Cold Storage Read online

  He noticed her noticing, and he saw the slight change in the way she looked at him. A tiny lowering of her shoulders, the minutest tilt of the head away from him. It was always the same. If women were smart enough to know him, they were smart enough to not get to know him any better.

  Shit. Why did he bother?

  “See you around.” She headed for the door to the dock. He started to follow, but she glanced at him and the half-full trash can he was holding.

  “Didn’t you want to dump that?”

  “Oh, right. Yeah. Duh. Right.”

  She turned back to the door and, busted, Teacake had no choice but to head for the dumpster. He was almost there when she called out, “Oh, there might be one thing.”

  He turned back.

  “Over on your side.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you hear a beeping sound?”

  He looked at her for a long moment, and the voice in the back of Teacake’s brain that had been trying to get a hold of his attention finally broke through. See?! the voice said. I told you there was a beep!

  Teacake looked at Naomi, his eyes lighting up with the realization. “Your side too?”

  Seven

  Teacake and Naomi stood stock-still in the middle of the floor on his side of the complex for a good forty-five seconds before he couldn’t take it anymore and had to say something. He usually found it hard not to fill silences, but being around her made it worse.

  “I swear it was there before, maybe if we—”

  She held up a hand, stopping him. Naomi had patience. Another five seconds went by in silence, then ten, then five more, and then there it was, right down at the bottom of human hearing levels, maybe 0.5 dB, if that, but the numbers didn’t matter, what mattered was that it absolutely positively was there.

  Beep.

  Their faces lit up in smiles, kids who’d just found their Easter baskets.

  “Aha!” she shouted.

  “I knew it!” he said, and they took off in opposite directions, he toward the north wall and she for the south.

  “What are you doing?” Naomi asked as they passed each other in the middle of the floor.

  “It was over here.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “It was definitely over here,” and she planted herself, still again, listening by the far wall.

  He called from across the room. “Lady, I heard this thing for half an hour after I got in, it didn’t register but it did, you know how sometimes you know something but you don’t, like, know it all the way, and then it just sort of pops up and—”

  “Will you please be quiet?”

  “I’m saying. This wall.”

  “You are very chatty.”

  “I know. It’s a thing. I—”

  “Shh.”

  He shushed. They stood still again. They waited the full rest of the minute.

  Beep.

  There it was again, like a starter’s signal, and they took off, each to the other’s wall, passing in the middle of the floor again, looking at each other with incredulity.

  “What are you doing now?” she wanted to know.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s over here, you were right!”

  They reached each other’s former positions, grinning. It was kind of fun, or a hell of a lot better than sitting alone and staring at their monitors all night, anyway. They waited again, trying not to giggle, failing a bit, but knowing they had thirty seconds to spare. Their eyes caught, both their faces wide and childlike, and wouldn’t it have been nice if the beep never came again and this moment could just last and last and last and—

  Beep.

  This time nobody moved. Teacake laughed.

  “What?”

  “I’m afraid to say.”

  “You think you were right the first time.”

  He nodded. Naomi looked up at the vaulted cement ceiling above them. It was steepled, like a roof but a shallower angle. The rake of the cement was funneling the noise, scooting it along the surface of the stone before dropping it down on opposite sides of the room.

  “We’re both right,” she said. She crept to the center point of the room, trying not to make any noise, and waited.

  Beep.

  Her head snapped in the direction from which the sound had come. Now she had a bead on it. She eased over to the reception desk, reached behind the counter, and buzzed herself through the gate. She went to the wall ten feet behind the desk, laid her ear against it, and waited.

  BEEP.

  The sound was most definitely coming from behind this wall, but the other side was just another corridor, running along the interior of the first row of storage units in the ground-level section. It wasn’t till you walked back through the doorway, into the reception area, and stopped to look at the wall in profile, so to speak, that you noticed the extra space. There was about eighteen inches more than there should have been between the wall in the reception area and the wall on the other side.

