I woke to the alarm clock beeping. It was wicked irritating. I didn’t dwell on it, though—because as soon as I was conscious, I was conscious once again of a jolt of pain across the inside of my skull. I wanted to go back to sleep. I tried to.
Wait. The beeping wasn’t an alarm clock. I knew what it was—I’d heard it before, I was sure—but I couldn’t remember exactly. It hurt to think, but I kept at it until I could place the sound: the warning signal of a reversing vehicle. And under the beeping was a mechanical roar. That sound belonged to an engine, a big one, and close. I opened my eyes and caught my breath. Everything was a smothering gray blur.
My mouth was stuck closed. I tried to move, but my arms and legs wouldn’t budge. I shook my head, rattling pebbles and a cascade of dust. Gravel—the gray blur was gravel. Monaghan must have bound me up, gagged me, and buried me in the trench opposite Redbeard. Javier, so he called him.
I swiveled my head as much as I could, trying not to choke. My right eye didn’t want to open all the way. I blinked out the crusted blood and peered through the rubble. A white lamp was shining into the utility vault. It seemed to be mounted on something. I gave my eyes time to focus.
It was a truck’s rear bumper, flanked by tires and mud flaps, just beyond the vault’s doorway. The cement mixer had arrived.
I started to wiggle into a position to sit up—but then froze. The engine still roared but the reverse warning had stopped. A shadow fell across the vault. A man in a hard hat was standing in the doorway, peering in.
“That’s grand just there, amigo. Not a budge more.”
I played possum. Denis Monaghan looked back over his shoulder, then pulled the flashlight off his belt and aimed its beam right at me—or right at my pile of rubble. He only needed a glance to assure himself, then he turned back toward the truck and started hauling at something.
I heard the truck’s cab door slam. A different man shouted over the mixer’s noise, “You want a hand?”
“No, thanks, amigo, tight space here, two’s a crowd. Just be ready to pour, right?”
“Okay.”
Denis wrestled something through the vault’s doorway and it hung there in midair, pointed at the gravel floor: a bowed metal chute, caked in old cement. He tugged at a handle to adjust its angle, and then bent down with a grunt and hauled the wooden stepladder out of the vault.
As soon as he was out of sight, I shifted my shoulders in the rubble until I was able to sit up. He’d bound me with plastic zip ties at the wrists and ankles and duct tape over my mouth. It wrapped all the way around, and I couldn’t pull it off. I tried raking my feet across the sharper pieces of rubble, but quickly figured that was no use either—the zip ties were heavy gauge. Same type that Yarina uses in the autopsy suite to close up the biohazard bag full of cut organs before it’s sewn back into the eviscerated body. It occurred to me that my death would be a medical examiner case, a homicide by asphyxiation; specifically, suffocation in semiliquid concrete—possibly with blunt force injury to the head as a contributing factor, depending on how bad my brain looked once it was out of my skull. My own organ bag would get the same treatment.
Except, it further occurred to me, you can’t do an autopsy if you don’t have a corpse, and a corpse buried in concrete stays buried for good.
I twisted over, planted an elbow for leverage, and started to lift my body out of the makeshift grave. I got the hip and knee on that side working into the gravel, too, and had nearly made it onto the floor of the vault when the roar from the cement truck got louder. The metal chute rattled, and a stream of gray slurry poured out and splashed down. It flowed into the side trenches first, moving fast, seeping into the gaps in the rubble where I’d just lain and where Javier lay still.
I couldn’t yell for help and I couldn’t run. So I flipped sideways and rolled until I reached the rear of the vault, the spot where Leopold Haring had bled out his last. And there, at the head of the trench, I spotted the rag bundle. I scooted till I could stretch to get it into my bound hands, and worked my fingers in. I could feel the gun barrel. I tried to rotate it, find the grip, find the trigger—
And the bundle unraveled, tumbling away from me. I lurched after it, into the concrete slurry, and got my hands on the rags again. The cold, thick gobs spread and rose where I sat, seeping into my clothes, and I fumbled to unwrap Grandpa Haring’s revolver.
