Women of the Dark Streets Read online

  “Most people wouldn’t know that,” Elsa said, amused.

  “Most people don’t have five-year-old nieces who watch it at least once a day, even when you beg her not to, because how many times can one person endure ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’ without going crazy?”

  “That’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it?” Elsa asked.

  “Absolutely.” Lisa-Marie showed her dimples again. “I have no intention of subjecting you to Dick Van Dyke or any faux Cockney accents. But as a longtime resident of Columbus, I feel terrible for anyone stuck eating hotel food when there’s a great Italian restaurant nearby. How do you feel about fettuccini?”

  Now it was Elsa’s turn to smile. “Love it.”

  *

  Near midnight, an unmarked black utility van pulled into the hotel parking lot. Andrew popped the side door for Elsa and she climbed in. He was sucking on the straw of an empty Frappuccino cup and had cinnamon frosting on his chin.

  “We stopped for breakfast,” he said, burping. “Late-night snack. Whatever.”

  “Saved you one,” said Christopher from the driver’s seat. He always drove because he liked being behind the wheel. As opposed to flying, which he hated. Andrew always teased him about that: a guy who hated to fly, and his job was to fly around and fix things.

  Elsa said, “I had dinner. A real dinner. With vegetables. You’ve heard of them?”

  Andrew burped. “Filled with radioactive fallout from that Japanese reactor. It’s spread all over the world by now, carried by the winds. Seeps into the earth. You’re much healthier with artificial food substances.”

  Christopher checked his rearview mirrors, though traffic was non-existent at this hour. “You look different. Did these vegetables happen to come with some extra-friendly companionship?”

  “None of your business,” Elsa replied.

  “You scored!” Andrew grabbed the last cinnamon roll. “We’re proud of you.”

  “Shut up,” she suggested. “I didn’t score anything. Ships that pass in the night. I’m never going to see her again.”

  Which was a shame, really, because Lisa-Marie was bright and funny and they’d had a fabulous dinner. She lived with her parents, grandmother, sister, and two nieces because her job in legal aid didn’t pay much. One of her former clients was a night manager at Elsa’s hotel, and whenever she needed to escape the noise at home, he let her crash in one of the empty rooms. Lisa-Marie was a good flirt, but Elsa was accomplished at dodging. The dinner had ended with no promises, no exchange of phone numbers, but Lisa-Marie had sounded very sincere when she said, “Next time you’re in Columbus, you should call me.”

  It had been the nicest dinner Elsa had experienced in quite some time, and if the memory of Lisa-Marie’s bright eyes and pretty face still gave her a warm little glow, there was no harm in that.

  While Christopher circled around the airport, Elsa pulled on a brown jumpsuit that smelled like laundry detergent. The airport IDs were still warm from the laminator. The service parking lot was empty but for some cleaning vans and three airport security cars. Their local TSA contact was a big, unhappy-looking woman named Dorothy Armstrong.

  “I wish you guys could do this earlier at night,” she said. “I’ve got to be back here at six a.m.”

  Elsa sympathized, but all she said was, “Not our rules, ma’am.”

  “Less chance of nosy tourists,” Andrew added, eyeing the empty food kiosks.

  Midnight was actually early for them. Elsa preferred two or three a.m., but scheduling this job had already been hard—Christopher was due to fly to Memphis for a cleaning there, and Andrew had to travel out to San Francisco to train some new technicians. The job paid well but the travel was grinding, and at the lower levels, employee turnover was high.

  Columbus Airport had three security checkpoints for passengers. They headed directly for Concourse A, which had already shut down for the night. Four screening lanes, typical formation, with four traditional scanners and two enormous backscatter units. The machine that had alerted was a model AXB-78-09-DZ, one of the best out there, sometimes a little temperamental. Christopher powered it up, Elsa plugged her laptop into the control panel, and Andrew unpacked the containment unit.

  Dorothy Armstrong was still complaining. “I don’t understand why a software update can’t be done remotely. I mean, does it really take three people?”

  “It’s very complicated machinery,” Elsa said. “It’ll take about an hour if it goes well. You don’t have to stick around, if there’s something you’d rather be doing.”

