Junk Mail

Chapter Twenty - Escapades, Evidence and Endings

"This was a bad idea," Ben muttered, as he followed Susanna out of the car. "I know it's a bad idea because I didn't think of it."

"Oh relax," Susanna said, as though she got a kick out of what they were about to do. "It'll be fine. And if we get do get caught, I've got an escape plan."

"What is it?"

"I run and you take the blame."

"But then I'll get caught!" Ben said, shoving her not so gently, as she messed with a window on the ground floor.

"Stop it!" she muttered, shoving him back. "And I said I had an escape plan. I didn't say if it was for you or for me. Make up your own."

Ben ran a hand through his hair and then scratched his neck. He started fidgeting with the collar of his shirt and looked around nervously in case someone turned up, but stopped when Susanna threatened to throw him on to the road if an oncoming car went past them. Ben aimed negative energy at her so that she suffered misfortunes for the rest of her life. He did not like Susanna very much and found himself comparing her to all the other women he'd ever met in his life. Susanna was somewhat like his mother, in that both of them went violently after money whenever they saw it. She wasn't very much like Ara, who liked to do the right thing wherever it was realistically possible, but he did suppose that they both had a drive to get what they wanted.

"We're in," Susanna said gleefully. "Now we just need to get into the lift and then down to level negative four. We can to negative five from there."

Ben looked at her doubtfully, thinking she had gotten them into the building very easily. If things were going good at the beginning, then something bad had to be waiting for them at the end of the road. Susanna did not notice the suspicious and doubtful look on Ben's face and simply urged him to follow her towards the lift.

Once there, she took out a key card and pressed it against the area just above the lift buttons. Ben waited patiently by tapping his feet impatiently and constantly poking her so she would hurry up. There were several things Ben hadn't told Susanna and one of those things was that he was kind of scared of the dark. Ben kept a dim light on in his room in case witches and skeletons entered in the middle of the night, but here - in the building he had once worked at - all of the lights were turned off. Only the streetlamps outside were radiating a soft orange glow but their light did not extend very far into the building, and definitely not far enough to reach the lift.

"How did you manage to get in here without any alarms going off?" Ben asked her, whispering. "Shouldn't something have made beeping noises and shouldn't we have seen flashing lights and shouldn't the police have turned up by now?"

"Shouldn't you have learnt to be quiet before coming here with me?" Susanna mimicked.

Ben ignored her and focused on why it was taking them so long to get into the lift. He noticed that they were waiting for it to come up so someone must have taken the lift down at some point during the day. Ben wished that it would hurry up because he needed to pee right then and he knew there was a toilet on level negative four, as he had used the toilet there several times when he'd worked with Andrew Davis. Ben also figured there would be lights down in levels negative four and five, and that they could turn on those lights as there would be no windows for anybody outside the building to spot them through.

"Finally," Susanna said, stepping into the lift. "Are you coming or what?"

"What?" Ben asked.

"Oh, just get in," she demanded, pressing the negative four button once he'd settled into the lift. "And stop looking at yourself in the mirror! We're not going down there for a fashion show. We're going down there to find something important."