The new shirt came out of a supply closet on the third floor. It still smelled like bleach.
No green tag this time. No name. Just me and a bucket with a false bottom.
Her boot hit the landing before her voice did. Another man stood behind her with his arms folded, watching.
Rina: This floor is dead tonight. So who the fuck let you up?
She put me into the wall with her forearm. My cheek hit concrete and my mouth filled with the taste of a penny.
Rina: I asked you a question, bitch.
Rina: You want to keep those teeth? Then talk. Or I'll let the dock boys pass you around for the price of a beer.
Her voice stayed flat, like she was reading a grocery list. I could hear how much she wanted to do it.
Rina: I could cut your throat and drop you in the tank. Nobody finds you. Nobody even looks.
Odile: Sorry, miss. Sorry. Wrong floor. I get lost easy.
She threw my bucket down the stairs. Water ran off the steps in a sheet.
Rina: Sit in there and think about your life. Move, and I'll break both your legs and leave you crawling.
My lip was split and her fingers had left a new map on my arm, red turning purple over the old ones.
I waited until her steps died out. Then I went up, because the stairs she locked me in were the one place nobody watched.
His office door stood open. Lamp on. Chair pulled out like someone had just left it.
A door left open is not a mistake. It is a hand held out.
A black book sat square to the lamp. Dock accounts. Numbers in a sloppy hand I knew from three years of his trash.
The accounts added up to nothing. He had written a whole fake book and left it where I would find it.
A new camera sat in the vent over the desk. Fresh screws, angled to catch the chair and the door. I hadn't put it there.
I had a screwdriver in my pocket. I turned my face away and let it watch my hands instead.
Then something clicked that did not belong to the building.
A brick of gray putty taped under his desk. A phone timer, green in the dark. Four minutes and eleven seconds.
A circle with a line through it, pressed into the tape with a thumbnail.
I knew that mark. My hands went cold and I stopped being a cleaner for a second.
Gray on top. Blue on the side. A pressure switch underneath that would not like company.
I cut blue and held the contact shut with two fingers. The casing snapped down on my thumb.
It took the nail and a strip of skin. Blood ran to my wrist and dripped on his desk.
The timer went black with twenty-two seconds left.
The clipboard on his desk had a coffee cart slip signed at one forty by his night man.
I wrote on the inside of the fake cover. Ask him who carried the cart up. Ask him what he got paid to look away.
He came in at four with his coat still on and read the note twice. Then he laughed, low, like it hurt.
Ettore: She left me a present.
Rina: I caught a cleaner on your stairs an hour ago. No tag. Split lip.
Ettore: Did you hurt her?
Rina: Not enough to teach her manners.
Then he looked up at the new camera. Straight into it. Straight at me.
Ettore: Who the fuck are you?
Ettore: Leave this floor open every night at one. No men on the door.
Rina: You want to leave your door open for a ghost.
Ettore: She saved my life twice. Open the fucking door.
I turned the phone off and sat in the dark with my bleeding thumb in my mouth.
Somebody had put a bomb in his office with a mark I knew from a long time ago, and I had just given him the only name I could.