  “I’d rather be sleeping,” Dorothy Armstrong said. “I’ll be in my office, how’s that?”

  Elsa nodded. “Sounds good.”

  It was a relief when she left. Not that Elsa couldn’t handle curiosity and questions, but the process went faster without distractions. She popped on her goggles and started scanning the AXB’s memory. Thousands of images flickered by, naked or nearly so—the vacationing grandmothers and grandfathers of America, the harried moms and impatient husbands and frazzled business travelers, the teenagers who’d forgotten to unpack their MP3 players. The images captured pacemakers, artificial hips, metal pins in bones, and other surgical remnants. Sometimes she saw people who’d had transgender surgery. Or people wearing sex toys. The screening was more invasive than people knew, and always uncomfortable for Elsa.

  The Class B image popped up. The passenger was a tall woman with nipple rings. Her body was shaded white against the black background. Elsa inverted the image. Black on white now, which highlighted the second image right behind her—a large, gray shape with two ominous wings, like a two-foot-wide bat.

  “That’s a biggie,” Elsa said. She pulled off the goggles and toggled the view for Andrew and Christopher.

  “Pretty girl,” Christopher said.

  Andrew glanced up while he screwed a transfer cable into the port under Elsa’s right hand. “Sweet demon.”

  “Only you could call a soul-sucking destructive force of the universe ‘sweet,’” Christopher complained.

  Elsa glanced around. It was just the three of them, and no one could possibly be eavesdropping. But loose lips sank ships, or so her father liked to say.

  Gleefully Andrew said, “You’re violating your security clearance.”

  “Tell the mice in the wall,” Christopher said. “How long’s she been in there?”

  “The demon is not a ‘she,’” Elsa said. “Don’t be sexist. Seventeen hours.”

  “Okay. Should be lulled into a nice sleep by now. Send her down.”

  The AXB hummed. The containment unit, which was the size of a large upright vacuum cleaner (and did a similar job, Elsa often thought), beeped as it began to work. The winged creature attached to the woman’s image slowly began to fade. This was the best part of Elsa’s job. Knowing that the technology that perplexed and aggravated so many travelers was, in fact, performing its job exceptionally well. Keeping the plane safe, and other passengers from infection, and preventing innocent people from who-knew-what disaster down the road.

  The demon went into storage in just under twenty minutes. It took another fifteen for Elsa to match up the passenger record with a report for the Department of Homeland Security and file the necessary paperwork. It wasn’t the woman’s fault that she’d been a carrier, but her home environment would have to be scrutinized. Agents would break in during the day while she was at work and scan the place. Had to be done. Fifteen minutes after the report went in, Elsa and her team departed the terminal. Christopher and Andrew would take the containment unit to the nearest storage facility for indefinite safekeeping.

  She thought about that sometimes: locked up forever, no chance of reprieve. Not exactly in keeping with the American justice system. But demons weren’t Americans.

  Tonight it was more satisfying to think about Lisa-Marie, and wonder if she was sleeping well, and imagine what she was sleeping in. Silk pajamas, maybe. Or a lacy gown, tight in all the right places. Maybe Lisa-Marie s
pent time that night thinking about her, too, because when Elsa woke, there was a note and e-mail address attached to the receipt under her door.

  Elsa took the e-mail address with her to Boston, and then to Tampa, and then back up to Syracuse. But she didn’t e-mail Lisa-Marie. Dinner had been nice, but she never expected to see her again.

  *

  More complaints were voiced today about the TSA after a five-year-old girl was separated from her parents for a backscatter X-ray. This video shows the girl growing upset and crying while her parents voiced their objections. A TSA spokesman today said that all passengers, regardless of age and size, are required to comply with government regulations for national security.—WCVB, Boston

  *

  Orlando was a tricky airport for extractions. International and delayed flights meant for a lot of late-night arrivals and departures at over one hundred and twenty gates. Even late at night, people were milling around—janitors, maintenance workers, security guards, stranded passengers in plastic chairs. This particular checkpoint still had two lanes open when Elsa’s crew arrived. The conditions were not optimal. But the Class A had already been trapped for twenty-six hours, and the specs called for thirty hours tops, so here they were, Elsa and Christopher and Sam, who was a last-minute fill-in. Elsa didn’t like Sam. He was cocky and rushed through jobs. She preferred Andrew, but he was stuck overnight in Houston with indigestion.

