Chapter 2 - The Service Shaft
The service shaft between the forty-seventh and thirty-ninth floors was three feet wide, built of bare cinder block and crisscrossed by thick gray electrical conduits that hummed with forty-eight hundred volts of power. The air was dry, hot, and smelled of ozone, burnt oil, and thirty years of dust.
Eliti had locked the heavy iron hatch behind them using the deadbolt from the inside, but she knew it was only a matter of time. Dardan knew the building layout better than anyone; he had supervised the installation of the private security floor when Sodor bought the penthouse four years ago.
Sodor lay against the concrete wall on the narrow metal landing, his head propped against a bundle of insulated fiber-optic cables. His breathing was worse now—a loud, dry whistle that echoed down the dark shaft like a dying turbine.
"Left pocket," he muttered. His eyes were half-closed, the whites yellowed by liver strain and dehydration. "The small phone. No SIM card."
Eliti reached into the pocket of the cashmere coat. She pulled out an old, heavy black flip-phone with a scratched casing.
"Who do I call?"
"Nobody," he said. "Press three... hold it."
She pressed the rubber button. The screen illuminated with a dull green light, displaying a three-digit sequence before switching to a signal locator that began pulsing red.
"That... turns off... the tracking on the Lincoln," Sodor whispered. "In the basement. Bay forty-two. Behind the storage lockers."
"Dritton has men in the garage," Eliti said, leaning close so she didn't have to raise her voice above the hum of the transformer boxes. "I saw two of them when I came in at five this morning. They were sitting in the silver Audi near the exit ramp."
"They... watch the elevator," Sodor’s hand closed around her knee, his fingers digging into the cloth with a sudden, desperate strength born of pure fever. "They don't... watch... the trash compactor bay. The door opens... to the alley behind the dry cleaner."
"Can you walk?"
Sodor looked up at her through the dark. For the first time, he really looked at her—not as a moving shadow that replaced the towels and emptied the brass ash buckets, but as a person with a face, a voice, and an existence independent of his comfort.
"I have... two hundred thousand dollars... in the spare tire bay," he said, his voice dropping so low she had to press her ear almost against his mouth to hear him. "Take it. Take the car. Drive to Indiana. Get on a bus."
"And leave you here?"
"I am... already dead, girl," Sodor rasped, a wet cough tearing through his chest that made him double over against his knees. "Dritton has... the paper. The city will... accept him by Monday. In our life... when the leader falls... the house is burned so the neighbors... don't catch the rot."
"My name is not 'girl,'" she said coldly.
Sodor stopped coughing. He looked at her, his dark eyes hollow, the skin around his cheekbones gray and tight as wet leather.
"Eliti," she said. "My name is Eliti Morceli. My mother was the daughter of a judge in Meknes. My father was a clerk who died in a tannery fire because the owner locked the doors from the outside to save five hundred dirhams of leather."
She reached down, took his arm, and draped it over her neck.
"I do not like people who lock doors," she said. "Stand up."
The descent down the twenty-four feet of rusty iron ladder was a nightmare of agonizing slowness. Sodor’s body was useless; his legs buckled on every third rung, his full six-foot-two frame hanging almost entirely from Eliti’s left shoulder while her small fingers dug into the oily iron rungs until her nails bled.
By the time they reached the thirty-ninth floor service landing, her white blouse was torn at the collar, soaked with Sodor’s fever-sweat and grease from the cables. Her left ankle had twisted twice on the narrow steel grating, but she didn't drop him.
Through the heavy steel door of the mechanical room, they could hear the thrum of the building's central boiler system—a deep, low roar that drowned out the sound of their breathing.
Eliti set Sodor down against a steel junction box and peeked through the wire-reinforced glass window of the door.
The thirty-ninth floor was a utility level, filled with water tanks, air handlers, and long rows of gray breaker panels. It was usually empty, but tonight a light was burning near the primary water pump.
A man was sitting on a plastic crate near the door, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a dark blue track jacket with the logo of a local towing company on the chest. On his lap rested a short-barreled pump-action shotgun.
It was Besnik—Dardan’s nephew, a twenty-one-year-old boy from the West Side who had been given a territory on Grand Avenue three months ago after he broke the knees of an independent bookmaker in Humboldt Park.
Eliti pulled back from the glass. She looked at Sodor.
He was sitting with his back against the breaker box, his head tilted back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling pipes. He was slipping toward unconsciousness; his skin had taken on a mottled, bluish tinge around the nostrils.
"Besnik," she whispered.
Sodor’s eyes flickered. "The boy?"
"He has a gun."
"In the pocket..." Sodor reached into his trousers with a slow, agonizing effort that made his whole body shake. He pulled out a small, flat object wrapped in a silk handkerchief. It was a silver pocket knife with a horn handle—the old Albanian dhasë, no longer than a woman’s finger, sharpened until the spine was thin as paper.
"He is... right-handed," Sodor whispered, the effort of speaking bringing a line of thin pink froth to his lips. "He always... stands with his left hip... against the rail. He has... no ears for... what comes behind him."
Eliti took the knife. The horn handle was warm from his body.
"Stay here," she said.
"Eliti..."
She stopped, her hand on the heavy brass lever of the service hatch.
May you like
"If you... drop the blade," Sodor muttered, his voice barely audible above the roar of the water pumps, "do not... look back. Run."
She didn't answer. She opened the door three inches, slipped through the dark gap, and vanished into the shadows between the giant blue water tanks like water disappearing into sand.
