Providence Descending - Sarah Boone (epub e ink reader txt) 📗

of the click, both heads shot up.
Lucy flipped the light switch. “Excuse me, would you mind covering yourselves up?”
Peg straightened her skirt, eyes aimed apologetically at Lucy. “I'm sorry. Did I schedule an appointment with you this morning?”
“Anna Providence, Audit Consultant.” Lucy extended a hand.
Peg's friend diverted his attention from buttoning his shirt to look at Lucy. He accidentally missed a button, so his collar appeared relentlessly crooked. “I have a nine o'clock with an Anna Providence.”
Lucy started. She recovered quickly by clearing her throat, but it was too late. They were both increasingly suspicious. “Richard Gray?” Lucy offered her hand to him as well. “Huge building, small world.”
When he took it, leering with this teeth bared as if to wonder, “Well, what do we have here?”, Lucy twisted his wrist and pulled his thumb back; with a sharp yelp of pain, he fell to his knees. Lucy withdrew the letter opener and held it to his neck. “You know Peg, I could pretend that I have this meeting scheduled with you and your friend Dick here, I could play nice and try and manipulate you without putting you through all this, but I am in a bit of a rush, and I figure since I'm going to need to get mean eventually, I might as well be mean now so we can start off our relationship honestly.”
Peg collapsed into her desk chair, bewildered, half-expecting Lucy to smile and say, “You're on candid camera!” But Lucy didn't say that.
Lucy said, “Now Peg, there are two things that I need you to do for me, and I know that you're going to do them, because if you don't, then I'm going to slice Dick open like a delivery from H&R Block. Do we understand each other?”
Peg didn't respond save for a slight opening and closing of her mouth.
“Peg,” Lucy snapped. “Peggy?” She pressed the letter opener harder against Dick's skin.
He turned his neck sideways, grinding his teeth. “Whatever it is,” Richard Gray said, “we'll do it.”
“Margaret, the first thing I need you to do is turn on your computer. Now.”

Chapter Ten – Show Time

Topher woke Lucy at five-thirty. “Come on, angel,” he whispered, “it's show time.”
She crawled through the little tunnel first, then he passed the guns and the bags to her. They waited, crouched by the bathroom door for the tell-tale beeping that would indicate the manager had deactivated the alarm.
“Ready?” Lucy asked her fiance.
“I'm ready.”
“Love me?”
“You know it.”
They heard the first of six beeps, the manager's code being pressed into the system. Then waited a beat before coming through the door.
The manager turned, all openings wide – eyes, nostrils flared, mouth agape.
Lucy, the brawn of the operation, hit the manager across the mouth with her gun. He went down. She pulled him up by the scruff of his neck.
Topher, the brains of the operation, said, “Bet you know what we're here for.”
The manager nodded.
“Listen up, Mr. Clifford. This is going to be really easy. I only need three things from you and we walk away from this clean, and I know you're going to give them to me, because if you don't, my partner is going to cut the thread on your existence. Your wife Marie. Your children Taylor, Johnnie, and Isabel. You live on Bayview Dr. and your kids go to Washington Elementary. Cooperate with us and everyone sees their next birthday. Do we understand each other?”
The manager nodded again.
“I need your keys, I need your codes, and I need your all-clear. The quicker the better.”

