Dreams of the Golden Age (25 page)

Keeping to shadows, they made their way to Horizon Tower, the fifty-story skyscraper housing the law firm. The building was fifteen or so years old, and not one of West Corps’ projects, so Anna didn’t know as much about it as she would have if her mother was keeping tabs on it. The fake-bronze framing around the mirrored glass lining the exterior was already looking dated, part of a style that was hip and cutting edge at one time but had been quickly abandoned for more classic designs. Eliot was right, though—the upper floors were tiered, offering him lots of good landing and launch points. She sighed. Looked like she’d be spending another night hanging out in doorways and stairwells.

The sound of a car engine traveled up the street, and Anna grabbed Eliot’s sleeve and pulled him flat against the concrete wall around the building’s base. A white police sedan slid up the street and kept going. Didn’t see them, and probably wouldn’t see Eliot’s car under the cover.

Eliot looked up, studying the façade. No lights showed through any of the windows, and from the back they couldn’t see if anyone was keeping watch on the lobby. West Plaza had a guard at the front desk twenty-four hours a day. “Can you tell if any security guards are wandering around?” he asked.

“No. I can only find specific people, not people in general.”

“Oh. Too bad.”

Whatever.

He walked to the end of the alley, craned his neck back, and pointed. “That one. That ledge will get us to the right floor. If we can’t get in without triggering an alarm, we can leave fast enough.” And the car was a block away, so they’d have time to get away before anyone found it.

“You have a phone? Maybe I can call you and sound some kind of alarm if I see something out here.”

“Don’t you want to come?”

“How am I supposed to get inside?”

He looked at her, looked at the roof ledge, and back at her. “I’ll take you.”

“You can do that?”

“As long as you won’t get scared.”

Her heart flipped over a couple of times. “I won’t.”

“Then hold on tight.”

His arm wrapped around her middle, and he pulled her close, so their bodies lined up right next to each other and she couldn’t help but put her arms around his neck. She could smell him, feel his muscles moving under her grip. He was solid, and she had an urge to wrap not just arms around him, but also her legs, and dig her fingers into his shoulders, and clench her toes. He was so warm, and she could just curl up. She had to work really, really hard to seem completely cool and normal. Professional. Just a fellow superhero doing the superhero thing. No matter how much her insides had turned into complete goo. When his grip on her tightened, tucking in right under ribs, she thought her brain might melt.

His knees bent, he reached up with his free hand, and launched.

It felt like a roller coaster or an elevator in free fall, wind zipping past her face, whipping at the locks of hair that had escaped from her hat, chilling her hands. The ground was gone, and her legs dangled. She yelped rather than screamed—didn’t have time or breath for a scream. Her muscles clenched even tighter, securing herself to Eliot. She was trying to hold tight to a rocket. Her eyes watered, tears streaming. She didn’t even think about looking to where they were going. The world was a blur, scrolling past too quickly, and she held her breath, waiting for the landing.

It came in seconds, though she swore she had time to think in slow exquisite detail through the whole flight. But it was a jump, not flight, and as the arc of Eliot’s trajectory started downward, she opened her eyes just in time to see the upper-story patio he’d been aiming toward. The open space had tall railings along the edge to keep people from getting ideas. Eliot easily cleared the railing, and his bent knees took the brunt of the impact. Anna’s own knees went out, and she folded in a heap on the granite tiles, her fingers still wound tight in Eliot’s skin-suit jacket.

So this was what it was like having a real superpower. She took a minute to get her breath back; she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

“Hey, we’re here,” he said, chuckling. Leaning against him to brace herself, she got her feet under her, straightened, and absently smoothed out the wrinkles she put in his suit.

“You must carry a lot of girls around.” She said it as a joke, but not really. More like a hint. A question, which she hoped he would deny. When he didn’t, she tried not to be disappointed.

The patio had tables and lounge chairs designed for fashionable corporate lunches and cocktail parties. This time of night, the place was empty, the table umbrellas all packed away.

