Undisturbed (1)

The manager was still in the office at ten, which the schedule had not said he would be.

He was putting things into a canvas bag that did not need them putting in, and he kept at it while Melissa stood at the counter with her jacket still zipped. There was a pot of coffee on the burner behind him. It had been there long enough that the surface had gone to a skin, and the smell had worked into the room the way smoke works into a coat.

On the wall over his shoulder, laminated and screwed down at the corners, was the site map. Two long buildings drawn as rectangles with the rows lettered inside them, the outdoor run along the east fence, the office, the shed, a red arrow at the gate. She had been looking at it since she came in.

"You're the one they sent," he said.

"Yes."

"Eighteen."

"Yes."

He looked at her for about as long as it took to decide it was not his problem. He worked for the storage company. She worked for the outfit that had the contract, and the two facts sat on opposite sides of a line neither of them had drawn.

"Keys." He put a ring on the counter and turned it so the tags faced her. "Office. Gate override, you won't need it, the code works. Master."

The master was brass and unremarkable and did not look like it should open anything.

"That's the company locks. Every door's got one. Some renters put their own on top of that. Those aren't yours. If a renter lock's hanging open you log the number and walk away."

"All right."

"People get funny about their own locks." He pulled the drawstring on the bag. "The company lock, you can open. That's the whole point of it."

She put the ring in her jacket pocket, then took it out again and hung it on the belt loop where she could feel the weight of it, because a thing in a pocket can come out with your hand.

"Log's there. You initial every round. Four rounds, one every two hours, and you don't do them at exactly the same time or people learn the pattern." He said that last part the way a person says something he has been told to say. "The buildings are on sensors. They'll come on."

"Shed?"

He looked up. "What?"

"There's a shed on the north side. It's not on the key ring."

"No. That's tools. Day people." He shouldered the bag. "Nothing happens here. We had a run of copper off the outdoor row last spring, before they put the fence up and the camera on the gate. That's the whole reason you've got a job. Since then, nothing."

On the map, C was the near row of the second building, and the numbers ran from the door end. She had it counted before he finished talking.

There was a question with about six words in it. She had been carrying it since the interview and had taken it out and looked at it in the truck on the way here, and there were two ways to say it that did not sound like anything. She got as far as opening her mouth.

Then she looked at the coffee pot instead. There was a brown ring baked onto the glass at the level the coffee had stood at that morning, and above the ring the glass was clear, and you could tell from the clear part exactly how much of the day the pot had spent boiling itself down.

"Okay," she said.

He stopped at the door and told her the coffee was hers if she wanted it, and went out. His truck made a long sound on the gravel, a shorter one at the gate, and then nothing.

She poured the coffee down the office sink. It came out in one piece for the first second. She rinsed the carafe twice and set it upside down on the rack and put the basket in the bin, and the smell was still in the room, and it would be in the room all night. She wiped the burner ring with a paper towel because someone had let it cook on and she could not sit at that desk with it there.

The desk drawer had pens in a tray, a stapler, a roll of clear packing tape lying on its side with the end pulled up and stuck to itself. She took a pen and shut the drawer.

Then she squared the logbook to the edge of the desk and wrote the time.

There were four monitors on the shelf above. Gate. Office. Lot. The fourth cycled between the two outdoor rows and then went black for three seconds before it started again, and she watched it do that twice to be sure it was doing it on purpose.

Her identification hung on a lanyard around her neck, her photograph on it and her name and the year printed under a company logo that had nothing to do with this building. She tucked the card inside her collar so it would stop swinging.

At 10:20 she took the flashlight and went out.

---

The cold had already come down onto the gravel. It was the kind that does not move, that sits on a surface and waits, and by morning it would be frost across the whole lot and the day people would track it into the office in the grooves of their boots. Her breath went out ahead of her and hung there and she walked through it.

The outdoor row ran along the fence on the east side, twenty-two doors, corrugated and painted a blue that the sodium light turned grey. She walked it with the beam low, along the seam where the door met the concrete. That is where a door tells you it is not shut. People look at the lock, and the lock is the last thing worth looking at, because a lock will hang there closed on a door standing open four inches and be perfectly satisfied with itself.

Door six was down but not seated. There was a gap under the left edge, less than an inch, enough to see if you were looking at the seam and nothing if you were not.

She set the flashlight on the ground with the beam on the door, took the handle in both hands and lifted. It came up eight inches with a sound that went out across the whole lot and did not seem to stop anywhere. She held it there a second to let the sound finish. Then she brought it down and it went home, and the disc lock swung once in the hasp where it had been hanging closed the entire time, doing nothing.

