Holy Terror Read Free Page A

are you?’
    â€˜No, no, everything’s fine. I was looking for something, that’s all.’
    â€˜Must have been pretty damned lost.’
    Conor stood up straight. ‘To tell you the truth, I had a kind of strange experience, and I was just making sure that everything was OK.’
    â€˜You had a strange experience? Don’t tell me. You were abducted by Cardassians. No, stranger than that. My uncle came in and offered you a raise.’
    â€˜This isn’t a joke, Darrell. This is for real. I can’t even begin to work out what happened.’
    â€˜You saw ghosts, right? They always said that Spurr’s Fifth Avenue was haunted. A woman with no head who walks around the hat department. Get it? A woman with no head who—’
    â€˜Unh-hunh. These two characters weren’t ghosts. A man and a woman. A tall woman, dressed in black, and a kind of Cuban-looking guy.’
    â€˜Hey! No kidding! I saw them, too!’ Darrellnodded his head as if he were never going to stop. ‘They were in luggage.’
    â€˜
You
saw them?’
    â€˜For sure. They walked up to me and asked me something. They said—’
    Darrell opened his mouth and then he closed it again. He lowered his clipboard and pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Isn’t that stupid? I don’t know what they said. I really can’t remember.’
    â€˜Try, Darrell. This could be critical.’
    â€˜I’m sorry, Conor. I just can’t remember. Still, it couldn’t have been anything much, right? One minute they’re talking to me and the next minute, piff, they’re gone.’
    â€˜When did this happen?’
    â€˜Oh … forty minutes ago, maybe a little less. Thirty-five, maybe.’
    â€˜I wish you’d called me.’
    â€˜I did call you as a matter of fact, just to see if you were back. You didn’t answer. But anyway, what are you worried about? They didn’t say anything, they didn’t
do
anything. Not that I can remember, that is.’ He took an anxious bite out of his donut, and then another, and then another.
    â€˜I think we’d better check the strongroom,’ said Conor.
    â€˜The strongroom? What the hell for?’
    â€˜I want to make sure that nothing’s missing, that’s all.’
    â€˜How could anything be missing?’ said Darrell, his mouth crammed.
    â€˜I don’t know. What happened to you up in luggage, that exact same thing happened to me, too,only I didn’t lose a few seconds. I lost twenty-nine minutes.’
    â€˜Twenty-nine minutes? Are you serious?’
    â€˜I met them outside the security door and that’s the last I remember. That’s why we have to check the strongroom.’
    Darrell lifted his mountainous gold Rolex. ‘Conor, I’d love to, but I’m real busy right now. And – come on – anybody who wanted to break into that strongroom would need an M60 tank. You didn’t see any M60 tanks pass by your door, did you?’
    â€˜Darrell, indulge me, will you?’
    â€˜For Christ’s sake, Conor. We have alarms, we have infra-red sensors, we have cameras, we have time locks. Neither of us can open the strongroom on our own and I sure as hell wasn’t here, was I? You had a memory lapse, that’s all. It could have been the heat.’
    Conor tried to be patient. It wasn’t easy to be patient with a short podgy boy with his mouth full of donut and silhouettes of hula girls on his necktie. ‘Help me out here, Darrell, and let a suspicious old chief of security put his mind at rest. I’ve got this gut feeling, that’s all.’
    â€˜Conor, do you realize the magnitude of what we’re talking about here? The
magnitude
? We’re probably talking about more than a billion bucks’ worth of stuff here, Conor. We’re talking about stuff that belongs to customers like Mrs George Whitney IV, and Harold D. Hammet.