“Should we try the door?” he said, moving toward the glass entrance at the back of the patio.

Anna was turning over all kinds of plans about how they were going to get in—she didn’t know anything about picking locks except what she’d seen in movies, and breaking the glass would probably be a bad idea.

But the door wasn’t locked. Eliot swung it right open.

“Wow,” she said. “Wasn’t expecting that.”

“You’d be amazed how many places don’t lock doors on the upper floors. They figure, who’s going to break in on the thirtieth floor?”

“But this is Commerce City. People fly around here,” she said.

“Superheroes fly—and what superhero is going to engage in breaking and entering?”

“Us?”

Smirking, he held the door open and gestured her inside.

She waited for the alarms to blare, but nothing did, and she figured Eliot was right: The ground floor was alarmed and guarded, but anything this high? Not so much. Another reason the building, or at least this floor, wasn’t so well guarded: The floor was nearly empty. The doorway led to a hallway and a row of prime window offices, but beyond a partition was a typical open-plan space, only with no partitions, desks, chairs, anything. A few power cords dangled from offset ceiling tiles. An emergency light cast a faint glow from a door on the opposite wall. She wondered how many floors were empty and how much of the building was leased. That said something about the law firm; if they needed the cheap office space they could get in a mostly empty building rather than leasing posher, more prestigious space farther uptown, where West Plaza was located. At least, that was what her mother would say about it.

“The lawyers are on the next floor down. Emergency stairs are this way, I think.”

“You seem to know a lot about this building,” Anna said.

“I just pick things up, you know? Like I said, it’s got good ledges.”

“I guess the Leaping Wonder would know about ledges,” she said.

“I have
got
to come up with a decent name.”

He went toward the emergency light, and she followed, scanning for clues about what business might have been here in the past and what had happened to it. Not much of anything had been left behind—a few pieces of nondescript office furniture, a few extension cords pushed up against a wall. The place smelled of musty carpet and long disuse.

The next floor down wasn’t quite as desolate, but it wasn’t filled, either. A pair of hallways branched from the stairwell door and contained rows of office doors and windows. A few accounting offices, an architectural firm, all with stodgy names and minimal public faces. The lawyers were at the end of the hall.

Eliot had a set of lockpicks, it turned out, and he knew more about picking locks than what you saw in the movies.

“You came prepared,” Anna observed.

“It just seemed like a good thing to have if I was going to be running around at night.” He inserted a pair of narrow probes into the keyhole of the office door and wiggled them until the lock popped and the door swung in.

“So, you a vigilante hero or a cat burglar?”

“Trying to be a hero,” he said. “But I have some pretty wide boundaries.”

She wasn’t one to talk, considering all her heroing so far had involved breaking and entering. She didn’t have time to work through the philosophical implications.

Inside, she turned on the light with a gloved hand. The front receptionist space had a desk and a few chairs. No artwork, no magazines on a coffee table. Just the desk, chairs, and bare walls. She went through to the back office, which also had a desk and a few of chairs. At least the desk had a computer on it, and one of the walls had bookshelves containing an official-looking law library, all perfectly lined up. A diploma for a law degree from the university hung on the back wall. The name on it was Evan McClosky. Patterson’s degree didn’t seem to be hanging anywhere.

The office was sparse; it seemed wrong. Celia’s office in the penthouse was clean and spare, but it still looked lived in and used. Usually, a jacket was slung over a chair or a pen lay out of place. The shelves had books on them. This place didn’t look lived in.

Eliot rubbed his hands together and looked around. “Okay, where to dig for these files of yours?”

Anna looked for another door: a closet, access to another room, anything. But no, the place just had the two rooms, and the rooms weren’t enough.

“There aren’t any filing cabinets,” she murmured. As far as she could tell, except for the law books, there wasn’t a scrap of paper in the whole place.

“They must have everything on computer, and we’ll never get through the encryption,” Eliot said.

“No,” Anna said. “I don’t care how high tech a company is, there’s always a paper trail. People sign things, people turn in receipts, they make copies, they get forms and notices from the city.”

