When the fourth monkey misbehaves

So, here is the first tidbit of my current project



When the Fourth Monkey Misbehaves
By G.W. Hogg
©4-9-05

Carric Scott was not a good man and most people you asked would agree. Though they would rarely say he was a bad man, few really knew him.
That morning, he got off the New York subway at his usual stop. Rode the elevator up to the eighty-fifth floor, badged in at the entrance to the office, and stopped to talk to the security guard.
Beverly, the security guard, smiled at Carric as he approached. He smiled back. She was a good looking woman of around forty, with the nice extra curves that women her age get. Black hair, cut neat and short. Carric always liked women in uniform, and she looked particularly fetching in hers.
She smiled again at Carric, as he put his laptop case on the counter. “Would you like to come over for dinner tonight?” She asked.
“Sure, anything special?”
“No, I just thought I’d like to have you over for dinner.”
“Should I bring something for dessert?”
“No.” She smiled and winked. “You can be the dessert.”
He smiled back. It was understood.
“Are you ready for your staff meeting this morning?” She asked.
Carric gave her a blank look, then suddenly realized what day it was. “Oh my gosh! I have treats today, and I didn’t bring anything!”
”You had better hurry, your meeting starts in half an hour.”
“Can I leave my laptop here?”
”Sure.”
They exchanged smiles and winks and he walked to the door. She hit the button, and the door unlocked.

As he rode the elevator down, he realized that he had not badged out. The system would still show him in the building. It didn’t matter to him, but some anal retentive security guy would see that he had badged in twice that day, and out only once. The might think that he was still in the building at two o’clock in the morning. This didn’t worry him, as he rode down to the first floor.
Out onto the busy sidewalk, passed everyone who was hustling to work, from work and where ever New Yorkers went at that hour of the morning. He walked the several blocks to the bakery that he knew.
Just before Carric entered the bakery, he heard a large explosion behind him. He spun around and looked up. The upper floors of the office building were he worked, were now engulfed in flames.
He stood there, silently, watching. Passersby stopped and looked also. Soon there were gasps from the crowd, fingers pointing, murmurs that were getting louder.
They all watched, as the flames grew, licking up the upper floors of tower.
Carric had worked in the tower long enough to recognize that whatever had caused the explosion and fire, was either at, or a few floors from where he worked.
Different people yelled, shouted, screamed, or quietly murmured. He heard someone say, ‘I saw a plane, I saw a plane hit the building!’

Carric didn’t care that much what caused it. All he knew was that someplace, probably in the basement of the Hudson building in Boston, where his company kept a small office; there was a record on a server, of Carric going in and Carric not coming out. That server also had a record of losing it’s connection with his office, on the eighty-fifth floor.

Everybody leaves, Carric knew. Sometimes you leave on your own, sometimes you had leaving forced upon you. He unclipped the cell phone from his belt and removed the battery. Then he did the same to his pager. Then he turned from the sight of the burning building and continued on down the street.

He turned down the first alley he came to. Tossing the batteries in different garbage cans. He found a piece of pavement, took it, and smashed his cell phone, then his pager. He continued to walk down the alley, putting the smashed bits into different garbage cans. He then crouched down next to a dumpster, emptied his wallet of all identification, credit cards, library card and put it all in a neat pile. He fished a pack of matches from his jacket pocket and carefully set the little pile on fire. With a little help from some newspaper he found, within a few minutes, Andrew C. Scott, ceased to exist.
He stood and opened a hidden flap in his wallet. From there, he took out a drivers license and credit card with a different name on them. Put them into their proper positions and left the alley.
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