Overkill

24

“You did that,” were the first words out of Katherine Darcy’s mouth.

“I’d love to take the credit for it,” said Jaywalker. “But I’m not half that clever.” He explained that the thing must have been on some sort of timer, and that it seemed to have been their bad luck to discover that the hard way.

“Don’t the night-court judges use this elevator?” Darcy asked. Or at least her voice asked. It was an eerie feeling, talking with somebody in such complete blackness. Sure, Jaywalker had had his share of conversations in the dark and then some. But not this kind of dark. Not absolute, utter, unrelenting darkness. It was spooky, is what it was.

“Don’t they?” Darcy’s voice was asking.

“Don’t they what?”

“Use this elevator? The judges who work night court?”

“Yeah,” said Jaywalker. “But they have special keys to override the system. Like the fire department.”

“Still-”

“What’s tonight?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Darcy. “Get-Stranded-in-the-Elevator Night?”

“No, what night of the week?”

“Monday,” she said. “Or at least it was until you proclaimed it morning.”

“Is that why you wore black-”

“What?”

“-to show the jury you were in mourning for Victor Quinones?”

“Are you out of your mind?” said the voice.

Okay, so maybe he’d been mistaken about that. “Sorry,” he said.

The voice said nothing.

“Anyway,” he told it, “if it’s Monday, or was Monday, that means there’s no night court tonight. Or last night.”

“Great.” The voice was back. “So what do we do?”

“We start,” he said, “by playing with the buttons.”

He found them quickly enough simply by running his hands across the front panels of the elevator. But no matter how he pushed or pulled them, or in what order or combination, none of them did anything. With some additional groping, he located the slit for the override key and spent twenty minutes trying to turn it with one of his keys or pick it with a paper clip. Eventually the end of the paper clip broke off, sticking in the slit and making further attempts impossible. He spent twenty more minutes unsuccessfully trying to find a release mechanism for the door, and another ten assuring himself that there was no emergency phone anywhere in the elevator.

“I give up,” he said.

“It’s getting hot in here,” Darcy said.

She was right. The elevator’s air-conditioning had obviously gone off when the lights and power had. And it was the middle of May, after all, and the past few Mays, present month included, had been pretty much holding their own in the global-warming sweepstakes. Jaywalker thought about commenting on Darcy’s decision to wear a long skirt but decided against it. He’d taken off his jacket, loosened his tie and turned up his shirtsleeves even before he’d played Find the Button. Then again, he tended to do those things as soon as he was out of the courtroom.

But yes, it was getting hot.

“How long can we last in here?” Darcy asked.

“Oh, at least another five minutes.”

“I’m serious.” And she sounded it.

“Longer than you’d think,” said Jaywalker.

“What’s that supposed to that mean?”

“That I have absolutely no idea,” he admitted.

She tried calling out for a while, alternating between “Help!” and “Hello there!” She tried banging on the walls, stomping on the floor, and shaking the elevator back and forth. It turned out to be well insulated, padded and impervious to shaking.

Jaywalker took off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. Placing his back against the wall of the elevator, he allowed himself to slide down until he came to a sitting position. “Relax,” he said. “You’re using up too much oxygen.” A moment later he felt her join him. Not quite felt her, but sensed her closeness.

“Seriously,” she said. “How long before we run out of oxygen?”

“I once read you don’t die of oxygen starvation,” he assured her. “Carbon dioxide poisoning kills you first.”

“That’s comforting,” she said. “Hey.”

“Hey, what?”

“That was a great summation.”

“Yours, too.”

“No,” she said. “I really mean it. By the time you sat down, half of me was rooting for your kid.”

“Right. And then you got up and blew us out of the water.”

“I was only doing my job,” she said.

“Well, you did it very well. For a rookie.”

He felt an elbow jab him in the ribs. Or maybe it had been a fist; in the dark it was hard to tell. But he readied his hand to catch it next time, just in case.

