CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The guard moved fast for a man his size.
It occurred to Miles that he didn’t even know the man’s name, but the time for such pleasantries was long gone.
Elsewhere, Vic was heading into the theater with a still-agitated Hess…
and Miles figured Hess was going to graduate from being good and pissed off within the next few minutes.
Whatever his name was, the guard led Miles back through the theater's main entrance and past the closed auditorium doors.
A low and steady voice was audible from behind those doors, amplified, working through something that required long pauses between sentences.
The lobby was empty of patrons; the house lights dimmed at the box office windows and the concession stand shuttered for the evening.
They went through a door marked STAFF ONLY at the far end of the lobby and into a service corridor that ran behind the auditorium's east wall.
The corridor was narrow and utilitarian, the floors bare concrete and the walls painted cinder block.
Bare utility conduit ran along the ceiling in parallel tracks.
They passed a costume storage room, a door marked ELECTRICAL CLOSET, and a second door marked PROP STORAGE before they reached the stairwell at the end of the hall.
Miles had already sent Vic a text as they moved: basement level, stage systems, Kowalski needed upstairs to clear the auditorium. He didn't know whether the message had landed before Vic had gone inside, but sending it was all he could do.
The stairwell went down one level, the steps worn concrete with a metal handrail bolted to the wall. At the bottom, a metal door stood slightly ajar. Terrence pushed it open and stepped through.
The basement was a low-ceilinged utility space running most of the length of the building.
The main electrical panel was mounted on the far wall, a commercial-grade unit large enough that its breaker rows filled most of the wall face, organized in labeled sections that covered stage power, house lighting, HVAC, exterior signage, and what a hand-lettered paper label described as VERTICAL SIGN ARRAY.
Beside it, on a separate bracket, a transformer enclosure the size of a small refrigerator sat mounted to the wall with conduit running in and out of it in multiple directions.
This was what fed the sign on the face of the building, Miles understood.
This was the unit that sent current up through the walls and into the PARAMOUNT letters burning above the marquee.
That was the first thing he noticed. But the second thing he noticed was that the floor was wet.
He saw it before he fully registered what it meant.
The concrete stretched out ahead of them and it was covered in a thin, even film of water that caught the overhead light and reflected it in a flat, dark sheen.
He was pretty sure it wasn’t a leak; the distribution was too even and too deliberate, spread across the whole floor rather than a pool spreading from a single point.
He looked toward the far corner and saw the utility sink there, a small deep basin set into the wall.
Beside it, there was a mop bucket that had been tipped on its side, empty.
And as he saw that, he also saw the man standing in front of the electrical panel. Though Miles had never seen a picture of the man, he had no doubt this was Own Gallagher.
He was lean and fair, with close-cut light brown hair and the flat, settled stillness of a man who had been waiting in that very same spot for several minutes.
He looked tense and wiry, as if expecting something.
He looked to be in his early thirties. He was wearing rubber-soled work boots, heavy canvas work pants, and thick electrical insulating gloves that ran to his elbows, rated for high-voltage work.
He held a length of exposed wire in his left hand, one end of which ran back to a connection Miles could see had been made directly to the main panel's primary bus bar.
The wire itself was heavy gauge, the insulation stripped from the last eight inches or so, and Owen Gallagher held that bare section clearly visible in his gloved fist.
"Stop right there," Gallagher said, thrusting the wire out. “Don’t come any closer.”
Miles stopped. He was just three steps inside the door, his foot just barely touching the water on the floor. The security guard stood behind him, at his shoulder.
"I heard you," Gallagher said with a too-wide smile—the sort of smile that spoke of lunacy rather than joy.
His voice was level and conversational. "Upstairs.
The argument out front. I couldn't make out what was being said, but I've been watching the front of this building for two hours, and I know what police vehicles look like.
" He looked at Miles with an expression that was without hostility.
Somehow, it came off as more unsettling than anger would have.
"I came down here to make sure this was done properly. "
"The floor," Miles said. “What have you done?”
Gallagher looked down at it with a brief, clinical interest. "The building doesn't drain particularly well down here. The water will stay put. It’s my defense. You try to stop me, I drop this wire and you die."
“So will you,” Miles pointed out.
“And I’m perfectly willing to accept that.”