“You the business expert or something?”

She didn’t say anything, because she would have to talk about West Corp and what it was like growing up in the middle of the city’s largest privately held business. “It’s just common sense.”

“I suppose I can try hacking into their computer, just in case there’s something there.”

“No, you can’t,” she said and held up the monitor cable—which wasn’t plugged into anything. There was no CPU, just the monitor and keyboard for show. “This is a fake law firm.”

“That looks like a real diploma to me,” Eliot said, pointing at the wall.

“The guy’s probably a real lawyer, but the firm isn’t really doing any business.”

“So we’re dealing with a fake company fronted by a fake law firm? Now what?”

“Makes me want to hide out and see what really goes on here.” She pulled out her cell phone and started taking pictures. Not that it would do any good, but it might mean … something. She could send the pictures to her mother—anonymously, of course—and see if it meant anything to her.

In the meantime, Eliot opened and closed desk drawers. Pens and other office detritus slid on particle board, but for the most part the drawers seemed empty. Then he came to the locked drawer.

“What’s in there?”

“Let’s find out,” he said and got out the lockpicks. This one took even less time than the front door. Anna moved to look over Eliot’s shoulder.

The drawer was deep, but all that lay in the bottom was a file folder. Slim, not much in it. Eliot took it out and set it on the desk’s surface, and Anna flipped it open and scanned the scant handful of pages within.

“Anything good?” Eliot asked after a moment.

She couldn’t tell right away. The business jargon made her eyes blur at first, until she made the effort to focus. She had to look them over a couple of times.

“They’re invoices. But they’re going the wrong way. They ought to be charging Superior Construction, not paying them.” But she wasn’t reading these wrong—Superior Construction hadn’t paid the law firm to file their paperwork and front the company. The law firm was paying Superior Construction, apparently for the mere effort of existing—but why?

The last couple of pages in the file were direct deposit receipts, the payments going in, made by a company called Delta Exploratory Investments. Those were pretty big numbers in those deposits—six figures. Not just-doing-business big. Payoff? Bribery?

She showed the page to Eliot. “You ever hear of them? Could this have something to do with the Executive?”

He hesitated and pursed his lips before shaking his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

This was important. She didn’t know how, but her only task this trip was finding the next piece, not solving the whole puzzle. After glancing around the minimalist office again, she growled. “There’s no copy machine—what office doesn’t have a copy machine?” Finally, she took pictures of the documents and hoped the images came out good enough to be useful.

“You get what you needed?”

“I think so.” She tucked her phone away. “Let’s go. Make sure everything’s locked.”

They locked all the doors, turned out the lights, scanned the rooms one more time to make sure everything was in place—not hard, considering how little was there. The offices were just real enough to make a casual visitor believe it was a real business. No more effort than that had been put into the place.

Now that they were on the way out, Anna’s sense of urgency grew. They’d stayed too long already, someone would find them out. Eliot kept his cool, though, casually striding up the stairs and across the empty floor until they arrived back on the patio. The night sky opened up, and the edge of the patio loomed.

The thought of Eliot jumping off the building and diving straight down to the street below made Anna’s knees lock up. Eliot had already climbed halfway up the patio railing.

“You coming?”

She didn’t have a choice, but she couldn’t get her legs to move. “I’m not sure I can do this.” Closing her eyes, she crept forward, her steps slow, until she reached the railing—and made the mistake of looking through the bars and down the side of the skyscraper. Gasping, she took a step back.

Eliot said, “You can’t be a superhero if you’re afraid of heights.”

“I’m not a superhero, I’m just a freak with a parlor trick,” she replied.

He laughed. “We all are. It’s how you use the trick that matters. Trust me, it’ll be okay.”

He even looked like a superhero, standing above her, legs straddling the railing, with the haze-lit city skyline as a backdrop, his smile blazing under his mask and helmet.
I wonder if I should ask him to prom …
Maybe if she asked him to kiss her. For luck, right?