Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Last Night

The building inspector came on Monday with a clipboard and a face that had already decided.

He was a heavyset man of about sixty, and he stood at the top of the cistern stairs with his arms crossed.

"Unpermitted water storage," he said. "Somebody called it in."

"Who?" I asked.

"Doesn't matter who."

"It matters to me."

Ezra, behind me, yawned and said, "It's a very old cistern."

The inspector went down the stairs anyway, with his flashlight, grumbling.

At the bottom, the beam stopped on the brick wall, where a brass plate had been screwed in more than a century ago.

I had found it Friday night, under forty years of soot.

THE CITY OF CLEVELAND, DIVISION OF FIRE, RESERVE CISTERN NO. 9, 1894.

He read it twice.

"Huh," he said. "I thought they filled all of these in."

"Apparently they missed one."

He ran his thumb over the plate, and his whole face changed.

"My grandfather was a fireman," he said. "He used to talk about these."

He tore the notice in half, folded the halves together and put them in his pocket.

"A county number called this in," he said, not looking at me.

"It came from the Terminal project office."

"Don't ask me why a project office cares about your basement."

I thanked him and gave him a bag of Tuck's brownies for the road.

When he'd gone, Tuck said, "That's how you do it, boss. Right there. You just let the guy be somebody's grandson."

I hadn't planned it.

But I knew now who wanted me out, and where they sat.

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