"Killer Weekend" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearson Ridley)

EIGHT YEARS LATER
PRESENT DAY
THURSDAY

One

S ix men, all wearing white hard hats and orange ear protectors, huddled in one corner of what was to become a themed fast food restaurant, That’s a Wrap, that would sport vinyl wallpaper of Monroe, Bogart, Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, and Harrison Ford. Not twenty feet away, on the far side of a temporary wall, passengers hurried down a long hallway that connected Salt Lake airport’s concourses C and D.

The entrance to the work site was through a thick sheet of black plastic. Sheetrock dust covered the floor along with scraps of aluminum conduit, pieces of electrical wire, and a half dozen used paper cups from the Starbucks down on concourse D.

There was debate among the workers about how to install a length of ventilation duct; the architect had neglected to note the location of the sprinkler system.

“There’s no way, Billy, that you’re going to get around that pipe,” the foreman said at last. “And you sure as shit can’t go through it.”

Billy disagreed. To illustrate his suggestion, he dragged two sawhorses to below the spot in question, threw two lengths of aluminum studs across them, and climbed up, while the foreman shouted out for him to use a stepladder because he didn’t want to lose his workman’s comp record.

But by then there was no stopping Billy. He punched a section of ceiling panel up and into the space above, and slid it to one side.

Shining a flashlight, he poked his head up inside.

“What the fuck?” he said. He withdrew his head and addressed his fellow workers. “Is this one of those haze-the-rookie things? Because if it is, it sucks.”

When no one answered, Billy jumped down and used a broom handle to knock the additional ceiling panels out of the way. The fourth panel wouldn’t budge. Neither would the fifth, or the sixth. He tried another, and it lifted partially. Billy carefully slid it to the left.

Now he and the others could see up into the false ceiling.

“What is that?” one of the men said. “A suit bag?”

It was a six-foot length of bulging, heavy black plastic, zippered shut.

The foreman took a tentative step forward.

“That ain’t no suit bag,” said the smallest of the six workers, a man with a goatee and a tattoo of three X’s on his neck. He spoke softly, which was not his way. “That’s a body bag. And there’s something in it.”