Christina Harlin My Boss is a Serial Killer (epu

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.I can damned well leave if I want to.” My voice didn’t have as much bravado as I liked.I needed to be able to leave here as quietly as possible, if I wanted to do Bill any good.Suddenly, to my horror, a face appeared at the end of the aisle, ugly and menacing.The evil troll Lloyd had found us.Charlene, apparently feeling the cold prickling of his gaze down her spine, turned and stared at him as well.He sneered at us.“Want to tell me what’s going on back here? I thought it was just the file clerks who liked to hide in these back rows.”Charlene started to say something, but I interrupted her, putting a hand to her arm to show it was nothing personal.I was fed up to my eyeballs with asinine behavior and if I wasn’t going to take it from Terry Bronk, I certainly wasn’t going to take it from Lloyd.Even though Lloyd was scarier.“I’m in trouble,” I told him, softly but clearly.“And Bill Nestor is in trouble.I’m trying to get out of the office without anyone seeing me so I can help him.”Charlene looked wide-eyed at me.“Do you know where he is?”“Maybe.I’m not sure.”“Where?” asked the scowling Lloyd.I looked from Charlene to Lloyd with a heavy sigh and then finally said, “I’m not sure, but I think he could have gone to Suzanne’s house.”“Makes sense,” said Lloyd.“I can’t believe no one else thought of it,” said Charlene.I resumed, “But the point is moot if I can’t slip out of here unnoticed.I can’t get to the stairs or the elevator without passing the conference room, and there are six pissed-off administrators in there who would love to fire me.At the front garage door are just as many cops who possibly don’t have Bill’s best interests in mind, and I’m in a pickle.”Rheumily Lloyd stared at Charlene.“What’s your business in this?”“She’s using my car, if that matters—”“Where’s your car?” he asked her.“Um, it’s…” she gestured vaguely in the air.“On Level P2, by the air conditioners sort of.”“Take the service elevator, then,” Lloyd said, as if this were the most painfully obvious thing ever.He motioned for me to follow, and I did it because I was too stupefied to do anything else.He led us through the back stacks, mostly out of sight from the rest of the office, to the corner of the file room where the maintenance access rooms were located.The service elevator was here, and as a security measure, it was unusable to anyone except the maintenance staff, Lloyd, and his minions.You had to have a special all-access keycard to even open the doors.Lloyd produced said keycard and opened the elevator for me.I stepped inside, still too shocked to find words.“Remember it’s the red Corolla,” Charlene said to me, her eyes flicking nervously toward Lloyd, as if she were standing beside a raccoon that might or might not have rabies.I nodded mutely.“Think you can help Bill out?” Lloyd asked me, and I nodded again as the elevator doors began to swoosh closed.Lloyd said, gruffly, “I always liked Bill Nestor.”My daring escapade came close to a crashing halt in the garage, though, over the stupidest little thing.Full of smugness for both getting a car and finding a sneaky way out of the office, I pulled up to the exit, rolled down the window, and reached for my keycard to open the garage door.But then I remembered that I wasn’t in my car and that I hadn’t thought to ask Charlene where she kept hers.I fumbled in the console for a moment, glancing up to see an eagle-eyed young police officer watching me intently.He was on the outside, viewing me through the glass of the fire exit door that was next to the garage door, and I figured that I had about thirty seconds before he came to ask me what the problem was.To ask me where I worked.To ask me who I worked for.Most of us kept our cards in our cars somewhere.There were only two or three good places to keep a card.Okay.Not in the console, not in the glove box.I checked spot number three, in the sun visor, and felt a wash of relief so great it dizzied me, when Charlene’s blue electronic access card flopped into my lap.As I drove out, the uniformed officer looked at the license plate of Charlene’s car and then looked briefly into my face, which I kept half bored, half impatient.He drew himself up as if he was going to stop me and ask a question—maybe it had been fairly apparent that I was in an unfamiliar vehicle.On an impulse, I held up the employee address list that Charlene had printed for me, and waved it as if it meant something.Good old rules of looking busy: always carry a piece of paper, and always look a little worried.The officer waved me through, and I was outside on the sunny streets of Kansas City.Chapter SixteenI knew Suzanne’s end of town well enough to find her house after one missed exit and a couple of wrong turns.She lived, as most of us did, on a cluttered residential street of young trees and exactly-the-same houses.The only thing that distinguished her putty-colored home from the others was the godawful long name on the mailbox.Since it was a weekday morning and still during the school year, the neighborhood was mostly deserted.A retiree was out walking his retriever.Nothing else.I parked Charlene’s car in Suzanne’s driveway and climbed out, inspecting the house critically for signs of Bill.Aside from a dead giveaway, like his poking his head out the window and waving at me, the only other sign I could think to look for was maniacally neat curtains.But Suzanne had shades, so I saw nothing except an ordinary house.I had driven all the way out here, so I might as well give her a knock and see if Suzanne had heard from Bill.If she actually was sick, she might not know anything about what had happened, and she could have spoken to him without understanding the importance.I went to Suzanne’s front door and rang her doorbell.On the way here, had I actually been able to bring my purse along with me, I would have called Gus and told him what I was doing.A guilty feeling hit me when I missed Suzanne’s exit that perhaps this little blow I was striking for my self-respect was counterproductive to the job the police were trying to do.My lecture from the night before—as nicely as it had ended—actually did make an impression on me about the importance of communicating with the authorities.I even reached for my purse to call the police department before remembering that I’d left it back on the conference room table.Brilliant.Not only had I left my purse, but I wasn’t even in my own car [ Pobierz całość w formacie 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