Miles believed him. Death for their cause seemed to be a recurring theme for Kane’s disciples.
He looked at the wire in Gallagher's hand.
Sixty amps or so through standing water would cover the entire floor in a fraction of a second.
It would not distinguish between the man it was intended for and any other person standing in the current's path.
He did notice that Gallagher was in insulated boots and gloves, which might save him.
But Miles was in leather-soled dress shoes and was standing on the mostly dry side of the threshold, but the threshold was not wide.
"Owen," Miles said. "I need you to set that wire down somewhere other than the floor."
"No." He said it simply, without acceleration.
Miles looked at the panel behind Gallagher. The breakers were all in their up positions, all of them live. Upstairs, the event was still running. He had no way to know how far along it was or whether Vic and Kowalski had reached the auditorium floor yet.
He turned his head slightly toward the guard. "Go back upstairs," he said, keeping his voice low and even. "Tell them to cut every circuit from the stage lighting board, everything they can get to from up there. Go right now."
The guard looked at the water on the floor and then at Miles and then at Gallagher, and then he went. The metal door swung behind him and Miles heard him on the stairs, moving fast.
Gallagher watched this without reacting. "You can't cut the sign array from up there," he said. "That panel is down here."
"I know."
"And the primary feed to the stage is down here, too, on a separate breaker from the lighting board.
Your people upstairs can cut the theatrical lights, but they can't cut what I need to cut.
" He glanced at the panel with a brief, proprietary certainty.
"I know this building's systems better than anyone currently in it.
" He said this with a good deal of pride, with that eerie smile still on his face.
Miles looked at him across the wet floor.
Ten feet of standing water between them.
Gallagher's boots and gloves, and the wire in his hand, and the auditorium full of people directly above their heads. He knew he had to disarm the man somehow…and if it couldn’t be physically, maybe it had be mentally instead.
"Tell me about Rachel," Miles said.
Gallagher's expression shifted instantly. The smile was gone now and was replaced by something that was not surprise, exactly, and not grief. It was something that moved through his face and settled back to neutral before Miles could fully read it.
"You know about Rachel."
"We know she came to Laurence. We know about Celestine and Song and Valdez, too." Miles kept his voice conversational, making sure to keep any sort of aggressive or accusational tone out of it. "We know what she wrote about them. We know how she died."
Gallagher was quiet for a moment. The wire sat in his fist and he was not moving.
"She paid Laurence four thousand dollars," he said finally.
"Four thousand dollars for an eight-week intensive program.
She paid Celestine twice a month for nearly a year.
She was looking for someone to help her understand why she couldn't stop feeling the way she felt, and every one of them took her money and gave her nothing back that she could actually use.
" His voice was not raised. It had the flattened quality of something that had been said internally so many times it had lost its edges.
"She got worse, not better. And she kept going back because she was so fucking sure something would finally work…
because they told her she was close to a breakthrough.
Because they told her the work was building…
that they had given her a framework for her pain that made her dependent on them to interpret it. "
"I know," Miles said. “And it wasn’t fair, was it?”
"She grabbed a two-hundred-amp cabinet," Gallagher said, his voice growing a bit angrier now. "Outside a bar on Red River Street. Two in the morning."
"I know that, too, Owen."
"The neon was still running when they found her."
Miles didn't respond to that. He held Gallagher's gaze across the water, looking for any opening…any moment he could somehow resolve this.
"She chose that," Gallagher said. "Out of everything she could have done, she went to a neon sign and she grabbed it.
And I've thought about that for two years.
" He looked down at the wire in his hand.
"I don't think it was random. I think she was trying to tell me something about where the blame belonged. "
"Rachel made a decision," Miles said carefully. "The people upstairs in that theater didn't make it for her."
Gallagher looked at him without expression. "No," he said. "They just took her money while she was making it."
The basement was quiet except for the low and distant vibration of the building above them, the muffled presence of one thousand people in their seats as they listened to what Laurence was saying.
Miles stood at the edge of the water, slightly afraid to move.
His weapon was holstered and his hands were at his sides while Owen Gallagher stood in front of the panel with the bare wire in his gloved fist.
Neither of them moved and Miles had the feeling that whoever did decide to move first was probably going to die.