Page 31 of After The Storm
“It’s okay. Probably just the security guard. Let’s keep going but if you have to say anything, make sure you whisper, okay?”
Still clutching his hand, she didn’t let go as they began to ascend the next flight of stairs to the sixth floor. When they reached each door, she stopped for a moment like she feared someone would come through at any second. Roman doubted that’s where they’d run into trouble. Far more likely, if they had any problems, it would come when they got to her boss’s office.
Finally, they got to the ninth floor and Kate perked up at the fact that at least they didn’t have to climb any more stairs. Turning her head to look back at him, she smiled.
“I didn’t think I’d make that last set of stairs,” she whispered. “How is it you’re not exhausted?”
“Good genes,” he said with a smile.
“But what about your injury?” she asked, pointing at his side.
He had felt it twinge a little a few flights below but nothing he couldn’t handle. Shrugging, he just shook his head.
“Maybe I should go through first. You know, just in case the security guard is there,” he suggested as she began to twist the door handle.
“Why? What are you going to do? Knock him out?” she asked wide-eyed.
In truth, he didn’t know what he’d do if they opened the door and found a security guard standing on the other side. He didn’t like getting other people involved in cases, especially when he already was breaking the law.
However, he couldn’t have a guard calling the police before they retrieved the information they’d come for, so if it meant he had to incapacitate the guy for a short time, he’d do it. His job was to protect Kate, and that’s what he’d do.
No matter what it took.
“No. Well, if I have to, but…just be careful when you open the door. Don’t go through it without looking around first,” he said, praying to God she’d listen to him on this.
“Okay. Jonas’s office is at the back. As soon as you go through the door, it’s on the right.”
She slowly opened the door and did exactly what Roman had told her to do, looking left and then right before walking through to the dimly lit floor of office suites. He followed closely behind, noting the location of the elevators on the opposite end of the floor and that there didn’t seem to be any other way out than the stairwell.
They hurried to the office at the back of the building, and Kate used her key to her boss’s office to let them in. Closing the door behind them, he watched as she made a beeline to the desk near the window thankfully covered with closed blinds.
She turned on the lamp on the left corner of his desk and looked back at Roman. “Jonas was a history buff, so when he saw these lamps online he bought them because he said they made his office look like an old timey southern lawyer’s office.”
Roman looked at them and didn’t see how they were any different than other lamps he’d ever seen in offices. Gold tone with linen rectangular shades, they didn’t seem old timey or southern to him.
“You should have seen how pleased he was when he turned them on for the first time,” she reminisced as she sat in the chair behind his desk. “He was just as pleased as punch.”
For the first time, he noticed Kate only occasionally had a southern accent. Curious, he asked, “Why don’t you sound like everyone else in New Orleans?”
She looked up as she spun around in the chair toward the filing cabinet next to the desk and asked, “What do you mean by that?”
“You don’t have a southern accent like everyone else in New Orleans. Like the desk clerk at the hotel. You don’t sound anything like him. You only sound like you’re from here when you say certain words, like when you said he was as pleased as punch. Why?”
Flashing him a smile, she said, “I was born in Illinois. My family didn’t move down here until I was thirteen. I think the rule is if you move somewhere after you’re twelve, you sound like the place you came from. I’ve picked up some of the accent, but I guess I still sound like I’m from up north.”
She opened up the filing cabinet and lifted a laptop out of the top drawer. Surprised to see that come out, he said, “That’s a strange place to keep that, isn’t it?”
With a nod, she closed the drawer and set the laptop on the desk. Opening it, she explained as she began to tap on the keyboard, “He was an odd combination of old and new. I guess it seems strange, but even with his quirks, Jonas was an okay guy.”
“What seems strange is that he didn’t take his laptop with him when he left the office.”
Kate stopped typing for a moment and shrugged. “I guess. That was another idiosyncrasy of his. He had the ability to remember any detail he came across. What do they call that? Photographic memory or something like that. So he didn’t really need his laptop if a client called him when he was at home.”
“Then what’s going to be on the laptop that will prove anything?” Roman asked, suddenly worried her boss had kept all the important details in his head and they’d risked coming there for nothing.
She grinned up at him. “I said he remembered everything. I didn’t say he wasn’t completely OCD about making sure there was a copy of it. As I said, quirky. Anything Jonas ever heard, read, or saw ended up in a file on this laptop. But I’d bet a hundred bucks most people don’t even know he had this since he kept it hidden in that file cabinet all the time. I’m likely the only person who knew he used it.”
Quirky indeed.