  “Why would anybody do that? Leave empty space like that?” Teacake asked.

  “Insulation?”

  “Between two interior walls? That’s some fucked-up useless insulation.”

  “What is this, drywall?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I have hung my share of it.”

  BEEP.

  He looked at her. “You want to call Griffin?”

  “Under no circumstances do I want to call Griffin.”

  He caught the extra meaning in it and was disappointed. “He tried that shit already?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a pig.”

  “Could have told you that.”

  BEEP.

  She looked at him. “So what do you want to do?”

  “Well, what I want to do is take that picture down,” he said, gesturing to a large framed aerial photograph of the caves, circa 1940s, that hung more or less over the exact spot that the beeping was coming from, “pick up that chair over there”—now he pointed at the uncomfortable-as-hell metal office stool that was parked behind the desk—“smash it through that cheap-ass three-eighths-inch gypsum Sheetrock, and see what the fuck is beeping back there.”

  “I’m okay with that if you are.”

  He laughed. “I said that’s what I want to do, not what I’m gonna do.”

  “Oh.”

  They looked at the wall for a while. It beeped again.

  She couldn’t take it. “Oh, come on. We can hang the picture back up over the hole to cover it and bring in a piece of Sheetrock tomorrow. I’ll help you patch it up. Nobody’ll know the difference.”

  “Why would we do that?” he asked.

  “Curiosity. Boredom.”

  “You get bored, it makes you want to smash through walls?”

  “Apparently. Don’t you?”

  He thought about it. Not particularly, but She was asking. Why did people always come to him with their shit, and why did he usually do it? He was going to get on top of that question real soon, but first he ran some quick numbers in his head.

  “Four-by-eight piece of drywall is fifteen bucks,” he said. “Plus a roll of joint tape, that’s another eight or nine.”

  “I will give you twelve dollars and we can use a sampler can of paint from the paint store. It’s easy.”

  “All so we can see a smoke alarm with a dead battery.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe we see something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we don’t know. That’s the thing.”

  “I need this job.”

  “You’re not gonna lose it.”

  “No, I have to have the job.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  He was getting heated. “No, you don’t. It’s, like, a condition.”

  “I said I get it. I’ve lived here all my life, I know what a parole condition is, and I know where black-and-gray tattoos with shitty ballpoint ink get done. Ellsworth, right? I mean, I
’m hoping it was Ellsworth.”

  “It was.”

  “Good. So you’re not violent. Now will you please pick up that chair and throw it through the wall for me? Please?”

  She fixed her brown eyes on him, and he looked into them.

  THE LEGS WERE SPINDLY METAL AND THEY WENT THROUGH THE DRYWALL easy enough, and the biggest chunk of gypsum came off when he pulled it back out. The real challenge was not to pull too much, so they wouldn’t have to replace more than one panel. They didn’t need the chair after that first blow; they used their hands, carefully tearing away a few larger pieces until there was a hole big enough for Teacake to get his head and shoulders through.

  There was a space back here all right, about sixteen inches of gap between this wall and the far one, and it was dark except for a red flashing light at eye height, three feet to his left.

  BEEP.

  It was much louder now, and a tiny light strobed white in sync with the sound. Teacake and Naomi looked across the concealed interior wall, checking it out. It was covered with dials and gauges, long out of use and cut off from power. They were set in an industrial-looking corrugated metal framework of some kind, painted in the sickly institutional green used back in the ’70s because some study said it was supposed to be soothing. Or maybe the paint was just cheap.

  BEEP.

  Both their gazes turned back to the flashing light. There was writing etched into a panel underneath it, but they couldn’t quite read it from here.

  “You got a flashlight on your phone?” he asked Naomi.

  She dug her phone out of her pocket, turned on the flashlight feature, and shined the beam through the hole, but they still couldn’t read the words underneath the panel.