  Their TSA contact was a short, stocky guy in rumpled white shirt, garish orange tie, and pants that needed to be hemmed. His name was Robert Henderson Clark and he talked a lot.

  “These machines need more maintenance than my car, and that’s saying a lot,” he complained. “When taxpayers bitch about their money being wasted, I know what they mean. I should buy stock in the manufacturer. Or your company. You guys are the only ones who service them, right? Big monopoly?”

  “I don’t know much about the back-end,” Elsa said vaguely.

  Clark kept talking. “I hear that half of Congress owns stock in these machines. Easy for them, right? They all fly private jets and don’t have to listen to the complaints I get.”

  “Hmm,” Elsa said.

  The image playback stopped at the scan of a woman Elsa’s own size. The woman was wearing a clunky necklace and had a tampon inserted in her vagina. The Class A behind her had an extra-wide wingspan but what was extraordinary, really, was the fist-sized head with hooded ears. Elsa hardly ever saw heads on them.

  She checked the size of the demon in the machine’s storage bank and tried not to blanch. “Christopher, can you verify this?”

  He sidled up to her while Clark continued his financial and investment speculations.

  “That’s a bigger allocation than usual,” he said.

  “Let me see,” Sam said, bouncing over like an enthusiastic puppy. “Wow.”

  “Wow what?” Clark asked. “Is the machine really broken?”

  “It’s not broken,” Elsa said, with a pointed look at Christopher.

  “Let’s take a look at your other AXB,” he said, and steered the annoying man away.

  Elsa double-checked the cables and triple-checked the storage unit, but Sam’s work seemed okay. She initiated the transfer and watched as the demon slowly disappeared. She wondered what havoc it had wreaked in the tampon lady’s life, or what it might have done if it had been left to board the plane. No one could officially say it, of course, but it was widely believed that the Brazilian jet that had recently gone down over the Atlantic had been a Class A. The sooner this demon was locked up, the better. At twenty-five percent the download began to slow. At forty percent, she realized that the creature was fighting the transfer.

  “Sam, you’re going to need power from the backup unit.”

  He was at her side instantly. “What? Nah. This one can handle it.”

  “If the download slows too much, we’ll have a breach,” she said.

  Sam shook his head. “It won’t. See, it’s holding steady—”

  The AXB began to shriek. Elsa tried an emergency abort, which should have sucked the demon right back up the pipeline into the backscatter machine. Instead, the storage unit jumped a foot into the air and emitted a spray of sparks. The terminal lights all flickered, and the warning sound turned into a whooping alarm.

  “Oh, shit,” said Christopher as he dashed back.

  “That shouldn’t have happened!” Sam protested.

  Everyone was turning to stare at her. Elsa ignored them. Although normal vision was useless, she instinctively glanced upward. Where had it gone? Whirling over their heads, unseen and menacing? Racing down toward the gates to attach itself to a sleepy kid, a flight attendant, a pilot?

  Damn it, they were going to have rescreen anybody who had passed through recently and was still at a gate.

  And screen themselves.

  And file a half dozen reports.

  It was the first Class A she’d ever let escape.

  *

  She didn’t get back to her hotel until nearly dawn. The front desk clerk let her extend her reservation. Elsa crashed hard on her pillows, waking near noon to a series of upset voicemails from her bosses in Philadelphia. Leftover pizza in the mini-fridge sufficed for lunch. After three conference calls and two aspirin, she changed into her bathing suit and went down to the outdoor pool. The weather was sunny and warm, and six or seven other guests were also swimming. Elsa ignored them. She wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone.

  A friendly voice said, “Hey! It’s Elsa Lancaster.”

