Dead Drop

Chapter 3

Mukhtar stood over Ms. Tiffany with both hands flat on her desk when the explosion rocked the building. The windows nearest the front gate shattered, showering the room with tiny shards of glass. Large white tiles fell from the suspended ceiling. Bits of fiberglass insulation drifted down onto the desk like snow. He’d spent his younger years in war-torn Iraq and knew the bomb was close when it went off.

Ms. Tiffany clutched the phone to her ear with white knuckles. “What was that?”

The flat crack of semiautomatic gunfire and the screams of the dying answered her question.

A rampant twitch spread from the corners of her mouth to her round cheeks, her chin, and then her eyes — as if she’d lost all control over the muscles in her face.

“P-p-please don’t hurt me,” she stammered. “Only Mr. Cunningham and the security guys have the combination to the safe. It’s impossible for me to get to the money.”

Ms. Tiffany obviously thought he was there to rob her. Mukhtar threw up his hands in disgust, causing her to hold up the desk phone receiver like a shield between them.

“I do not want the money,” he said. “I am here to help.”

“I have two kids,” Ms. Tiffany babbled, breaking down in earnest. “Please…”

Mukhtar pushed away the fear knotting in his belly and looked down at the pitiful thing. “What must I do to show you I am not your enemy?”

The woman stared at him, blinking back tears, her brain playing some perverse loop of what she thought he was saying. “I don’t have the combination—”

“Ms. Tiffany,” he said, affecting what he hoped was a soft and calming tone. “We need to call the police.” Perhaps a task would calm her down.

She pressed the phone against her ear in a shaking hand. “The line is d-d-dead,” she said, dropping the phone and cowering lower behind the desk. “Please, I am a mother, for heaven’s sake. I beg—”

The office door flew open, causing both Mukhtar and Ms. Tiffany to flinch. Mukhtar felt certain he was about to be shot. Instead, the park manager, Mr. Cunningham, stumbled across the threshold clutching a wide-eyed little boy tight in his arms. Wearing only a bathing suit, the child was maybe two or three years old and covered from head to toe in gray soot. He blinked, staring at nothing with huge brown eyes, likely deafened from the initial blast and too frightened to utter even a whimper. Mukhtar heaved a sigh of relief when he saw it was the man he’d originally come to see. Mr. Cunningham was smart. He would know what to do.

“I believe Fadila and her friends are responsible,” Mukhtar said, spilling all his information at once. He felt a pressing need to explain everything he knew to someone in authority. “I came to tell you I saw Saleem had an explosive belt—”

Mr. Cunningham’s eyes fluttered. He pushed the child at arm’s length as if he wanted someone to take him. His shoulders sagged, and it was obvious he would not be able to hold the position long. Only then did Mukhtar see the jagged shard of wood sticking from his boss’s bloody shirt just below his ribs. Mr. Cunningham’s face grew more ashen by the moment. He gave the boy a final shove, pressing him into Mukhtar’s arms before staggering over to push Ms. Tiffany out of the way and collapse in her chair.

“Park… lights,” he gasped, his breath barely strong enough to propel the words. Sooty, bloodstained hands trembled over the computer keys. “Have to… turn off lights. Make it… easier… for everyone… to hide…”

Cunningham gave a final click of his mouse and the office fell dark. Mukhtar peeked out through the mini-blinds to watch as the main lighting all over the park flicked off, leaving the concrete pathways, the concessions, and the water attractions bathed in the eerie yellow glow of the small number of emergency bulbs. It would indeed be much easier now for people to hide in the shadows. This simple act had saved countless lives. His mission complete, Mr. Cunningham slid out of the chair and pitched face-first onto the carpet. Mukhtar had been around death often enough to know it when he saw it, and this man was dead.

Now completely unhinged, Ms. Tiffany threw her jowly face back toward the ceiling and let go a burbling howl. Her head bobbed in time with the intermittent rattle of gunfire outside, as if she were absorbing the bullets with her body and not just her ears.

“Be quiet!” the Iraqi boy hissed. “You’ll bring them down on top of us!”

The woman leaped over her dead boss and ran to the corner as if she thought she’d find a door there. She bounced when she hit the wall and collapsed there in a heap, screaming as if she’d been set on fire. Mukhtar had seen such a thing and she sounded exactly like that. Some people went catatonic at the death of a friend — or the prospect of dying themselves — others went immediately and completely crazy, as if their last shred of sanity had been whisked away in the awful cyclone of violence.

Mukhtar had no idea where to go, but he knew that to stay here in this place with this babbling woman meant eventual and certain death. He pressed the little child to his chest and then ducked out the door into the vague and inky blackness of the water park — and ran.