How many rounds did the antique hold? Five, I guessed. How many had Monaghan discharged? One, at least, into the back of poor Javier’s head. Four cartridges left, if Oskar kept all the cylinders loaded, and if Leopold hadn’t unloaded any, or shot the gun off himself for some reason...
What does it matter, Jessie? You only need one shot, if you’re lucky. You only have one way out.
I could get a decent enough grip to steady the butt and lay my finger alongside the trigger guard, but the sludge had covered my waist and was creeping higher. I sloshed backward to try to push myself upright against the wall, and bumped up against something chunky and hard. It was Denis Monaghan’s lump of HAC concrete. I got an elbow down and hoisted myself onto it, as high as I could.
I raised the gun. I didn’t know if the antique revolver was single or double action, so I cocked the hammer just in case.
My head was pounding. I fought to calm my breathing, and scanned back and forth from the gun muzzle to the vault’s entrance. The cement truck filled the doorway. The chute was directly in my line of fire, but I could still draw a bead on the mud flap behind it. The mud flap, and the truck’s right rear tire.
I held my breath and pulled the trigger.
Sparks flashed off the bumper. No one came running. The sound of the gun’s report was not nearly as loud as I had been hoping it would be—the concrete sludge must’ve muffled it, and the noise of the mixer itself was deafening.
I cocked the hammer again. The slurry was bubbling up, swamping everything, rising on me.
I locked my arms, aimed, and fired.
Nothing. No sparks, no bullet impact that I could see or hear. The concrete pushed against my belly with each breath.
I didn’t cock the hammer. I didn’t squint to aim. I bent my elbows up one time, lowered the gun back down, let it come to rest on its target, and squeezed the trigger.
The hammer pulled and snapped, and the gun went off.
The cement truck’s tire burst with a huge hiss, and the whole rig groaned—then listed sideways.
The engine noise dropped from roar to idle, and its giant rotating drum stopped moving. So did the flow of slurry in the chute. I braced my legs against the HAC concrete under me, and wedged myself a little higher out of the muck. I heard the cab door again, and the engine shut down altogether. The bumper’s work light went out with it. I was in the dark.
I tried to shout, but the duct tape held fast. No one heard me—but I could hear them. The mixer operator was saying they would have to stop work.
“No, it’s fine, amigo, it’s fine, keep it coming,” Denis replied.
The man moved over to the tire. I could only see him from the knees up. I turned my head to the clods of yellow cement that had been the cause of Leopold Haring’s murder and rubbed my cheek on them, trying to wear through the duct tape. But Monaghan had wrapped it tight, and all I was doing was tearing up my skin.
“I can’t work the mixer if it’s not level.”
“Sure you can! Fire it up and carry on, will you. We’ve got to get it in there all at once, you know that.”
“I can’t keep on this pour.”
“It’s just a flat tire.”
“Yeah, but now the mixer’s not level. We’ll fuck up the equipment if we—”
“What are you so worried about?” Monaghan was still relying on charm, not turning to threats just yet. “You got someplace else you need to be? Let’s finish up, amigo!”
“I’m telling you...”
“Look, if we don’t get all of it in there right now, the whole utility vault will be ruined. You want to explain that to the people at Pacific Gas and Electric? I do not.”
“Denis, the mixer is leaning! It’s a hazard as it is, sitting here. Who knows what happens if I turn the agitator back on.”
“You saw the specs and you know the sequence. We can’t leave this pour halfway done—and if we stop now, we’ll have to shovel all that shite out. We’ll have to jackhammer it out, if it sets! How long is that going to put us back?” Monaghan’s tone hardened. “Turn it back on.”
“I’m gonna go find the superintendent.”
“Turn it back on, I said,” growled Monaghan.
It was a bad approach.
