31 Nicole
Nicole
They decide to Lyft to the hostage showdown. The G isn’t running, so it would require taking two trains, and the transfer is always, like, twenty minutes, so Nicole uses her account to call them a ride, which arrives in the highly absurd form of a baby-blue Kia Soul.
“Remember that hamster commercial from when we were kids?” Brandon asks as it pulls up.
Nicole doesn’t respond. He’s going through something, so it’s time to cut him some slack.
In the car, the driver is blissfully silent, aside from asking her name.
No one says anything, maybe afraid like Nicole that the driver might hear something about their plan and turn them in.
Although, at this point, it feels like everyone knows—they called a lot of people.
So now they all sit in silence, with just their thoughts.
Which in Nicole’s case are mostly about what an idiot she is.
For trusting Ellen, for fucking Ellen, for wanting to be like Ellen.
Has she lost so much of herself that she wanted to be a corrupt lawyer for criminals?
She knows so much of it was burnout in law school, learning all the tricks people had for avoiding consequences as if they were virtues of the system that had worn her down in ways she hadn’t expected.
So she’d come up with an easier dream than changing the world—making a small little world, just for her and her friends, someplace cozy and safe.
But then that had seemed far away, almost impossible, a deadly mountain trail she might not survive.
And she just became a cog in a machine she’d once said she wanted to take down.
And then she wanted to be a better cog, a cog like Ellen.
She takes a deep breath, sitting in the back seat, head against the window as the city rolls by in slashes of bright colors and black.
Brandon hears her and reaches out and takes her hand and squeezes.
She envies him. Brandon may charge forward into terrible ideas, but he’s never lost himself.
And in the end, she even ended up making a Brandon-like mistake of screwing the boss.
She’s just as silly as he is. She needs to make better choices. She needs to remember she has choices.
They stop first at an office-supply store, one of those twenty-four-hour ones.
Ollie runs in for what they need, then hands them out to everyone before Ian calls the second Lyft, which ends up being small and smelling heavily of bad cologne.
But they all cram into it and take it to their final destination.
It’s by the river, close to the Navy Yard, some ugly high-rise they put up a while back, all gray metal and large windows.
The gym is on the second floor, the huge windows covered in torn brown paper.
A faint light is inside it. Around them, most buildings are dark.
This isn’t the fun part of Williamsburg.
“You sure?” the driver asks.
“Yeah,” Nicole says, getting out. The air hits her, cold and smelling like the fish and trash of the river.
But she likes how cold it is. Makes the edges of her body feel like knives.
And that’s what she has to be now. She has to cut through a lot of shit to pull this off.
She nods at Ian, who pulls out their phone and sends two texts.
She hopes this works.
They walk up to the front door, but there’s a doorman, and she’s not sure how to get past him, so she walks around the building, the others following her silently, until she finds a back stairwell, door propped open with a free weight.
“They left the door open for us,” Ollie says. “That was nice.”
“Well, they want this to go smoothly,” Nicole says.
Ollie laughs. “They don’t know who they’re dealing with.”
Nicole rolls her eyes but smiles as she walks up the stairs. Yes, this is an insane plan that Ollie came up with, but it could really work and do the most good all at once. She hopes. They all turn on their phone flashlights as they walk farther into the darkness.
The stairwell opens on the gym locker room, her phone light shining on white tiles, their footsteps echoing off them. They’re not trying to be stealthy, but if they were, they’d suck at it.
“There,” Ian says, pointing at a shower stall and shining their light on it. “I think there.”
Nicole looks at it, unsure what they mean until it hits her. “Please tell me you’re not pointing out the shower you had a threesome in right now.”
Ian shrugs. “Nice to remember something fun as we walk toward our deaths.”
She doesn’t respond. The locker-room door opens on a lobby: a built-in reception desk they couldn’t cart away, the elevator bank. Here it’s wooden floors and a vague smell of industrial air purifier and mold.
“Hello?” Nicole calls out.
“Welcome,” says a voice from the darkness.
Nicole swallows as her friends line up next to her.
She looks down the line at each of them: Ollie eyes-wide excited; Ian glancing around, taking everything in; and Brandon biting his lip, nervous.
They’re all nervous, she realizes, even her.
They shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be doing this, should never have gotten wrapped up in it, but here they are.
Brandon is closest to her, and she takes his hand and squeezes, and he squeezes back, taking Ian’s hand, and they take Ollie’s, like they’re about to skip down a yellow brick road to their violent deaths. But at least they’re together.
Nicole drops Brandon’s hand, takes a deep breath, and marches forward, shining her light out.
They walk into what must have been the main equipment room at one point.
Now it’s mostly empty, aside from the dead body in the middle of the floor.