“How did you get those clowns to show up in Oakland Raiders outfits?” she wanted to know.

“I swear I had nothing to do with that,” he said. “I ran into a former client, and he wanted to know all about the case. So I told him. He must’ve figured it out on his own that it might help if they were to make a cameo appearance.”

“Jaywalker the innocent.”

“Always.”

“And this is for making a fool of Detective Fortune, who just happens to be married to my neph-”

He caught her on the word this, or pretty close to it. And it must have been a fist, because he caught her by the wrist. It was surprisingly thin, thin enough for him to wrap his hand completely around it and hold on. And it must have been the wrist farther from him, because when he pulled on it, the rest of her came with it, across his body and onto his lap. They kissed, or at least he did.

“That was my eye,” she told him.

He tried again.

“Better.”

But if making out in the dark on the floor of an elevator was Jaywalker’s idea of a good time, it apparently wasn’t Darcy’s. “We have to get some air in here,” she insisted, “before we die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Carbon dioxide poisoning.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No you didn’t,” he said. “You said-”

“Whatever. Get us some air, Jaywalker.”

As much as he hated to get up, he did. This time he reached upward, for the ceiling. He figured there had to be a removable panel somewhere up there. Didn’t all elevators have one, in order to get at the cables? But the ceiling was too high. He crouched low and jumped. Nothing.

“What are you doing?” Darcy wanted to know.

“Trying to get you some air.”

“By doing jumping jacks?”

He explained his thinking to her. It was she who came up with the idea of climbing up on his shoulders, as he would remind her several times over the days to come.

The first impediment, as they quickly discovered when she placed one foot atop his extended knee, was her heels. The result was painful, but easily enough remedied. Not so her long narrow skirt, which made it difficult for her to bend her own knees and would have made sitting on his shoulders all but impossible.

“Don’t look,” she warned him.

Don’t look?

He heard a faint zipping sound. Make that an unzipping sound. Though in the dark, it turns out, they’re hard to tell apart. A moment later her foot was back on his knee, this time heel-less.

The physics of climbing onto another person’s shoulders are not that complicated. The climber, after placing one foot securely atop the climbee’s horizontally extended upper leg, swings the opposite leg over the climbee’s back and shoulders. Holding that first foot with one hand, and now grasping the second foot with his free hand, the climbee straightens himself up and into a standing position, all the while maintaining not only his own balance but that of the person comfortably perched atop his shoulders, as well.

And that’s all there is to it, except for the rather obvious caveat that in order to achieve success, the first two steps must have been properly executed.

If you’ve ever ridden a horse, you know how absolutely essential it is that in the initial process of mounting the animal, you place the correct foot in the stirrup. It doesn’t take all that much in the way of imagination to predict the outcome when the wrong foot is used instead. Now in all fairness to Katherine Darcy, it is true that horses are generally mounted-at least when humans are doing the mounting-in the daytime, or when sufficient ambient light is present to determine which way the animal happens to be facing.

Katherine Darcy did not have that advantage.

Which explains why, when she finally came to rest perched securely upon Jaywalker’s shoulders, the two of them were facing in very different directions. One hundred and eighty degrees different, to be precise.

Even in the dark, they both recognized the problem immediately, though problem is hardly the word Jaywalker would have used to describe the situation. But as easy as it had been to get there, no ready solution presented itself for correcting things. Think back to the horse-and-rider analogy, if you will, and imagine the rider, saddled up but suddenly facing the tail end of the beast, attempting to turn around. Okay, now try to imagine it with Jaywalker’s head in the way.

“What now?” asked Darcy.

Jaywalker tried to answer, but his words came out unintelligible even to him. And it was no wonder; he was talking directly into what could discretely be described at Darcy’s lower lower abdomen, and every time he opened his mouth his lips kept getting stuck on bare flesh. He tried tilting his head back as far as he could. The result was substantial pain in the back of his neck and significantly less fun for his lips. But it did enable him to speak out loud.

