CHAPTER 6

Iris was still half-asleep when she pulled up to the rolling garage door behind the old bank. She was ten minutes late, but she was too tired to care. Brad could kiss her grits if he decided to give her any grief. No sane person works on Sunday. It didn’t help that she kept hearing Ellie say “Fuck ’em” in the back of her head.

“You feeling okay?” he asked as she slumped out of her car.

“I’m fine.” Iris forced a smile. This was a big career opportunity, she reminded herself. Brad recommended her for the job; she should act excited. It could lead to bigger and better things, but the only emotion she could muster was mild annoyance.

She grabbed her duffel bag from the backseat. At least she had managed to cobble together a field bag. She even had her own tape measure.

“Thanks for coming early. I just got news we’re fast-tracking the project, starting Monday.”

“Oh? Were we slow-tracking it before?” Iris asked with mild sarcasm.

“Not exactly. Mr. Wheeler wants schematics of the foundations by the end of the day. Then we need to give them at least a floor a day to keep up with the design development team.”

Brad led her up the loading dock and through the service corridor behind the elevator shaft. They passed the entrance to the main lobby and continued down a hallway that was beige from top to bottom. Fluorescent bulbs hummed overhead.

It had taken them eight hours to finish one and a half floors on Saturday. Iris did some quick math in her head. If they were going to continue working their normal shift at the office and then do the survey work after-hours, she’d be working around the clock.

“So, are we supposed to work until 2:00 a.m. every night?” Iris demanded in a voice much harsher than she intended. Shit. She had just breached the unspoken professional credo—thou shalt not bitch and moan. She sweetened her voice. “I mean, I don’t see how we can do that without help.”

Brad turned to look at her with deadpan eyes. “You want to keep this job, right?”

The color drained from her face. “Of . . . of course I do!” She couldn’t afford to lose her job after three months. It would ruin her résumé. Was he threatening to report her to Mr. Wheeler? Wait, was he laughing?

“I’m just messing with you, Iris!” He chuckled. “Mr. Wheeler wants you working on this building full-time, starting tomorrow.”

Iris wanted to hit him on the head with her bag for teasing her, until the second thing he said registered. “You mean I get to work here instead of the office?”

“Yeah. Ha! I really had you going!”

“Yes, you did, you bastard! Who knew you were such a prankster?”

“Well, you should never underestimate the quiet guy.” He grinned and opened the door at the end of the hall. She followed him through it and down a dark stairwell.

The heavy door thunked closed behind her. The stairwell was almost completely black, and a cold draft wafted up from wherever they were heading.

“Will you be working here too?”

“Not too much.” He clicked on a small flashlight. “I’m supposed to supervise you and keep up with the other work at the office.”

Iris was being furloughed from the office fishbowl. Her days would be spent unsupervised, in sneakers and jeans. She smiled in the darkness at the thought, until something crawled across her hand. She let out a squeak and shook it violently. There were cobwebs clinging to the handrail. She yanked her hand back and told herself that the tickling on her neck couldn’t possibly be a spider. The winking beam of the flashlight streaked the cinder-block walls with shadows as they climbed down deeper into the bowels of the building.

After two flights of stairs, the flickering light finally stopped moving. When she caught up to Brad, he was struggling to open a heavy steel door. He gave it a solid kick, and it swung open, crashing loudly into the adjacent wall. The stairway landed in a narrow corridor that led to a large room with two enormous round doors.

“Holy shit!”

She stared at one of them. Cursing was not professional, but the one door must have been eight feet in diameter. There was a giant wheel spiked with handles in the center of the door that reminded Iris of a pirate ship’s helm. She reached out and spun it. It wasn’t locked. The door was twelve-inch-thick solid steel with locking bolts the size of soup cans lining the perimeter.

Brad walked the vault door open and laughed. “Hey, who wants to rob a bank?”

“Whoa.”

Iris stepped inside. It was a long, narrow room not more than five feet wide but at least twenty feet deep. The ceiling was polished bronze. The two side walls were lined from top to bottom and end to end with hundreds of little doors lined up in rows like apartment mailboxes.

“What the heck are these? This isn’t where they keep the money, is it?”

“Nope. That vault is over there.” Brad motioned across the marble corridor to the second, larger vault door on the opposite wall. That one was so huge, the floor stepped down in front of it so it could swing open. Iris could see from where she was standing that the larger vault was full of empty metal shelves.

“So what is this?”

Each little door lining the walls was identical, except for the numbers engraved in Gothic script. Each door had two keyholes. Iris reached out and touched one.

“This is the vault with the safe deposit boxes. It’s the place where people lock away their most precious possessions. Or, you know, stuff they don’t want anyone to find.”

Iris scanned all the little metal doors and saw that one of them hung open. She walked over to it and peered inside. The door concealed a steel-lined cubbyhole. It was empty. Iris reached in past her elbow. The walls were smooth and cold. She pulled her hand out and closed the door. It swung freely back open.

“I guess you need a key to lock it,” she said to no one.

Her footsteps echoed off the bronze floor as she headed back out of the vault. Round corkscrews of shaved metal crunched under her feet. She bent down to pick one up and came face-to-face with a safe deposit door that was riddled with holes.

“What the heck happened here?”

“They drilled it open,” a gravelly voice said behind them. It belonged to an older black man in a blue collared shirt that said “Security.” An ID tag hung around his neck, and a giant ring of keys dangled from his belt.

“Oh, hi.” Iris straightened up. “You must be Ramone.”

“That’s me.” He was tall, thin, and slightly crooked. Looking at his short gray hair and tired eyes, Iris guessed he was at least fifty years old. His dark brown skin looked as dry and dusty as the vault floor.

“I’m Iris. I think you’re going to be stuck with me for a few weeks.”

He walked over to her, his black sneakers silent on the vault floor, and shook her hand. It was a gentle handshake, but his hand felt like sandpaper.

“It’s nice to meet you. Do I need to get another set of keys for this young lady?” he asked Brad.

“No, I’ll just give her mine,” Brad said.

Ramone seemed satisfied to get the business settled. He glanced at one of the safe deposit boxes, then turned to Iris. “Is this your first time down here?”

“Yeah. It’s like being inside a coffin!” Brad answered for her. He kicked the outside walls and walked around the corner. “You know, these vaults are solid steel. The walls are like a foot thick. They don’t build ’em like this anymore.”

Iris nodded in agreement. When Brad had wandered down the hall with his tape measure, she dropped her voice and asked, “What do you mean, they drilled it open?”

“The box,” Ramone said in a three-pack-a-day baritone. “Whenever someone wants to claim their stuff, they have to drill ’em open. You know, after they submit a formal request to the State of Ohio and get a warrant.”