The mold smell vanishes under the scent of blood.
She hears Brandon gasp, and even she pauses slightly.
Around the body are five figures. One light is on over them, so she can see most of their faces clearly: Connor tied to a chair and gagged, his hand a deep gash of red.
Victor tied to another chair, uninjured, thankfully.
He meets her eye and looks hopeful for a moment, then quickly finds Ian and looks something else—sad, maybe.
In front of them are two plain-looking men, one with a fancy gun, the other with a bat. And between them is Ellen. She’s in a ruby-red suit with a black cowl-neck top.
“It occurred to me after we spoke,” Ellen says, a small smile on her lips.
“The timing. I texted these gentlemen, and they said they’d called your friend almost half an hour before you called me.
You weren’t calling in a panic. You had taken time for something.
” She tilts her head and tucks a stray hair behind her ear.
“And I remembered you—I remembered being you. Young, smart, ambitious, and overlooked. Girls like us, we make plans. And that’s what you’ve done, isn’t it?
You figured out that the kidnappers were my clients. What was it, something I said?”
Well, fuck. “I saw the auction site on your phone and on his.” She nods at Connor. “Wasn’t too hard to figure out you knew more than you were telling me. So I just needed to reason out why.”
“Nicole—” Ollie starts, but she puts her hand up to stop him from talking. This isn’t part of the plan, but the plan will still work.
“I knew I shouldn’t have checked it while you were there.
” Ellen shakes her head. “But I couldn’t resist. Have you seen how much money it is?
And my clients here are happy to pay a finder’s fee of half their maximum bid, sign a ten-year contract…
Do you know what kind of bonus I’d get? And my hands stay clean. ” She shrugs. “Or would have.”
“You’re not someone who strikes me as good at staying clean,” Nicole says. “I’ve seen your apartment.”
Ellen purses her lips, looking a little annoyed. “If you just hand it over, we’ll let your friend go, and I’ll make sure you get a promotion—a year ahead of schedule.”
Nicole pauses. That’s tempting. Very tempting.
She would finally be clawing her way to the top.
Queen rat. She wouldn’t have to be like Ellen.
She could go back to her dreams of being a TV lawyer with a soft life, or maybe even further back, to what she wanted to be originally: someone doing good in the world.
She knows the firm has a pro bono department. That might be a good start.
“Send the email saying I should get the promotion now, and let Victor go,” Nicole says. “Then we’ll give you the drive.”
“Nicole!” Ollie says, but she silences him with a hand again. She can feel Brandon and Ian shifting nervously.
“Smart. First show me you have it.”
Nicole takes a drive out of her pocket and holds it up. “We’re each carrying a few of them. Only we know which one you want, and if you start firing, there’s a good chance we can destroy it before you take it from us.”
Ellen smiles widely. “Oh, you’re very good.”
Nicole shrugs. Ollie came up with a lot of the plan, but this touch was hers.
“All right,” Ellen says, taking out her phone and dictating as she types. “Barbara”—one of the senior partners—“I’ve spent the day working with Nicole Davis, and she has a mind like a steel trap. I think we should fast-track her. There’s a lot of potential there, and I don’t want to lose her.”
Nicole smiles. “Nice. Now Victor.”
Ellen tilts her head, considering. “You don’t want Jon, too?”
Nicole looks back at Brandon, whose eyes are red and watering again.
“Is he dead?” Brandon asks softly.
Ellen smirks. “No. Just very badly beaten.”
Brandon stares back at Nicole, and she knows he can’t make a decision.
“After we give you the drive, we’ll take him,” Nicole says. “Though I’m not so sure what we’ll do with him yet,” she adds, glaring at Connor, who slowly lifts his head.
“I’d start with an ER,” Ellen says, then waves her hand at Victor.
The man with the bat unties him as the man with the gun keeps it pointed at him.
Victor stands, rubbing his wrists where they were tied, and walks slowly across the room.
His eyes meet Nicole’s once, looking confused, but then he stares at Ian, moving to stand between them and Ellen, like a shield.
“There,” Ellen says. “I’m very reasonable. So now the drive please.”
Nicole nods, fishing out a handful of drives from her pockets. So does everyone else. They each have a dozen drives, all identical, now piled in their hands. Ellen taps her foot.
“Uh…” Ian says. “Anyone remember which of us has it?”
Nicole’s eyes go wide, and she grimaces.
“Fuck,” Ian says.
“Guys…” Brandon says, voice tearful.
“Really?” Ellen asks. “You didn’t mark it?”
“We have this,” Ollie tells her.
Nicole holds up a finger and goes over to the others. They gather in a little group, pointing at the drives. “It has a blue dot on it,” Nicole says loudly.
Which is when the shooting starts.