Left To Die

Adele followed after her partner, an uneasy gait to her step. She couldn’t sleep, not now. Not after the day’s events. Her idea of a good time and relaxing with a drink rarely involved the workspace, but she hadn’t wanted to turn John’s invitation down. John’s personality took some acclimating, and she didn’t want to shoot down his one offer of camaraderie. He was a strange one. A rebel, in the most juvenile sense of the word. But there was also something deeper. Something she couldn’t quite make out about him. It piqued her curiosity.

She had to walk double pace to keep up with his long, steady strides as he moved down the nearly empty office hallways.

“APB was a bust, but the tox report should be on my desk,” he said conversationally, leading her toward the stairwell.

“Not more stairs,” Adele groaned.

“It will be worth it. Don’t worry.”

John’s office was on the seventh floor. But instead of heading up, he took the descending flight.

Adele stared uneasily after the tall man. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

John glanced over his shoulder up at her and flashed a jack-o’-lantern grin. “Haven’t decided yet. Just come, American Princess. You see killers everywhere. Makes it hard to recognize comrades.”

“Yeah? You’re a comrade, not a killer, is that it?”

“Perhaps I’m a bit of both.” He gestured at her and, without waiting, continued down the stairs.

With a rising sense of malaise, which made her feel silly, Adele followed after John, taking the stairs much slower than earlier.

He led her down to the basement and pushed open an old rusted door. A dusty, cracked hallway filled with chipped paint and dull lights stretched before her. At the far end, she spotted an evidence locker and a couple of interrogation rooms that seemed little used. John pushed open the door to interrogation room three and glanced inside, looking around. “Coast is clear,” he said, conspiratorially.

Adele didn’t know what or who he was looking for or expecting to find in the old, abandoned interrogation room, but she didn’t care to ask. Out of the entire building, this floor was the worst she’d seen.

Large flakes of paint peeled off the walls, and watermarks scoured the floor, suggesting the basement had flooded more than once. Lettering marked some of the doors as interrogation rooms, displaying words beneath thin layers of dust. The building had been serving the DGSI for a decade, but the basement had been left, it seemed, to fend mostly for itself.

John moved further down the hall until he reached Interrogation Room Six. Then he fished a key from his pocket. He tried the door handle, which wouldn’t turn. He nodded in approval, humming quietly to himself—the same tune that served as his ringtone. Then he inserted a small key, turned the door handle, and pushed it open.

He glanced up and down the hall, only further adding to the burden of unease on Adele’s shoulders. As the door opened, she was assailed by a strange, fruity smell. She’d been to vineyards before, and the odor of fermentation in the basement was overpowering.

John inhaled it, though, like a matron coming home to fresh-baked cookies. He stepped into the room, and, reluctantly, Adele followed. She scraped past the rusted metal frame and stepped into a room that was entirely dark. A second later, the door slammed shut, sealing off even the illumination from the hallway.

Adele felt her heart lodge in her throat. “John?” she barked. “This isn’t funny.”

She heard chuckling from the darkness, but then, a moment later, there was a quiet clicking sound. Lights sputtered into being above her, illuminating the enclosed interrogation room.

Except, instead of a metal table and cold chairs, there was a large, oversized couch pressed up against the back wall. A small distillery leaned against the wall, set on a wooden plank table that looked to have been handcrafted. A couple of pictures hung on the wall opposite the distillery, and miniature wooden barrels were stacked in the far corner, next to a sealed blue plastic tub with a thin layer of duct tape circling the lid. The fermentation smells came from this pile of barrels and the rectangular plastic container.

Adele saw a couple of bags of sugar, some clear tubing, and two hard corks on the ground as well as some other ingredients that she knew went into making wine and moonshine.

“You’re joking,” she said, staring at the place.

John whistled a cheerful tune and retrieved a couple of glass cups from on top of the window ledge. The window glimpsed the adjacent interrogation room, but it was too high for Adele to see much.

“Glasses are clean, don’t worry,” he said.

“By the smell of it, this stuff is strong enough that even if they weren’t clean it wouldn’t matter.”

John raised an eyebrow at her, then gestured toward the couch. “Has a reclining lever on the side. TV’s over there—turn on whatever you want. Actually, second thought. If it’s not sports, you won’t be able to find it down here.”

Adele wasn’t sure what to make of all this. Somehow, John had managed to build himself a secret mancave in the basement of the DGSI headquarters. By the looks of things, and the number of glasses, he either used it regularly, or he had guests over on occasion.

“Do you bring all the girls down here on their first day?”

John snorted, but any retort was interrupted by the sound of liquid trickling into a cup.

“You in for some sangria? Or would you prefer something from the distillery?”

Adele hesitated, then said, “The hardest thing you’ve got.”

John nodded in appreciation, and after a moment, he returned with two cups. Both held clear liquid.

Adele accepted her glass from John. She leaned back in the couch and pulled the handle on the side, sighing as the footrest lifted up and the back of the chair reclined.

John sat on the couch, also, but preferred the arm, his boots on the cushion of the couch.

John faced Adele and leaned against the wall. He grabbed a remote lodged between the back of the couch and the wall, and pointed it toward the small screen attached to a swinging arm in the middle of the room. He clicked the remote, and the TV sputtered to life, filling the room with French commentators chattering about some recent soccer game.

“Do you like football?” said John.

Adele shrugged. “I played a lot of sports growing up, but I was never particularly interested in watching them.”

John tutted, sniffing in mock offense.

Adele inhaled the contents of her glass and winced as a powerful odor assailed her, clearing her nostrils and raising the hairs on her neck. She could feel John’s eyes on her. She pressed the glass to her lips, tilted it back, and swallowed a gulp.

Immediately, she regretted this decision.

The moonshine scorched her throat and filled her mouth with a strange, gingery taste. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was powerful.

She felt the burning sensation turn to a tickling one, threatening to elicit a cough. She clenched her teeth, refusing to give John the satisfaction of seeing her react to the liquor. Her eyes watered, but she managed to keep the drink down. A small victory.

Adele glanced over at John, who had already downed half his glass.

“Good, isn’t it?” he said with a smirk.

Adele shrugged and leaned even further back. Above her, she spotted a couple of the pictures she’d initially noticed from the door. Both photographs displayed men with guns and wearing uniforms.

She stared. “Were you part of the Commandos Marine?”

Absentmindedly, his hand reached up and massaged at the burn mark on his neck. The handsome man shrugged and murmured quietly, “Once upon a time.”

“My father served in the military.”

John nodded to show he’d heard, but offered no comment himself. He took another long swallow from his drink, downing the rest in a giant gulp, and then swung his legs over the couch to retrieve some more.

“I’ve heard stories about you guys,” she said, nodding toward the picture. “Some people say you’re the Navy SEALs of France.”