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“Take him to the executive suite,” Brian snaps. “I need to think so we don’t miss anything.”
I’m about to snap back, but when I see his face I realize he’s lost inside his own head, probably in memories of his own childhood trauma. I quickly nod and take the boy out into the hallway. I try to block his view, but there’s so much blood and it’s impossible to maneuver over and around bodies without him seeing things.
Anyway, he’s already seen them.
He cries out when he trips over an arm, and then he’s sobbing again.
I get him into the executive suite and we sit on a black leather couch facing the window. I try to distract him again with fireworks, but the boy has lost interest in the one thing he was so excited to see.
He was going to work with his daddy, going to see big loud lights in the sky. And now this. He gets up, pacing restlessly back and forth. Finally he stops and stares out the window.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” he says, not bothering to look at me. The boy suddenly looks far older than the five or six he surely is. Of course he knows what dead is. Maybe he didn’t fully understand yet that everyone was dead, maybe he didn’twantto understand, but how would he have been shielded from such knowledge, surrounded by violence at such a young age?
“Yes,” I say. “But you can’t say that. When I take you outside, you can’t say that. Promise me.”
He looks at me, his lip quivering. He’s trying to be brave and stop crying. He’s only five, and already he thinks it’s not okay for him to cry. His dad just died, for fuck’s sake. I think I’m crying more than he is now.
“Okay,” he whispers.
I turn and watch out the door for the cleaners. It feels like a lifetime passes before the elevator doors finally open. Ten large men all wearing black T-shirts, pants, and work boots. Several covered in black tattoos. They bring in buckets and mops and cleaning supplies, and rolls and rolls of plastic wrap and duct tape.
They peer with interest at me and the boy, but I hear Brian say “They’re with me.” And they quickly get to work.
Half the men go back downstairs to handle thirteen and the lobby. Brian goes with them. I shut and lock the executive suite, not trusting myself and the boy alone with these men.
The clean-up is faster than the time waiting for them to get here. They’re efficient and have coordinated this down to a science. Suddenly the boy rushes past me and out the door into the lobby, I follow to try to stop him, but it’s too late.
Plastic wrapped bodies are being carried to the waiting elevator. The boy watches each one as it passes, and I know he wonders which of these plastic mummies is his dad. He can’t even say a proper goodbye.
When they’ve gone, Brian returns, wearing his own set of clean gloves. He goes into the executive suite and comes back out a few minutes later, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
I give him a questioning look and he just raises his wrist to reveal the new watch stacked on top of the one he was already wearing. “Special delivery.”
“You were going to let that just blow up?”
He shrugs. “I’m still expensing it to the client.”
We go down to the thirteenth floor together with the kid. Brian picks up the bomb, and checks for any other evidence the cleaners might have missed. The bodies of the guards are gone and the bullet holes have been filled—like it never happened. But apparently bomb removal isn’t a part of their job. Either that, or Brian wanted to keep that bit of evidence himself.
When we get inside the elevator, he wipes off each button.
“What about the stair railing? I think I touched it,” I say.
Brian shakes his head. “You and hundreds of other people. Nobody ever cleans those, so no one’s fingerprints will stand out. Besides, no one knows what happened here tonight.”
That’s so gross, that nobody ever cleans the railing in the emergency stairwell. I try not to dwell on that thought.
Brian looks down at the boy, suddenly remembering he’s here. And this kid has instincts only living with criminals can create.
“I-I won’t tell anyone,” he whispers.
Brian nods and looks awkwardly away from the kid.
When we get down to the main floor lobby, Brian says, “Get him to someone who can help him and then meet me at the car.”
I usher the boy outside into the warm muggy night. All of this has happened and the parade is still going on. It’s so surreal. I hold the boy’s hand as we walk toward the parade, the loud fireworks still popping and exploding above us as the atmosphere shifts from one of blood and death and loss to a summer carnival energy.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