“Just a minute,” he said. “Hold on tight.” And he let go of her with one hand, in order to free it.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked, her weight shifting suddenly as he bent at the waist, trying to, well, make an adjustment of sorts.

“Nothing,” he said.

“What nothing?”

“Relax,” he said. “It’s a guy thing.”

He straightened up, resumed his two-handed grip and told her to reach up and feel around above her. “There should be a panel right in the middle of the ceiling,” he told her. “Either it’ll push up easily, or there’ll be screws to loosen it.”

“I need you to move,” she said.

“Which way.”

“To the left.”

He moved one step to the left.

“No,” she said. “The other left.”

Another complication that came with facing-in-opposite-directions syndrome, as they soon discovered, was the matter of “forward” and “back.” But once they’d gotten their commands and responses in synch, the rest turned out to be surprisingly easy. Within a minute or two Darcy had located and loosened the four thumbscrews that kept the ceiling panel in place, and pushed the panel itself upward and off to one side of the roof. Not only did that act succeed in releasing excess carbon dioxide and ushering in cooler-and presumably more oxygen-rich-air, it allowed for just a hint of bluish light to filter in, as well.

It took some doing, but Jaywalker managed to lower Darcy to the floor of the elevator almost without mishap, the relevant portions of them being sufficiently cushioned by the carpeting as to produce only full-throated laughter and a measure of lingering tenderness. Or perhaps the tenderness might better be ascribed to the events that would transpire over the next several hours. The carpeting, it would turn out, was in fact padded.

But not all that padded.

And had it not been for intervention-not so much of the divine sort as the judicial-it’s highly likely that Katherine Darcy and Jaywalker would have spent the remainder of the morning happily engaged in those very same events. From Jaywalker’s perspective, it would have been all he could have asked for, understanding as he did how vastly over-rated sleep and sustenance tended to be. And if Darcy’s words and deeds were any indication at all, then the same could safely be said of her.

But intervention did indeed intervene.

As suddenly as they’d gone out at midnight, the lights came back on, the air-conditioning kicked in, and a humming noise started up. Almost immediately, the elevator began descending. As blinded by the brightness as he had been by the earlier darkness, Jaywalker began groping around for his clothes, grabbing his pants, his shirt and what he thought was a pair of black socks.

“That’s mine,” Darcy snapped.

“Is not.”

“Is, too,” she said. “Unless you wear a 34B.”

He handed it over.

By the time the elevator settled to a stop at the first floor, the two of them were more or less dressed. And although they stood side by side, facing the door as nonchalantly as they possibly could, as though simply waiting for it to open so they could be on their separate ways, they wouldn’t have fooled anyone with eyes to see. Hell, they wouldn’t have fooled Stevie Wonder.

But it wasn’t Stevie Wonder who was standing there when the door opened. Knowing that much was the easy part. For Jaywalker, the hard part was trying to place the familiar-looking man staring back at him, key in hand. At least he thought it was a man, though the women’s sunglasses and the platform heels gave him pause.

And then it dawned on him.

“Judge Sternbridge,” said Jaywalker, out of sheer amazement. Because it was in fact Miles Sternbridge, the head of the disciplinary committee. Miles Sternbridge, who’d meted out Jaywalker’s three-year suspension and had just last week dropped by Harold Wexler’s courtroom to make sure Jaywalker had been behaving himself. Miles Sternbridge, in platform heels.

And yet, if Jaywalker wasn’t mistaken, here was Sternbridge screaming at him.

“This is a private elevator! For judges only! What are you doing on it? And you’re with another of your hookers, I see!”

Jaywalker could feel Darcy about to say something, or perhaps explode, alongside him. He put a hand on her arm, first to quiet her, then to steer her past Sternbridge and toward the door that led out to the lobby. Only then did he turn back to address the judge.

“Nice shoes, your honor.”