guess I better go down there and get it.”
“I’ll do it,” Faith said, standing up and reaching for her purse. “I’m bored just sitting here anyway.”
“You sure you don’t mind?” the older woman asked. “You’re not on the clock.”
Faith nearly rolled her eyes at the not so subtle hint that she wouldn’t get paid for running an errand. “I know, Mrs. Henders, but I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ll go straight down there, and I’ll come back in a few minutes with either Cinthy, or the key.”
“All right, Faith,” Mrs. Henders agreed. “I appreciate it. I have to run up front for a moment, but I’ll be back here in three minutes.”
“Sounds good,” Faith replied. She left the employee lounge and headed toward the back of the cavernous building with a bounce in her step. She’d let Cinthy know she’d meet her at Club Bruno, grab the key, and then she was out of there. Both the cargo elevator and the employee elevator were busy, so she took the stairs down three flights to what the museum called the Basement.
The Basement actually consisted of an enormous street level warehouse, and three underground floors of storage. The exhibits in the museum proper represented a tiny fraction of what the Basement contained in it’s maze of humidity controlled and hermetically sealed vaults.
Faith reached the bottom of the stairs and pulled open the door. She walked past the elevators which, strangely, had large crates blocking the doors open. Faith frowned, then shrugged. They were probably loading stuff into them to take upstairs.
She opened the door into a big room where deliveries were accepted and stacked before being sorted and catalogued. She walked along a narrow aisle between the towering crates, aiming for the voices she heard coming from the back of the room where the wide rolling delivery doors were located. She started to call out when the content of the conversation she was hearing suddenly registered.
She was so shocked that she kept walking, straight up the aisle and around the corner. She stopped in plain sight of Cinthy, Eric, and three uniformed museum guards, a mixed expression of surprise and disappointment on her face.
“Faith, what are you doing here?” Cinthy demanded sharply. “I told you to wait for me in the lounge.”
“Mrs. Henders sent me to tell you that you forgot to return the vault key you checked out,” Faith said, her eyes taking in the black ground-truck backed up to the loading dock, already loaded with several large crates stamped with the museum’s seal. A ground-truck that she knew for a fact belonged to Eric. “But you didn’t forget it at all, did you? You’re stealing from the museum.”
“So?” Cinthy said, tossing her long blonde hair over her shoulder carelessly, though her blue eyes were icily intent. “What do you care? This museum has so much crap no one will realize anything’s missing for years. We’ll be long gone by then, and so will you.”
Faith shook her head, wondering if Cinthy thought she was an idiot. She was easy going, yes. But she wasn’t a criminal, nor was she about to stand by and let them rob the museum blind while she did nothing. She noticed that Eric and the three guards, Rick, Jeffers, and Todd, were all watching her warily. She turned around, but Cinthy stopped her.
“Where are you going, Faith?” she asked.
“Back to the lounge,” Faith replied.
“Are you going to tell anyone what you saw?”
Faith turned back to face the woman she’d thought of as a friend. “If I say nothing, then I’m as guilty as you are.” She looked up at Eric, then the other guards. “You guys get paid to keep these things safe, and here you are stealing them. Do you really expect me to just let this slide? Pretend I didn’t see it?”
“That’s exactly what we expect,” Eric said, speaking for the first time.
“Yeah, I can see that,”
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