at it, and there was a solid steel panel attached to the railing at the escape’s entrance. It was a perfect hiding place.

“Oh . . . you’re not falling.”

“What?” Derrick asked. “Why in the world would I be falling?”

“When I saw your signal heading out the window, I thought you were going to make an escape by jumping out the window! Jeez I was soooo let down.”

“No thanks. I’ve seen a jumper before. It wasn’t pretty.”

“Wait so where are you right now?”

Derrick cupped his hand against the device, to lessen the background noise from the wind. “I’m on a fire escape, believe it or not. ”

“Ohhh, that makes sense.”

“Were you able to reach Charlene?”

“I’ve called her like five times and she hasn’t picked up. I’ll try again in a few minutes, but I wouldn’t count it. There’s a chance that she won’t come by the apartment, but she might also just not be picking up calls from random numbers.”

“Shit. I’m wondering if I should just give up and run,” Derrick said, shivering as a gust blew through the railing.

“What, are you getting cold feet already? It’s not even close to the skinny boy’s deadline yet!”

“Yeah, but get this: we found a stash of Afterburner in the maintenance closet. And they were moving a whole cartload of some sort of drug: maybe more Afterburner, or maybe a precursor, or something else entirely. It smelled so strong you couldn’t mistake it though. This apartment is bad news.”

“So why’re you just sitting there? Aren’t you going to move your ass?”

“Well, the thing is, Xavier offered me another eight thousand dollars if I could get the tablet.”

“Damn, okay boy! You just gonna wait here until Charlene comes around, right?”

“Yea, that’s the plan. I can actually run down the escape if they come after me, so this is a somewhat safe option.” Derrick said. “Wait, I just thought of something.”

“What’s that?”

“You looped the surveillance camera footage starting from when I entered the fourth floor, right? That means they have footage of me entering the building, but not leaving the building.”

“Psh, I’ve got you covered. I’ve already ripped the footage of you walking around the building and I can slice and render it into the lobby’s camera feed at any time.”

Maxine might be a daredevil, but she was good at her job. “Great, that’s perfect.”

A gust of wind whipped through railing again, rattling it even further. The escape seemed stable, but then again, the asphalt below also seemed pretty hard.

The clattering of a keyboard came through the voice comms. “Hey, D, I’m going to grab a snack.”

“Wait, you’re just leaving me here?”

“Yeah, it won’t be long. A girl’s gotta eat!” Keys jangled on Maxine’s end of the call. Where was she even going to get food? She lived in an abandoned building in the middle of the flooded city!

“How am I going to know if Charlene came back? I don’t want to be climbing in and out of that window every fifteen minutes,” Derrick asked.

“I’ll tell you when I get back!” Maxine said, her voice getting fainter. “Later, sweetie.”

#

It was cold. Not that it wouldn’t have been cold if Derrick had just been walking around the city, but up on the fourth floor, with the wind blowing, and the chilled metal of the gratings pressing into his clothing, the cold penetrated to his core.

Derrick had tried curling up into a ball, which helped a bit, but it had already been forty minutes since he started waiting on the fire escape.

It was close to seven. They were nearing the deadline of eight o’ clock that they had all agreed they’d need to get Xavier’s device by eight, if they wanted to extract the data on it by nine.

When would Charlene get the message? Was she going to come back?

And how much of the eight thousand dollars would he end up making if he ended up not getting the tablet before eight? He could justify keeping at least part of the money for assuming the risk, like they had agreed on, but who knew what Xavier might try to pull? He hadn’t even given Derrick the other five thousand dollars from their original deal yet. And Xavier might try to use even that part of the payment as collateral in order to dictate the terms of the second payment. Shit. I wish I had gotten that five thousand dollars first. If Xavier’s house was close enough, they might’ve had time to head there so Derrick could pick the five thousand dollars up first, and then stash it somewhere safe, before going back to the apartment to try and get the tablet . . . .

