One of Them (Vigil #2) by Arvin Loudermilk Page A

immediate alert. “That couldn’t be him, could it?”
    Mac shook his head. “He would never call. You heard him say it, he was going to page. Sam always does what he says.”
    “Unless he wasn’t able to.”
    The phone continued to ring, chirping four more times.
    “Should I pick it up?” Mac asked.
    “No. Absolutely not.”
    “What do you want to do then?”
    “We should probably get our asses out of here, but you still haven’t told me how we’re going to do that.”
    “Castellano’s office.” The phone stopped ringing and Mac put the last of the computer disks into the duffel and handed it back to me. I whisked it over my shoulder and I waited for him to regain his rifle from behind the desk. Once he was back standing, we left the office and headed across the blackened bullpen.
    “So what’s in Castellano’s office?” I asked him.
    “There’s a door in there. It’s inside his private bathroom. It looks like a utility closet, but it’s actually a roof exit.”
    “Roof exit?” I said, louder than I should have, not quite getting how an exit onto the roof was going to be of any help in a building twelve stories tall.
    As I was groaning my discontentment, on the other side of the bullpen, the elevator car dinged and its doors slid open. Mac and I dropped down below the desk line so fast I was surprised there wasn’t smoke coming out of our asses.
    “Who the fuck was that?” I whispered.
    Mac tilted his head. “The person who was calling?”
    A male voice boomed out. “Hello? Agent Douglass? This is Sergeant Simmons. I need you to respond to me at once, sir. I saw someone at the top of the room. Was that you, sir? I’m aware that you are up here. You signed in. Please, say something. I need you to identify yourself.” A flashlight beam started crisscrossing the area. If the Simmons guy got even halfway across the bullpen, he’d have been able to spot us easy.
    Mac slid his rifle all the way under the desk. “I can get rid of him,” he said. “You crawl out of here and get to the roof and wait for me. If I’m not there in ten minutes—” He shrugged. “Hopefully I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
    He jerked upward and raised his arms high. The roving flashlight found him an instant later.

No Time
    I ditched the duffel down the nearest aisle, remaining on my knees as I looked around for someplace to hide. There was no way I was leaving Mac on his own.
    The flashlight beam held steady, and Simmons’s radio crackled. Ahead five feet, a free-standing kiosk with a computer terminal seemed to be my only refuge. I ducked behind it. It had a decent width. If I kept low and quiet, and the lights stayed off, I wouldn’t be discovered. Not if I didn’t want to be.
    “Sorry about the confusion,” Mac said to Simmons as he was closing in on him. “I tripped and fell when I heard the elevator open. I’m totally embarrassed. I’m a fucking klutz.”
    “You can put your arms down,” Simmons said, and then chuckled. “What were you doing out here in the dark?”
    “Coming back from taking a whiz. I didn’t want to turn the lights on. I never do. It’s a waste. I knew the way, and the pisser is not that far from my office. I just wasn’t expecting visitors. You shocked the hell out of me when you came in. It was like I suddenly forgot how to walk.”
    “You took a good long while to respond, you know.”
    “Yeah. I was hoping you’d go away. I didn’t want to have this conversation.”
    “Then your bathroom break was also the reason you didn’t answer your phone?”
    “My phone was ringing? I didn’t realize. Was it you?”
    “No, it was downstairs. They were calling to inform you that I was on the way up.”
    “Huh. What are you doing here?”
    “Colonel Carter is making a big delivery. No one can be walking the halls while he’s doing it.”
    “Is there anyone in the building but me?”
    “You’re the only one who’s not where they’re supposed to be.”
    “But I am where