Free Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski

hands up in front of her chest. Five fingers on one hand, two on the other.
    “Look at that,” McCoy said, sitting in front of a laptop screen 3,500 miles away. “Number seven. She’s going out of order. Now why would she be doing that?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because the guy knocked on the door moments after Girlfriend hung his coworker out of the window.”
    “Yeah, I know that. But someone like Girlfriend could have easily handled this guy. Look at him. He’s a cream puff. I got his file around here somewhere. She was saving him for last. Like dessert.”
    “Why?”
    “You always take out the toughest targets first. Girlfriend identified the first woman—this Felton woman—as her most formidable target. Despite her fear of heights.”
    Keene sipped his tea. He was going to have to get up to pour another cup soon. “I’ve been thinking on that. Seems like a very sloppy move to me. You have the pane of glass shattering on thestreet below. No telling what that may have hit. There might be six schoolchildren down there, bleeding to death.”
    “Not likely. That bank of windows faces north, and there’s nothing down below but a minor street used mostly by delivery trucks. Girlfriend was thinking ahead.”
    “Fine, I’ll spot you the glass. But what about the target? Surely, somebody’s going to notice a woman hanging out of a window, no matter how small the street.”
    McCoy smiled. “Again, not likely. This is Philly. You ever been there? I have, and the murder rate’s out of control. Plus, the sun’s strong today. A lot of glare.”
    “Be serious now.”
    “Seriously? I think this is Girlfriend showing off. It was a tremendously ballsy move. Because you’re right—you can’t keep that kind of thing under wraps for long. Somebody’s going to look up and see that woman. It may take a minute. It may take an hour. But you can bet that somebody’s going to spot her and start freaking out, and boom. That’s where the clock really starts to tick.”

His name was Vincent Marella …
     
    … and he was reading a paperback thriller. He’d found it in the changing area. Someone had left it on a table with a few other books, the idea being that other employees of 1919 Market would bring in their old books and get a swap thing going. Of course, that never happened. Only the original guy brought in books. And that was it. Vincent guessed that there weren’t many readers on the security staff.
    The book wasn’t bad, actually. It was called
Center Strike,
and was about a gang of high-class yet tough-as-nails thieves whotried to loot the gold stored in vaults beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center within forty-eight hours of the collapse. Completely ridiculous, Vincent knew. A red burst on the cover promised that the book was BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS. Yeah. Right.
    Reading stuff like this was both exciting and unnerving. Exciting because one of the book’s heroes was …wait for it … a World Trade Center security guard, who also happened to be a Gulf War vet who single-handedly saved his platoon from a nutty Iraqi general who had held them captive in the desert.
    It was unnerving because … well, Vincent was a security guard in a thirty-seven-floor skyscraper in a major American city.
    He wasn’t a Gulf vet—he’d grown up between wars. Too young for Vietnam, too old for the Gulf. And he’d never had anybody hold him captive.
    Still, he’d seen some action. Not too long ago, in fact.
    Vincent was in the middle of a flashback passage about the hero’s gruesome torture in the Iraqi camp when a disheveled-looking guy dressed in a ratty T-shirt walked through the revolving doors. Guy was white, but his black T-shirt was emblazoned with a fake cereal box advertising CHEERI-HO’S, and the busty woman on that fake cereal box—with oversize lips, hips, and bust—wasn’t exactly a General Mills mascot.
    Vincent sighed.
    It was Terrill Joe, your friendly neighborhood crackhead.
    What was