Maxine had been on and off the voice comms. She had said she would contact Derrick if she heard back from Charlene, but had undoubtedly found something else to distract herself with in the meantime. She was always looking for the new, the challenging, the exciting; Derrick’s jobs just sometimes intersected with her thrill-seeking.

The device beeped. Derrick poked at it with his slow, chilled fingers, and heard Maxine’s voice on the line. “Your ass is probably frozen, so you’ll be happy to hear this. I’ve got her on the line. Now watch and learn!”

There were two beeps, and then a woman’s ragged breathing entered the call. “HELLO? Is this SECURITY?” she cried out. The rattle and wind of a subway train rolling through the background came through the speaker.

“Yes, this is the security for your apartment,” said a deep, male voice. It sounded natural, convincing, as if it really was coming from a tired security guard with stubble running down his double-chin. “Is this Charlene?”

“YEA this is CHARLENE. Now WHAT is going on with my APARTMENT? I got a notification on my phone that said someone tried to break IN!”

“Yes, ma’am, we’ve been trying to reach you for a while about this.” Maxine said again, through her voice-changer. “We also believe someone tried breaking into your apartment, since something triggered the alarm on your lock. We saw a suspicious person on our security footage, walking around our building around that time. And when we came to your room to check, your door looked like it had been tampered with. But, the lock was activated, so we couldn’t go inside your room to investigate. Are you away from home right now, ma’am?”

“YEAH. I’m out of the house, and I got this notification that scared THE BEJESUS out of me!”

“Can you give us the pass code to your apartment door?”

“The pass code? Like my PIN thingy?”

“Right, exactly. The number you use to unlock your door. That way we can see if someone broke into your apartment while the crime is fresh. Other residents have been complaining recently about things going missing in their apartments, so this could really help the ongoing investigation.”

“WHY do you think you have the RIGHT to look in MY apartment?!”

“Well ma’am, we’re asking your permission. The sooner we can check out the crime scene, the sooner we can see if they stole something, and work on getting it back. The suspect might still be in the building, or they might even be another resident. Or they might have seen something expensive, and planned to come back to get it later.”

“AhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Charlene’s shrill scream rose in pitch until the earpiece’s speakers clipped it off—a standard safety feature that Maxine had shown some foresight to include. “I just BOUGHT that TOY, DAMMIT. But I don’t want any of YOU coming in MY room! What if one of YOU was the THIEF?”

“Don’t panic yet. Maybe one of the kids living near you triggered the alarm on your door for fun. If nothing seems wrong in your apartment, it could have been a false alarm. Anyways ma’am, you can either give us the passcode now, or come here yourself and let one of us in. If someone from security isn’t there, you can go ahead and check the room yourself, and call us back if everything seems fine. If some in the room seems strange, leave the room and don’t disturb the possible crime scene.”

“FINE! I’m coming back now. DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING.”

There were two beeps again, and Maxine’s normal voice returned.

“You heard that all, right Derrick? She’s incoming. Get ready to move in once she leaves. I mean, if you want to make the deadline, that is. But take your time; I’m sure our little horny cross-dresser could afford to be half an hour late to his one-night stand.”

“Ugh, finally,” Derrick grumbled. “Okay, thanks for the heads up. I’ll be careful, but we’re still targeting eight, as long as it’s safe to do so. He did pay me thousands of dollars for the job.” Even as Derrick rolled off his side and onto his feet, the phantom pressure of the gratings followed. He would be sore as hell tomorrow.

Derrick sidled up against the bottom edge of the window. There was bird poop in the corner of the glass, but it was otherwise clean enough to see clearly through. The hallway was empty, at least as far as Derrick could see from either side of the window, and it was still, too—it didn’t vibrate as Derrick placed his ear against it.

“Okay, I’m in position. Let me know when I should enter the building.”

“Roger, mister handsome secret agent.”

“Stop teasing me.”

For the next half an hour, the only thing he could hear in his earpiece was the sound of Maxine’s gentle breathing, and his own.

“Now!”