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assumed he was, it was just another “Wub wub waaaaanh,” like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
    Still, I knew odds were at least one of them wasn’t a total idiot. They might guess what I did and it would be hard to protest my innocence with my knees covered in rat piss. I crawled quickly toward a nice tangle of silvery tubes that should hide me from the spot where I came in.
    I skirted around it, finding what looked like the abandoned nest of an especially large rat, and paused, turning off my light.
    Not a second later, I heard a thump. “You see anything?” Not Patrick Wilson’s voice, complete with a hollow echo from the men’s room.
    “He’s not up here,” Gutierrez said. Just to really complete the heart attack for me, the beam of a flashlight splashed underneath the tubes, trying to halo my foot. I shifted, and the light followed my motion. “Wait.”
    “You see him?”
    The light twitched again, trying to draw out the movement.
    “It’s just a rat.”
    The light was on the far wall now, a series of concentric circles fading away. I turned around. I was about halfway to the front of the building and still hugging the wall for the most part. If memory served, I was over some offices.
    “Can I come down now?” Gutierrez asked.
    “Yeah, there’s—” And the rest of what he said was cut off by the thump of the panel going back in place. I turned my light back on and crept along a few more feet, then figured, what the hell. I was going to have to do this eventually. I lifted the panel and peeked underneath. It was a large, open office with several desks and, more importantly, several people. It wasn’t the kind of place I could just jump down into, tell them I was Harry Tuttle, here to repair their air conditioning, and leave.
    With the side of my head pressed into the ceiling, peeking out of the smallest possible crack in the panel, I considered my options. That’s when I heard a door open.
    Not Patrick Wilson said, “I need everyone to stay in their offices for the time being. It’s nothing to worry about, but we’ve lost track of a visitor.”
    Then came the sweetest words I’d ever heard. Well, okay, not the sweetest, but certainly welcoming ones for my present situation.
    “Mr. Harris is at lunch,” said one of the clerks. “Is he going to be able to get back in?”
    “We’ll have the situation cleared up before that. Don’t worry.”
    I mashed my cheek into the floor, wincing as that bit into my tender nose, trying to see what I hoped that exchange implied. There it was: right at the end of the larger office zone was a smaller, single office. Sure, there were windows looking out into the common room, but I could work with that. Kind of. Or at least for as long as this would take.
    I crept along the beams, my legs burning the whole way, until I judged I was above Harris’s office. I checked from the panel and saw that my estimate was good. Just beneath me was a good, old, city-issued desk, with an outdated PC riding it. There was a chair that had dished out more lower back pain than most football players and a cluttered couple of filing cabinets.
    I lowered my head into the room upside-down. Through the glass window looking into the larger room, I could see three clerks going about the business of the office, all of them with one eye on the clock. It was one of those large ones that reminded me of the clocks in school marking the cursed minutes until Mrs. Dugan’s math class was over. None were really looking at Harris’s office, but then, why bother looking at the boss’s office when you know he’s not there?
    There really wasn’t going to be a good time to do it, so I just went for it, slowly lowering myself into the room, watching the clerks on the other side of the glass. They went about their work, and the whole time I was willing them not to look at me. I hoped for the sudden development of mutant powers. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d tried that—it pretty much summed up my