  “Hang on to the thing,” Teacake said. He put one foot on the stool, grabbed the edges of the hole, and hoisted himself up and through without waiting for a response. The stool pitched and started to fall. Naomi caught it, but not before it had knocked Teacake off balance and dumped him, upside down, into the space between the walls.

  “I said hang on to the thing!”

  “Yeah, I didn’t say ‘okay.’ Traditionally, you want to wait for that.”

  Teacake sneezed six times. When he recovered, he looked up from his semi-inverted position and saw Naomi’s hand holding out a Kleenex through the hole in the wall. He looked at it, impressed. Who has a Kleenex in this situation?

  “Thank you.” He took it and blew his nose. He offered the soiled Kleenex back to her.

  “You can go ahead and keep that one,” she said. “Can you get up?”

  He shimmied himself into an upright position and scooted sideways down the wall through the tight space, moving toward the flashing panel.

  “Shine the light over there,” he said.

  She did, moving the beam onto the panel beneath the blinking light.

  He read it. “‘NTC Thermistor Breach. Sub-basement Level Four.’”

  From the hole, she turned her light on him.

  He winced. “Could you get that out of my eyes?”

  “Sorry. Thermistor what?”

  “‘NTC Thermistor Breach.’ There’s a whole bunch of stuff back here.”

  She moved the light back onto the board and he looked up and down it, where a number of other monitors and displays were stacked.

  “‘Airtight Integrity,’ ‘Resolution’ with a plus sign that’s, like, underlined—”

  “Plus or minus.”

  “Okay, ‘plus or minus 0.1 degree Celsius.’” Naomi kept the light moving and he read the stamped letters under each of the deactivated gauges and displays. “‘Cold Chain Synchronicity,’ ‘Data Logger Validation,’ ‘Measurement Drift Ratio,’ ‘LG Internal,’ ‘LG Probe,’ ‘LE1 Probe,’ ‘LE2 Probe,’ ‘LD Internal,’ Jesus, there’s, like, twenty of ’em.” He turned back to the gauge right in front of him as it beeped and flashed again. “But this is the only one that’s flashing.”

  “NTC Thermistor Breach.”

  “Yeah. You know what that means?”

  She thought a moment. “A thermistor is part of an electrical circuit. There’s two kinds, the positive kind, their resistance rises with temperature, and the negative kind, their resistance falls if the temperature goes up.”

  “So it’s a thermometer?”

  “No. It’s a circuit that’s reactive to temperature.”

  “Like a thermometer.”

  “It is not a thermometer.”

  He turned and looked at her. “What are you, all science-y and shit?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘and shit,’ but I take a lot of science. Prerequisites for vet school.”

  The alarm beeped again, and Teacake turned back to it. “This is thirty or forty years old. How come it’s still on?”

  She shrugged. “Guess they wanted to keep an eye on temperature.”

  BEEP.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Good question. And what the hell is sub-basement four?” She shined her light in his eyes again. “I thought there was only one.”

  Eight

  Mooney had been driving around with the bodies in the trunk for two days and they were starting to reek. At first, he’d been able to pretend the smell wasn’t there, or that it was the brewery on the other side of the river, or maybe it was that weird syrupy smell that had been blowing in and out of the river valley for the past couple of years, or even that it was he himself, just smelling like a man during a heat wave, as one does in these complicated climatic times we live in. But he knew it wasn’t any of that.

  Mooney never did well in the heat, which was what had made Uganda such an odd choice, but hey, you don’t always choose your path in life; sometimes it chooses you. Right now, life had selected him to be the custodian of the mortal remains of the two unlucky bastards in the trunk of his car, and so far, he was doing a shitty job of it. A final goddamn resting spot was harder to find than you’d think, once you ruled out all official channels (for obvious reasons), garbage dumps (out of respect for the dead), and anyplace that smacked of future housing or commercial development (for fear of eventual disinterment). That didn’t leave a hell of a lot of Pottawatomie County open to surreptitious burial, and Mooney was starting to wonder if the whole car wasn’t going to have to end up in the river when he saw the ad for the self-storage place on TV.

