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nametag said Gutierrez. He was the smallest guy there, and from the looks of him, couldn’t grow a full beard. “He always such a hardass?”
    Gutierrez snorted. “He’s being easy on you.”
    The way he said it made me think that if my skin had been a shade darker, I’d be in cuffs and then some. “It’s my lucky day.”
    Not Patrick Wilson had made it back to the guard station and was on the phone. He wasn’t going to like what he found and I had to make tracks.
    “Hey, Gutierrez? You mind if I take a piss?”
    “What, here?”
    “Yeah. I was thinking right up against this wall, so that when the K-9 units come through, they know it’s mine. No, I was more considering heading to the bathroom over there,” and I nodded at the men’s room on the other side of the hall, “and seeing if I could figure out what those porcelain cup things on the wall are for.”
    “Yeah, go ahead,” he said, trying not to smirk.
     I forced myself to stroll over slowly, pushing the door open into a tile room permeated with enough industrial cleanser that I was pretty sure the soles of my shoes were being eaten away. I could see why Gutierrez wasn’t concerned about my running. There was a window, but it was closed, with chicken wire crisscrossing through the opaque glass. Fortunately, this wasn’t my first rodeo.
    Look, I’m not proud of how many buildings I’ve broken into and out of. I’d like to list them off, but the sad fact is I’ve lost count. I’d never actually broken into or out of this particular building, and I was going to have to do it on the fly while three armed men and one armed woman tracked me down, which would make things difficult. But suffice to say that if I were applying for a job, in the “special skills” section, I’d be totally justified in describing some form of what I was about to do.
    I went to the last stall and stood on the toilet tank. Any minute now, Not Patrick Wilson would get the word that Detective Art Saroyan was missing, even if barely anyone could remember ever seeing him, let alone working a case with him, and he’d try to figure out why he or possibly Nick Zorotovich had shown up claiming to be the other. I would have to work quickly.
    I pushed up the false ceiling and shoved the panel to the side. An amateur might have gone right for the air ducts, but it takes a special kind of person to go through those: namely children, contortionists, and Olympic gymnasts. I had lost a few pounds since I stopped stress eating on the job, but it wasn’t like I had suddenly turned into Bishop the android. I grabbed the supports in the ceiling, jumped off the toilet tank, and hauled myself up.
    The smell of ammonia had been replaced by the stench of ammonia. Down there it had been produced by Dow; up here, rats. And it was everywhere. I was hoping they were nice and small, none bigger than a housecat, but I didn’t plan to stay and measure them. The turds were all around, along with chewed-up insulation, warnings to trespassers like myself: “Okay, human, this place is ours and you’re here because we let you.”
    I replaced the panel in the ceiling and started moving. It got pretty dark, but with the light bleeding up through the minute holes in the acoustic tile, I could see a little. I fished my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight app. Amazing what they can do with technology nowadays.
    Up here, the false ceiling stretched over most of the expanse, though it ended in solid blockhouse, which was probably where the jail started. There were ducts and pipes and tubes leading into the ceiling below. I went on hands and knees, keeping to the splinter-iffic beams crisscrossing my new floor. With the silvery tubes snaking every which way, I felt like I was performing a colonoscopy on Robbie the Robot. I could hear the noise of the building below me, but the barrier had turned it into a muted slurry. If Not Patrick Wilson was shouting at Gutierrez and the other guards as I