“I got ninety minutes before it sticks to my drum,” the mixer operator said with a cold finality. “I’ll ask the super what to do.” I heard his footsteps crunch away.
Denis cursed. His boots stayed still, their heels toward me. Then they ground around in the dirt, and I saw the toes stepping nearer. The boots reached the threshold, and Denis Monaghan came over it. He lowered himself down, backward, and splashed into the heavy concrete slurry. He grabbed something behind him, and turned. He had a shovel.
But I had a gun.
Monaghan flicked on his flashlight. He pointed it first to the trench where I was supposed to be buried, but soon enough found me, wedged in the back of the vault where Leopold Haring had bled to death, pointing that fat-caliber revolver’s muzzle right at him.
Denis faltered. If he tried to wade through the slurry to brain me with that shovel, I would shoot him. If he tried to leave, I still might shoot him. If he stayed where he was till the cement mixer man came back with the superintendent in tow, he was screwed.
We both heard their voices at the same time. That site superintendent, God bless him, was one loudmouthed man.
Monaghan looked over his shoulder toward the truck, then back at me. He made his decision. He pushed a foot through the slurry, and lifted the shovel.
I cocked the hammer on Grandpa Haring’s revolver.
Monaghan stopped. He didn’t move. How could he?
“You wouldn’t shoot me, love,” he whispered.
I didn’t respond. I mean, I wanted to, sure—but, duct tape. I think—no, in retrospect, I know—that Denis understood my intentions just fine, because he didn’t budge, and the fear in his eyes spread to take over his whole face, then his whole form. I could feel it radiate across the vault.
The superintendent and the mixer operator took their sweet time crossing the distance between my living and dying, but they made it eventually. Denis, rooted by fear, couldn’t do a damn thing to stop them making that journey. They came up behind him in the vault entrance.
“You gonna dig it out on your own?” the superintendent joked, of the shovel. Denis remembered, too late, that in his other hand was a flashlight. It was illuminating a woman half-submerged in viscous concrete, duct tape across her mouth—a bloody clot in her hair, probably—and, in her zip-tied hands, pointed awkwardly right at the three of them, a great big gun.
“Oh, shit!” yelped the mixer operator.
I turned the revolver sideways, away from them, and thumbed the hammer back down. I started my muffled yelling again.
Denis Monaghan dropped the shovel and flashlight and spun around. He put his hands on the threshold of the utility vault above him, gave himself a mighty push of a lift out of the sludge, shouldered past the mixer operator and the site superintendent, and ran away.
The other two men stood staring at me, stunned.
I dropped the gun into the slurry.
The mixer operator finally snapped out of it, jumped into the vault, and waded over in a hurry. The superintendent glanced back, confused, in the direction Denis had disappeared, and then joined the other man in helping to free me. When he got close enough, he recognized me and said my name. I nodded furiously.
The mixer operator found the end of the duct tape gag and started to unwind the thing, but he was being delicate about it. Duct tape hurts when you peel it off skin, and the mixer operator was a decent man who didn’t want to hurt me. I gibbered at him as best I could to hurry up.
Yeah, it hurt—but that was the least of my worries.
“Call the police!” I screamed, the second my lips were free. “Denis Monaghan murdered the architect Leopold Haring and a food services guy named Javier! Call the police!” I waved my chin to my right, where the body was submerged in the slurry. “Then shovel Javier out of there before he’s gone for good. But first the cops! First cops, then shovel. Cops, shovel, in that order! Now!”
The superintendent fumbled with his phone. The kindhearted mixer operator worried over my bleeding head. He had his utility knife in hand and was just about to cut the zip tie off my wrists when I barked, “And the gun! Jesus, fish around and find that thing before it sinks any more. I’m going to need it for ballistics...”
The superintendent got through to 911 dispatch, and started babbling out the whole story. The mixer operator cut my arms loose. I locked them around his neck, and I let him drag me out of the mire.