Page 33 of Wrong Way

"There…um, there was work done on the sign," he said slowly. "The vertical sign. One of the neon sections on the upper face went dark about ten days ago, and a crew came in to assess it. They were here for two days."

"What company?"

"Shit, I don't know. That's not on my pay grade, you know?"

It was unfortunate, but in the end, Miles wasn’t sure it even mattered.

"Where is the main power for this building?” he asked. “The primary electrical panel, the transformer room, whatever feeds the sign systems and the stage."

The guard blinked. "It’s in the basement. There's a utility level below the main floor."

"Who has access to it?"

"Building staff. Maintenance. Our crew would know, but most of them are inside right now for the—"

"I need someone who knows where it is and can get me there right now," Miles said.

“I mean, I can do that in a minute, but—”

"Not in a minute. Now."

The guard nodded, asking no more questions, and started to dig in his pocket for his keys.

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.”