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To unfurl my innards like a flag for everyone to read, a red warning shout, with 1088 Dupont as its theme and title.
* * *
And then it was Thursday, the night my site supervisor finally turned up—a man I knew, as they say, of old.
“Hooper,” he said. “Heard this was where they put ya.”
“Sir.”
His name was Czolgoscz (first initial L., so you just knew we were fated to be friends), and unlike me—unlike most security guards, to be frank—he considered himself “career,” which apparently required growing a brush-cut little pseudo-cop moustache, with a gut to match. To normal people, this job was a step on the way to something better. But since Czolgoscz had no better thing to go to, he spent his time trying to make everyone as clinically depressed and constantly paranoid about their lack of employment options as he was.
He gestured for me to let him in, which I did. As usual, his first stop was my D.O.R.: A quick flip-through later, he went rooting for the site standing orders, eager to compare and contrast.
“No patrol since 0200,” he noted. I nodded. Always so impressive to find a site supervisor who can count.
“I was just going,” I said.
Czolgoscz smirked. “Yeah, well, you better put on your parka.”
I nodded again. He kept flipping.
“You cover the whole site when you patrol?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Even upstairs?”
“Yes.”
“Everywhere upstairs?”
He fixed me with what he’d probably call his “got ’em on the grill” look—a Dennis Franz-like glare absolutely made for admiring in bedroom mirrors. I wondered whether he was seriously still nursing a grudge from that time he’d tried to get me fired for supposedly deliberately leaving a janitor stuck in a George Brown campus staff elevator, and merely succeeded in having me moved to another site. (Though not this one.) I also wondered, idly, whether anyone had ever thought to put Sonny Rehan through this kind of bullshit.
“There’s . . . holes in the floors upstairs,” I said. “As you may have noticed from my previous reports.”
He wasn’t about to suggest I’d lied in the D.O.R.—but then, I wasn’t exactly about to volunteer that information either. So instead, he got up, shrugged his own parka back on, and opened the door again. Saying: “Think I’ll tag along tonight. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t suppose you have a flashlight,” I replied, without much hope.
He chuckled, and gave me an abortive kind of slap in the general direction of my back—nothing he could find himself facing possible harassment charges for, if I happened to take it the “wrong way.”
“C’mon, Hooper,” he said. “We’re both old enough to vote, right? Think we can find our way around a hole or two.”
It was raining when we left the portable—sleety, half-frozen rain that seemed to fall in gushes rather than drops, street lamps mere hazy smudges of light through the gathering fog, and with no neon cross to see by, just the phosphorescent glimmer of the water-heavy air itself. We clumped along like top-heavy navy-blue astronauts, wreathed in the milky nimbus of our own breath.
Czolgoscz and I went around first one side of the building, then another. We checked behind the parked trucks. Nothing.
We went around the piles of earth and the stacks of gravel-bags, through the main body of the first floor, picking our way between the open dirt trenches and an intermittent sprinkling of dismayingly sharp-looking beds of metal rods set in concrete.
Again, nothing.
And now we were at the bottom of the stairs leading to the second and third floor, right beneath the largest of the holes, on the threshold of a part of 1088 Dupont that I had never seen before.
Not finding any of 1088’s usual residents around so far hadn’t really made me feel any better about being in the building after my chosen cut-off point, even with Czolgoscz’s big, beer-swilling ass at my side. Inside my pockets, I felt my hands curl in on themselves, as though tunneling for invisible weapons.
Czolgoscz put his boot on the last step. He looked at me. I looked back at him.
Then we went upstairs, together.