She turned the lock so the keyhole faced out along the row, the way the others faced. Then she picked up the flashlight.

Door fourteen had a padlock on it as well as the company lock, and the padlock was open. Not hanging. Closed through the staple but not snapped, the shackle sitting in the hole with a hair of daylight under it, which meant somebody had pushed it in and not pressed down.

Not hers. She put the beam on it long enough to get the number and wrote the number on the back of her hand with the pen, because the clipboard was under her arm and her hand was closer, and went on.

---

She let herself into Building One at 10:51.

The corridor ran the length of the building with roll-up doors down both sides, and the lights came on in banks ahead of her as she moved and went off behind her about fifteen seconds after she had passed. She counted her steps between banks so she would know when the dark was coming. Nineteen at her pace. Twenty-one if she stopped to work a lock.

A hundred and twenty doors, two rows. She put her hand on every company lock and turned it against the hasp, which took less than a second each time, and none of them moved. Fifty-one of the doors carried nothing but the company's lock. The rest had a second one, a padlock through the slot in the latch bar or a shackle through a staple welded to the frame, and one had a combination dial turned to zero. She kept the number without deciding what she wanted it for.

Halfway down the second row a hasp came away from the door when she touched it.

She put the light on it. The lock was closed. The shackle had gone through the staple and not through the bar, so the bar was sitting loose against the frame with the lock beside it looking exactly the way a locked door looks, and the door would have rolled straight up under it.

She got the master out and opened the lock and lifted the bar and set it over the staple properly and put the shackle back through both and pressed it until it clicked. Then she pulled down on the bar with her whole weight to see whether it would come, and it did not come.

That was the third thing she had fixed and nobody would ever know about any of them.

Building Two was Rows C and D, and it was colder than One, because it sat further from the road and had no vehicle traffic on the west side to move the air. She went in at 11:34 and started with C.

Twenty-eight doors on the left and twenty-nine on the right, which she had thought was a mistake in her own counting the first time and had checked. It was not a mistake. There was a service panel where the twenty-ninth door would have been on the left.

She started up the right-hand side.

She did them the way she had done the other hundred and forty. Hand on the lock, turn it against the hasp, look at the seam, move. She was at eighteen when she noticed she had stopped counting how many she had done and started counting how many were left, and she went on doing the locks properly anyway, one and then the next, because the ones between here and there were still doors.

Eleven.

The lights ahead of her came on in a bank of four and the ones two banks back went out. She checked a seam that did not need checking.

Nine.

She could hear her own boots and nothing else. The building had no sound in it of its own. That was worth knowing, and she had not known it until tonight, and she made a note of it the way she made notes of things and then put it down.

Six.

Her hand was doing the locks a little faster than the rest of her was walking, so that she was reaching for the next one before she had finished with the last, and she made herself stop at the fifth from the end and do it at the proper speed.

Four.

The door was the same blue as every other door. The company lock sat in the housing with its face turned in toward the frame, which meant nobody had squared it in a long time, which meant nothing at all.

Above it, through the slot in the latch bar, there was a brass padlock.

It had gone the colour brass goes. Dull in the flat of it, and where the shackle came out of the body there was a bloom, pale green and crusted, the kind that comes up slowly in cold air over years and then stops.

She put the master into the disc lock. It turned. She took the disc lock out of the hasp and held it in her left hand and it was warm from her pocket, where nothing else in the building was warm.

She put her right hand on the padlock.

It did not move. She had not expected it to move.

She turned it in the slot to bring the keyhole round to the light. It was a keyhole for a flat key with a wave cut into it and the master was not that and had never been that, and she took the master off the ring anyway and put the tip of it against the hole and it stopped a quarter inch in, the way it was always going to stop.

She got both hands on the body and pulled up against the slot, hard enough that the latch bar rang once against the door, and the sound went the length of the corridor and came back and the lights did not care.

She stood there with her hand on it. The bloom came off green on her fingers.

The lights above her went out. She did not put a hand up to bring them back, and she stayed in it, and the exit sign at the end of the corridor was red and small and lit nothing.

Then she moved enough to start the bank overhead, and put the disc lock back through the hasp and closed it and turned the face out to the corridor so it matched the rest of the row.

She did the remaining twenty-five doors of Row C, and then all sixty of Row D, and by the end of Building Two she had sixty-eight doors carrying nothing but the company's lock.

She initialled the round at 12:06. Under it she wrote the number of the outdoor unit with the unsnapped padlock, from the back of her hand, and then she washed her hands at the office sink and the ink came off grey and the green did not.

Three rounds left.

 

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