  Elsa turned in surprise. Lisa-Marie was stretched out on a beige lounge chair. She was wearing the same green bikini she’d been wearing in Columbus four months ago and looked just as fabulously pretty. She lifted up her big brown sunglasses and gave Elsa a grin.

  “Small world,” Lisa-Marie said.

  Elsa felt off balance. In both a good way, because the day suddenly seemed a lot less crappy, but in a suspicious way as well, because how small was the world, really?

  “What brings you here?” Elsa asked cautiously.

  Lisa-Marie waved her right hand toward the horizon. “Mom and Dad had a hankering for Disney World. I thought I booked us into a hotel over in Kissimmee, but I guess I clicked the wrong button. At least there’s a shuttle bus. I had to leave them there, or one more trip through It’s a Small World would have made me commit hari-kari.”

  Elsa relaxed. “I don’t do theme parks.”

  “Smart woman,” Lisa-Marie replied. “So what do you do when you have a day off in Orlando?”

  “What makes you think I have a day off?” Elsa asked.

  “Because check-out was hours ago, and you’re in the pool, and you said you don’t do theme parks.” Lisa-Marie leaned forward, filling out her bikini top even more. Suntan lotion glistened on her skin. “Don’t you want to spend a few hours playing tourist with me?”

  Elsa had nothing to do until the Class A showed up again at the airport or she got her next assignment. She had the feeling that Philadelphia would punish her a little for this, maybe keep her cooling her heels for another day or two.

  “I’d love to play with you,” she replied.

  *

  They lounged by the pool, went for ice cream at Downtown Disney, and then walked around the lake and shops there while canned music played in the perfectly trimmed flowerbeds. Every now and then Lisa-Marie’s parents called from the Magic Kingdom with updates on how much fun they’d just had in the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and Lisa-Marie would roll her eyes and grin. Elsa’s own folks never left suburban Chicago. Certainly they wouldn’t be walking around a theme park all day.

  “They probably rented electric wheelchairs,” Lisa-Marie mused. “Last time, Dad slammed right into a Mickey Mouse who was signing autographs.”

  They had a seafood dinner at a restaurant built to look like a steamboat, and afterward drank hot chocolate at a small table in the Godiva shop. Shoppers streamed in and out of the Disney Store next door. Elsa was feeling
a bit like Snow White herself. She’d immensely enjoyed the day, and the way Lisa-Marie smiled at her, and her sense of humor about just about everything. But it couldn’t last. Like horses turning back into pumpkins, Elsa had to return to her normal life.

  Knowledge of that couldn’t keep her from wanting to lean across the table and kiss Lisa-Marie. Just once for memory’s sake, to see if those lips tasted as sweet as they looked.

  They talked and talked and talked. Once their cups were empty Lisa-Marie said, “Be right back,” and dashed off to the bathroom. Her phone buzzed as soon as she was out of sight. Elsa thought Lisa-Marie’s parents would worry if she didn’t pick up, so she scooped up the smartphone. But there was no call. Instead, it was a message and her own name was the subject line. That was odd. After further investigation she realized her name was attached to several messages, and documents were attached as well.

  Her hotel itinerary for here in Orlando.

  Her hotel itinerary for her last job, back in Atlanta.

  Her hotel itinerary for the job before that, in Roanoke.

  Shivers went down her back and left her feeling ice cold. Quickly Elsa dropped the phone, left the shop, and walked toward the nearest exit. She felt like she was thinking perfectly clearly, but also like she was moving through unseen bales of thick cotton. Dimly she heard Lisa-Marie calling after her.

  “Elsa, wait!” Lisa-Marie was calling out. “I can explain!”

  A long line of yellow cabs was idling in the parking lot. Elsa slid into the backseat of the first one and muttered her hotel’s name. The driver, an elderly man with a shiny bald head, was pulling out when the other passenger door opened and Lisa-Marie climbed in.

  “Hey!” protested the driver.

  Elsa ordered, “Get out.”

  “I can explain,” Lisa-Marie said breathlessly. “Everything. I’m not some stalker following you around the country.”

  “That’s exactly what you are,” Elsa retorted.