Chapter Eleven – The Warner File

Peg opened Raoul Bender's account and changed the account balance without delay. “It's done,” she said. “Twenty million dollars.”
“Good,” Lucy said. “One more thing.”
“Why are you doing this?” Peg asked, not a plea, but a simple question. “Why here? And why me? I'm an entry level assistant. All of my entries get checked by -”
A knock on the door.
“Peg, are you in there?”
“Stacey,” Peg said. “Stacey oversees all of my data entry.”
“Shit.” Lucy gritted her teeth. She turned towards the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Peg's hand levitate toward the phone. Lucy pointed the letter opener at Peg. “Stop. Touching that phone will be a mistake you'll have to live with for the rest of your life, and the rest of your death too. You decide how quickly it's coming, Peggy. Don't touch that phone.”
Richard struggled in Lucy's grasp.
“Peg, Peg? Open this door. I need to talk to you about this account change.”
“Just one second,” Peg called out. “I don't think you can hurt me,” she said to Lucy.
“Of course not,” Lucy said, “because I need you.” Lucy jabbed an elbow into the back of Dick's neck. Unconscious, he slumped into the corner behind the desk. “It would be much easier for me to hurt your kids, Kayla and Donnie. Much, much easier. 216 Chestnut Way, is that right? I'm sure they're home right now, aren't they? Couldn't go to school because of the earthquake.”
“ Peg, what's going on?”
“Hold on, Stacey,” Peg said, voice trailing off into a gasp.
“You're right, Peg. I can't hurt you, but I can hurt them. Don't give me a reason, alright? Help me get Dick into this chair.”
They pulled Dick into one of the chairs across the desk from Peg, and Lucy sat in the other. “Now let her in. Make sure she comes inside, and close the door behind her.”
Peg swung the door open and bolted down the hallway. Lucy swore. She tried to catch Peg's sleeve, but it was too late. Cyber-thievery or not, this job was turning out to be one hell of a challenge.
“What the...” Stacey Rush watched Peg go, then turned towards Lucy.
Lucy yanked her inside.
“Hey! Excuse me!”
“Sorry, Stacey,” Lucy said. She held the letter opener against her torso. “I need you to come inside with me.” Her voice had a new edge to it, an urgency. Now, instead of an hour, she was working with a window of a couple of minutes. Lucy sat the branch manager in the empty chair. “My appointment was on this floor after all.”
Stacey looked at the unconscious Dick, the desperate woman before her wielding an office tool. “Well, this is strange.”
Lucy rushed over to the computer to print the account information. “Tell me, Stacey. Do you know anything about something called the Warner File?”
Stacey shook her head. “I haven't heard of any Warner File.”
Dick began to shift around in his seat, eyes shut, chuckling lightly. “So that's what you're here for.” The laughing grew louder, from a fit of giggles to a booming guffaw.
“Do you know what it is? Where it is?” Lucy snatched the account information off of the printer deck. “Tell me!”
The building's loudspeaker went off, a voice saying, “Will Mr. Warner please report to the fourth floor?”
Warner?
Dick began to laugh even harder. Lucy shook him. “What is it? What does that mean?”
“It's code,” Stacey said. “Warner is the code for a high-level security breach.”
Lucy hurled herself out of the office and down the hall to the nearest staircase. Does this mean that the Warner file doesn't exist? Lucy wondered. Did Jimmy set me up? That way he gets his money and I go to jail for life.
Guards exited the elevator in front of her. Lucy wheeled around the other way, leaping through the people at the donut and coffee kitchenette.
One of the guards yelled, “Stop! Security! There's nowhere to run, Miss Providence.”
He was wrong. There's always somewhere to run.
The ground shook below her and Lucy sprawled to the ground. An aftershock from this morning's quake. There was another slight jump, then nothing. She got up and kept running.
Lucy ducked around another corner, a dead-end with one door at the end. She ran to it, pulled it open and found herself face to face with Sergeant Brenner, head of security.

Chapter Twelve – Chase and be Chased

Topher asked the bank manager, Tom Clifford, how long it would be until the rest of the bank employees arrived.
“My Assistant Manager is late, actually,” Mr. Clifford said. “He's supposed to unlock before me.”
Lucy and Topher shared a look, the intensely communicative kind, and Lucy went straight to the window. “Parking lot's empty.” She shoved Clifford into the corner. “You sure about that?”
“After your assistant, how long?” Topher asked.
“Fifteen minutes, give or take.”
“I think we should go now,” Lucy said.
Topher shook his head. “We wait for the assistant. Then we use the fifteen minute window.”
“We don't know if he's even coming!”
“Damn it Lucy! Be patient for once in your life. You're smarter than that.”
Lucy walked over to her fiance and shoved him in the chest. “Are you saying I can't handle this job? You sound like my dad!”
“Your dad would wait.”
“I'm not him. You're not him! He is not in charge here!” Lucy snapped. She paced in front of the vault door. “Open it.”
“Wait,” Topher pleaded. “Five minutes. I don't want to marry you in a holding cell. Be patient. If it makes you feel better, we can have Clifford call the Assistant Manager and confirm that he's on his way.”
Lucy pursed her lips and crossed her arms across her chest, a stubborn woman, but moveable nonetheless. “Fine. Five minutes. Make him call.”
Topher kissed her forehead. “Alright.” Then he turned back to the corner where they'd left the manager. But the manager was not there.
The happy couple had been so busy arguing that neither of them had noticed Tom Clifford slink away.
“Shit. Where is he?”
Tom's bleeding nose left a thin trail of blood that followed his progression under a teller's booth and to the nearest big, red panic button.
Lucy started for the manager, gun drawn, ready to blow his head open. Topher grabbed her free hand and pulled. “No cigar today, honey. We need to go.”
She growled, still moving towards Tom Clifford, the man who made it impossible for her to prove to her father that she was as good as he. Topher pulled harder. “No need to add murder to your rap-sheet. Come on, Luce! Let's go.”
She ran with him, past the bank manager, past the vault they hadn't opened and the safety deposit boxes they hadn't broken into. The sound of sirens was getting more common to Lucy, like incessant ringing in her ears. They never sounded as far away as they were, and they were never so close as when she thought she had time.
She and Topher ran through the back door and into the range of two armed police cruisers. Four cops. Four guns. No way out.
Topher raised their joined hands in surrender. “Better luck next time, huh?”

Chapter Thirteen – The Man in the Hard Hat

Lucy's return to the fourth floor was kicked off by a sudden reunion. The man with the hard hat, who'd given her directions earlier, knelt there, across from the elevator, his arm shoved into the underbelly of an air conditioning unit. The elevator bell rang, and he looked up.
“You!” the man in the hard hat said. “Hey, you're not supposed to be here. In case you haven't noticed, the earth is shaking, this building's on fire, and security's looking for you.”
“I need to get out of here,” she said. She stepped out of the elevator.
He stood, wiping the grease off his hands. “I know that you need to get