|
|
I STOOD ROOTED in my spot behind the desk for a moment, uncertain what to do.
Sure, I could easily take Mr. Hyperhidrosis, overpower him before he pulled the gun he carried which I could detect by the smell of gun oil that lingered beneath his overpowering body odor. But there was no guarantee that he would be cooperative or help lead me to where his gang was keeping Howard.
My other option, then, was to hide, hopefully see what he was doing, and follow him.
I glanced around the room looking for a spot to take cover.
There really wasn’t anywhere. Not even under Howard’s desk, which had an open front, likely to more easily facilitate his lunch-hour blowjobs.
I felt a wave of panic as his footsteps stopped at the door. A key slid into the lock.
With no place else to go, I figured I’d try the oldest trick in the book and hide behind the door. But an old trick was better than no trick.
The door opened just after I lunged across the room.
As Mr. Hyperhidrosis moved into the room, trailing the foul spice of his body odor, I felt like a kid who’d been caught without much time to find an optimal hiding place, and prepared for him to discover me and attack.
I watched him move directly to the desk before I quietly pulled the door open a bit more, enough to conceal me more completely.
The quick peek I’d gotten of him revealed he was wearing the same dark suit I’d seen on him in the alley–-that much, at least, I could tell from the smell – and he had short, army-style, buzz-cut blond hair. He wasn’t the leader I’d seen standing over Gary’s head. He was tall and wide. The phrase “built like a brick shithouse” came to mind.
Behind the door, I could no longer see him. But that was a good thing. I amused myself for a moment thinking about if the situation had been reversed and he’d been the one hiding that his odor would have given him away quite easily. I thought back to all those times I’d played hide and seek as a child, wondering just how much better I would have been at it had I possessed these wolfish traits then.
He came back into my line of sight as he moved around the left side of Howard’s desk. I held my breath as he disappeared behind the desk again.
I heard him pick up something from the desktop and then headed back around the other side of the desk.
Then he stepped back out of the office, not even bothering to close the door behind him.
I peered cautiously after him.
He was carrying Howard’s laptop in his meaty right hand like some paperback novel.
As he approached the elevator, he passed Howard’s assistant, who was walking toward the office. It was obvious that she would have seen him coming out of the office, but she barely glanced at him as they passed each other, despite his distinctly foul smell. Instead, she glared past him, at my gaping face peeking out the doorway.
“Hey!” she shouted at me. “What are you doing in there?”
Mr. Hyperhidrosis was just getting into the elevator as she shouted, and he turned to look at what the commotion was. A flash of recognition lit his face, his heartbeat skipped a beat, and a fresh new wave of sweat oozed from his pores. He recognized me from the alley. He glanced about the office seeming to make a decision that there would be too many people around for him to do anything about me here.
He punched a button and scowled in my direction. Despite knowing I’d be able to overpower him, it still gave me a chill to consider having to face off with such a large, meaty, angry man.
His scowl disappeared behind the closing elevator doors.
Faces started appearing over cubicle walls and people who were already walking around in the hallways stopped to look at me. They all seemed annoyed for the interruption in their routine, but their combined scents were tinged with the eau of curiosity not about what was going down, but whether or not it would prove to be more interesting to watch than getting back to work.
I gave a sheepish wave in the direction of Howard’s assistant, who kept walking toward me.
“I was just looking for the bathroom,” I said in a loud voice and kept walking toward the elevator. A few of the heads that had popped up sank back down.
But three people maintained an interested aura about them, and one of them, other than Howard’s assistant projected anger at my intrusion.
As I continued toward her, her heartbeat picked up dramatically. Combined with a bitter anger fused with a wave of fear, I became sure she was in on the whole deal with Mr. Hyperhidrosis and part of her fear was that she was being caught betraying her boss.
One of the tall, thin gentlemen approaching from the end of the hallway had that indignant air of anger about him. His intent was to confront me. About five cubicles back, there was another young man who gave off the same fight-reflex scent. He was rounding the side of his cubicle, also heading toward me.
Neither of them frightened me so much as the sound that came to me from down the end of the hall. The quiet tapping of a four-digit number into a phone and the whispered voice: “We have an intruder on the sixty-second floor.” I knew security would be here within minutes and that I didn’t have much time.
“Where do they have Howard?” I asked her quietly as I got within a few footsteps of her.
The intense mix of anger and fear coming off her was so strong, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her curly, blonde hair unrolling and re-curling.
“Go to hell,” she hissed under her breath. And as one of her colleagues got within a few steps of us, she smirked at me as she yelled out. “No, don’t touch me! Leave me alone!”
The man closest to me reached for my arm, saying, “Listen, pal, we don’t want any trouble here,” and the whole office area filled with the scent of the curious. The wave of scent translated to sound would be something like, “Ooooh, there’s something good going down!”
I easily shrugged off the hand of the Good Samaritan, remembering that he was an innocent bystander here – that everyone in this office, with the exception of the bitter bitch before me, was innocent.
Unable to resist saying it, I leaned in close to her and said. “I outta stick you alone in a locked room with Howard’s fiancé for ten minutes. She’d wipe that smirk off your face permanently for what you did with Howard.”
Her demeanor, her scent, her heartbeat changed immediately to surprise.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. Buddy behind me tried putting a hand on my arm again, this time saying. “That’s about enough out of you.”
The other guy who was heading my way was within a few steps of us.
Again, I easily shrugged myself out of the man’s grasp, then took a few steps toward the elevators, pushing my way past the other fellow forcefully, but without hurting him.
With these jokers, all the witnesses, and security on their way, Howard’s slutty secretary wasn’t going to be giving up information any time soon. My best bet would be to follow Mr. Hyperhidrosis.
At least he left a distinctive trail.
There wasn’t time to wait for an elevator, not with these two Good Samaritans here; and certainly not with office security on their way.
My best bet would be to hoof it down the stairs and hope I could get down quickly enough to closely follow Mr. Hyperhidrosis.