It came in the darkness, in the middle of the night, a faint metal-on-metal tapping, knocking, drumming, riding an echo through the empty building.
Even faint as it was, it waked Rachel. She thought it was just one of the street people, gone a bit nuts—such things happen around downtown Los Angeles—someone rapping with a spoon or something on one of the doors to the parking garage below her apartment. She didn’t want to hike all the way down to the street level in her nightshirt to find the cause. Nor did she want to call the cops about some, probably harmless, poor soul and make an already unlucky life worse. So she turned over and went back to sleep.
***
The following morning arrived fresh, sunny and clear. October was Rachel’s favorite month. The heat was gone, the smog fading. She had quite forgot the night’s disturbance.
Having overslept, she was still licking the crumbs of a breakfast of bagel and cream cheese from her lips when she strode down the ramps to her glass cubicle on the parking garage’s street level. Walking through the parking levels gave her the chance to check on things like burned-out lights, litter, wall damage, and what vehicles had been left overnight—which was okay as long as they belonged to regular clients and weren’t left there too long.
She was surprised to see a dirty white van parked behind one of the big cement pillars. . . .