  The first and most obvious thought that crossed his mind was that he’d buy some kind of airtight vault, seal them both up inside it, wheel the thing into the smallest possible unit they had, lock the door, toss the key, and never think about it again. But on his first scouting mission out to Atchison Storage, earlier this afternoon, the smell had really started to settle itself into the metal and fabric and fiber of the car, and he just didn’t see anything made by God or man that would hold that stench in forever and ever. Except for Mother Earth herself.

  Plus there were the storage bills: $49.50 a month? To hell with that. He’d buy a couple gallons of gas and torch them in his parents’ backyard first.

  He’d turned around in the driveway and was on his way out of the eastern side of the storage place when he saw the wooded glade, up on the hillside near the crest of the bluff. Immediately, he knew the two rotting corpses in the trunk had just found their personal Valhalla. He hiked up onto the bluff, took a look around at the trees and the view and the peacefulness under the whispering pines, and he hugged himself. It was something he did sometimes; he’d wrap both arms around himself and squeeze, sometimes making a little cooing noise, just something to let him know he was alive and he was loved, even if only by himself at times. But from tiny acorns great oak trees of love do grow, right?

  This was the spot. He’d treat those poor dead souls properly, dig them a hole down under the frost line right here on this glorious, unbuildable bluff that overlooked the river on one side and a mountain of rock on the other. Those were two natural wonders that he could count on to stay exactly where they were, unchanged, for a good forty or fifty thousand years. The corpses would
be undisturbed.

  Yes. This place would do nicely.

  So now he was back, under cover of darkness and with a shovel. He pulled off the driveway fifty yards short of the eastern entrance and killed the lights around ten P.M. There was just one car down below in the parking lot, probably the guard’s, and it looked kind of familiar. But nobody guards an unlit bluff on the wrong side of the Missouri River, so Mooney figured he was safe over here.

  He got out of the car, went around to the trunk, and winced at the foul smell that was seeping out of the cracks along the edges of the metal. He turned his head away, took an enormous gulp of fresh air, turned back, opened the trunk in one swift motion, and got smacked in the face with the most assaultive stench he’d ever smelled in his entire life. It wasn’t just that it smelled bad—you couldn’t just say bad, that didn’t come anywhere close to covering it. It’s that the smell hurt, it was so powerful. It had a thickness to it, a body and form; the smell was all hands and they were all over him, grabbing him by the face and throat and nostrils and lungs and forcing their thick fingers into him.

  Mooney snapped his head away as fast as he could, barely getting a glimpse of the rapidly decaying contents of the trunk. He fumbled around for the shovel. It should have been right on top, that was where he’d left it, how could it have moved, Jesus Christ, where was the goddamn shovel? Face still averted, he slapped his hand around the trunk a few times, an angry dad swatting at the kids in the back seat while trying to keep his eyes on the road, but every place his hand landed was worse than the place before—that part was wet, and this part was hot (not just warm, mind you, but hot)—but wait, here it was, hard and wooden and shovel! His fingers closed around the handle and he yanked it out of the trunk, slammed the lid, and practically collapsed, gasping for air.

  This couldn’t be right. This smell could not be normal. Then again, what experience did he have? What did he know, maybe this was how it went down when you died. If it was, quick mental note: he definitely wanted to eat better and exercise four or five times a week from now on, because death was no party. Okay. When did he fire the last kill shot, what was that, two days ago? Less than that; he’d loaded both corpses into the car at two in the morning on Wednesday—that’s forty-four hours. How fast does a body decompose? He actually pulled out his phone and was about to google that very question when the essential insanity of that act somehow managed to announce itself through the fog of his stench-choked brain. He put the phone away and started the walk up the hill with the shovel to dig the grave.