Burn Factor by Kyle Mills

Author:Kyle Mills [Mills, Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-06-203016-0
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2001-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Thirty-four

She decided to cover the last half mile on foot.

The sun hadn’t quite made an appearance yet but the east had turned a deep red, casting a malevolent glow over the crumbling industrial park. The good news was that she could see where she was going. The bad news was that so could anyone else. Quinn moved quickly through the piles of twisted metal and machinery, finally taking refuge behind the rusted remnants of a car. From there, she could see the old warehouse that Eric called home, but couldn’t bring herself to complete the last two hundred yards that would take her into its courtyard. She looked around her again and strained to hear something that might indicate she wasn’t alone—a vibration, the clink of metal on metal, the crunching of dirt beneath rubber. There was nothing.

The sun broke over the horizon and she was suddenly surrounded by the distended shadows of dawn. What was she waiting for?

She ducked through the stone archway guarding Eric’s property and ran, half-crouched, through the sculptures in the courtyard, finally stopping short when she got to the door.

It was wide open.

She hovered there for longer than she should have, not knowing what was inside and not sure she wanted to. She’d already resigned herself to the fact that the best she could hope for was to find exactly what she’d been told she would. And then her only friend in the world would be an anonymous man on the other end of a phone line.

She forced herself forward, pausing again at the threshold and then slipping inside. The brick walls of the hallway seemed to close in on her as she penetrated deeper into the building. She wanted to turn and run. But to where? She had no choice but to keep going.

The enormous room that made up most of the building was a little better illuminated than the hallway, thanks to the morning sunlight streaming through its windows and skylights, but it was still hard to discern individual details in the visual chaos Eric had created. She hovered at the room’s edge, scanning it and the walkway that circled the wall twenty feet up. Once again, there was nothing. Or at least the skillfully created illusion of nothing.

She moved silently, picking up a hammer lying on the floor and allowing herself to take a little comfort from its weight and the smoothness of the wood handle against her palm.

The desk was where she remembered it, pushed up against a wall covered in graffiti-like mathematical symbols. She took a deep breath and opened the lower righthand drawer, finding it full of neatly labeled hanging folders. She started to flip through them, having some difficulty because of her reluctance to let go of the hammer. Nothing particularly interesting at first: taxes, insurance, product receipts, house receipts, credit card information. Toward the back she came across a folder labeled with nothing but a series of dollar signs. She pulled it out and emptied the letters and check stubs it contained onto the desk.

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