Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

a good few seconds to understand what Reggie is saying. She’s talking really fast, and that cool Louisiana accent of hers is turning every second word to chowder.

“Slow down,” I tell her, trying to make sense of it all, my drug-addled brain not helping. “Wait – Reggie, no, slow down, I can’t hear… Hold up, what do you mean electrified?”

EIGHTReggie

The satellite photo on Reggie’s screen looks mundane, but it makes the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

It shows a self-storage unit in Glendale – the kind of facility that has sprouted everywhere in the US, appearing near highway off-ramps and industrial areas. Big Green Storage, the company is called. The kind of outfit that offers a concrete-and-steel box with a roller door for the low, low price of $21.95 a month (First month free!!!). The building that houses these particular concrete and steel boxes is three stories high, linked by elevators and fire stairs. It is identical to hundreds of other storage units across the US.

Except for one tiny detail.

The Glendale franchise of Big Green Storage was run, as most of these places were, by one permanent employee. Reggie looked him up: Art Levinson, a forty-something man with a driver’s licence photo which made him look as if he’d just heard that a distant, half-remembered cousin had just died. Just another poor bastard working for a little over minimum wage in the great state of California.

At around eleven that morning, Art had been in what passed for the building’s office, making himself a cup of coffee, when his hand had started to vibrate. “Buzz,” he told the 911 operator on the call Reggie pulled. “Like I was holding my phone, and it started ringing, only my phone was all the way over on the desk. That kind of buzzing vibration mode, you know?”

Reggie has to play the audio back a few times before she understands the story, because by the time Art had managed to place the call, he was hysterical.

The buzzing sensation had stopped as soon as Art had taken his hand off the coffee machine. When he touched it again, the buzz was stronger. He’d thought it was another earthquake at first, or even just a regular tremor. But nothing in the office was moving, as it would during a quake.

It was then that Art realised that his shoes were buzzing, too. He’d gripped the edge of the table the coffee machine stood on, and snatched his hand away with a yelp. “Red-hot,” he kept repeating on the call. “Like my skin was on fire. The whole damn thing was a red-hot joy buzzer.”

By then, Art’s feet had started to feel the same way, stinging and burning inside his shoes. He’d leapt for his desk, all but throwing himself onto it, his coffee mug shattering across the floor.

There was no relief on top of the desk. It hurt him just as bad.

“It was an electric shock,” he told the operator. His voice on the tape is garbled. “I’ve had them before, touched a live wire once or twice, I do DIY amps and stuff at home, and I know what it feels like. But I knew that couldn’t be true, because the desk was made of wood. You can’t run a current through wood.”

This last was said with a kind of hysterical, desperate confusion.

Art had boogied off the desk and boogied right the hell out of the office. By then, every single surface he touched – be it wood, metal, plastic, concrete, his shoes, his clothes – felt like grabbing hold of a live wire. There was a stench by that point: seared plastic, ozone. Art flew out there, howling, barrelling out of the office door into the parking lot. Five feet out, he tripped, sprawling on the concrete surface – then leapt back up with a distraught cry when it shocked him too.

Ten feet or so out from the building, the sensation began to drop away. Art had somehow made it across the street to a warehouse, borrowed a cellphone to call 911.

The cops came, along with an ambulance. Art couldn’t tell them if there was anyone else in the building – tenants could come and go as they pleased without signing in, and the truck-sized security gates were on the other side of the building.

Art was physically fine, albeit shaken. But none of the first responders could get within ten feet of the building. It wasn’t a hard boundary, but as they approached, the concrete began to shock them.

The storage unit, and the parking lot around it, had become electrified.

Reggie makes herself focus. The how can come later – it’s the what that concerns her now. She works fast, pulling up info on the building. Owners, blueprints, current tenants. Satellite imagery. The police presence will make things tricky, especially if they call in another agency like the FBI. Moira can probably take care of that, holding the folks at the Bureau off until China Shop gets in place, but that doesn’t mean they have all night. They need to work fast.

The cameras are all down, of course – torched by the electricity coursing through the building – but she digs in deep, going through the owners’ server. It’s not difficult. Self-storage companies aren’t exactly the Pentagon when it comes to systems security.

Reggie quickly grabs the past twenty-four hours, finds the time the cameras went down – 9.58 a.m., a little over two hours ago. Reggie skips back an hour, runs it at high speed. Nobody around. Nothing out of the ordinary, in either the reception or the dimly lit corridors.

Reggie growls. Seems like the what will have to wait until China Shop get there.

Maybe this isn’t as mysterious as it seems. She knows a little about electricity, has a basic knowledge of computer systems and copper wiring. Could it just be a disconnected power cable? One of the big utility cables buried underground, perhaps…

But even cursory research shows that the