Pulse

41

I t was like watching dinosaurs at play, if you overlooked the huge, knobby tires.

The roar had awakened her at eight o’clock sharp and continued steadily for the last three hours, so she never got back to sleep. Mildred Dash stood at her apartment window and watched the earth-moving equipment across the street.

The brick and stone walls of the buildings had come down days ago. Now the dinosaurs were scooting the wreckage around, even moving some of it with cranes (so like a brontosaurus, a crane), so it could be scooped up, loaded into squat and powerful dump trucks, and hauled away.

Mildred was tall and a bit too statuesque to be attractive. Though refined, even regal, in bearing, she was too rough hewn to be feminine. Her gray-tinged black hair was coarse, her features chiseled but not finely. Her nose was slightly too prominent, her chin too pointed. When she was very young, the boys had considered her a knockout. Now those same boys would have found her a little scary, like a dreaded substitute teacher.

Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, had learned not to take her lightly.

She was still wearing her robe, and wasn’t planning on going out today. There was no way she could escape the feeling that if she left her apartment, left the building, the neighborhood, even for a short while, the dinosaurs would attack. She would return not to her home but to ruins.

As a former practicing attorney, she knew the value of a fait accompli. The destruction of her building wouldn’t harm anyone, if the building was completely unoccupied. Even if she’d had enough legal claim to delay demolition almost indefinitely, her arguments would become moot in the dust of debris. Mildred Dash knew how the law worked-and how it didn’t work.

As matters stood, Jack Enders would continue his attempts to intimidate her, and kindly rattlesnake Joseph Coil would continue his folksy charm assault. They continued in their attempts to assess her, to read her motives and her intentions. It didn’t make sense to them. Of course it wouldn’t-to them. Even if she were to explain it to them, they’d nod their supposed understanding and then offer her money. Or at least try to talk her out of her intransigence. Become her saviors instead of her pursuers.

Mildred understood the puzzle piece that was missing, and whose absence caused all their other assumptions to be off the mark. Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, knew about the limited time she had left. They didn’t see why she wanted to spend it here, in the midst of demolition and debris. This had been her life, with her husband, her children, her tragedies and joy. Her meaningful life had been here, was still here.

Still here.

It was so simple, so foreign to them, that they overlooked it, couldn’t see it.

She refused to end her life before she died.

Jody found herself alone in the offices of Enders and Coil. Dollie, the receptionist, was up front in the anteroom minding the phones, but that didn’t count. Dollie didn’t venture back into the main offices unless she had a good reason, and with Jack Enders and the associates in court, and Joseph Coil on his way to Philadelphia to take a deposition, there wouldn’t be a good reason.

Jody took one of the two flash drives she’d bought on credit from an office supply and computer shop on East Fifty-fourth Street, and slipped into Enders’s office.

It was more than merely quiet in there; it was hushed. Jody had been told the offices of Enders and Coil had been specially insulated so they were virtually soundproof. That wasn’t quite true. If she listened closely, Jody could hear the rushing sound of Manhattan traffic.

Enders’s desktop computer sat blankly on its oak table nestled to the side of the desk. With a glance out through the slatted blinds covering the window to the hall, Jody booted up the computer. She’d lightly searched the office a few times and had no trouble coming up with the list of passwords Enders used. Genius9578 gave her access. She slipped the flash drive into a USB port on the side of the computer and copied the files and e-mail contents of Enders’s hard drive.

It took less than five minutes.

She removed the flash drive and returned it to her purse, then repeated the process with the second flash drive in Joseph Coil’s office.

So much more convenient than rummaging through paper files in steel cabinets, Jody mused. She regarded technology as her friend.

Jody and her friend were going to see what they could learn in addition to what she already suspected about Enders and Coil. And Meeding Properties.

Safely back in her own shoebox-sized office, she had to smile. She also had to admit to herself that she enjoyed what she was doing. It wasn’t only trying to right a wrong. It was also the secretiveness, the spying, the taunting of fate. She liked figuring the odds, then proving she’d figured right by experiencing the danger and accomplishing her goal. The danger. God help her, she loved the danger.

If either Enders or Coil had caught her copying the contents of their computers, all hell would not only have broken lose, it would have run riot.

Jody understood that what she’d done was illegal, and there would be no point in pretending she hadn’t known. Not only would she have lost her internship, she would have lost all possible chances for a position at a respectable firm. If she’d been caught copying files, she probably would have been arrested and charged. After all, this was a law office.

On the other hand, the law was malleable.