She was already racing to her desk to grab her coat and keys before the thought was complete in her mind, heart in her throat.
There was a third stash of kryptonite.
“Keep working on Chow’s accounts! If you strike out, start on Wayne’s. Any suspicious activity in Wayne’s, start yelling your head off for Superman and don’t stop until he shows up or I get back!”
She grabbed her coat without stopping and picked up speed as she headed for the ramp.
“Where are you going?” Jimmy called after her as she dashed up the ramp out of the bullpen.
She punched the button for the elevator. “Baxter Avenue!”*****
Chapter 12
Twenty minutes later.
Lois bit back a curse as her foot slid on the loose gravel beneath her. Her heels really weren’t up for this sort of thing, and she missed her usual after-hours prowling-around sneakers. She had half a mind to step out of the stylish pumps entirely, but, as she’d been reminded all too recently by her ill-fated oil dip, running in heels was still a step up from running barefoot.
She planted her feet solidly beneath her and cupped her hands to peer through the dusty window in front of her. Inside, large wooden crates sat piled high, shrouded in long shadows. Cobwebs stretched across the gaps between them, dust motes clinging to the gossamer.
The place looked deserted.
Maybe there wouldn’t be any running at all tonight, she thought with uncharacteristic hope.
The Baxter Avenue address had led her to a nondescript storage building. It had a smaller blueprint than most of Lex’s other properties, but was two stories. The sign had been removed, though weather and age had stained the lettering indelibly on the building: The Exhibit Supply Company.
It had been impossible for her to miss the ‘x’ in the name.
She swallowed. Whatever she found in this warehouse had been one of Luthor’s last acts on Earth. The thought sent a chill down her spine.
Moving around the side of the building, she had discovered that the little warehouse boasted a dark green door.
She tried to ignore the foreboding that had settled over her as she’d left the green door untouched and slipped around the back to the window she was currently peering through. Pushing against the window, it was unwilling to budge. Either locked or stuck, she decided it wouldn’t offer her the discreet way in that she was searching for.
Moving further along the building, she came to a fire escape that led up to the second floor. Taking a quick look around and not catching any movement, she decided that ‘up’ usually worked out well for her, and reached up to mount the ladder, speedily making her way upward. Finding a door at the landing, she quickly got to work with her lock picks.
It snicked open obediently a moment later.
She paused again, listening intently at the cracked door. When there wasn’t any indication that someone had heard her, she opened the door quickly, slipping inside and pulling it nearly closed behind her.
Silence and darkness met her inside.
When nothing moved, she pulled her penlight from her pocket and switched it on.
The short hallway she now stood in offered two other doors in front of her and a staircase to her right. She glanced down into the shadowy bowels of the building but couldn’t see further than the top-most steps. But she didn’t see anyone lumbering up out of the darkness, so that meant no one had seen her, either.
Holding the penlight in her mouth, she grasped the doorknob that she’d just come through in both hands and quietly closed the door all the way, letting the latch fall silently back against the strike plate.
Now she had to be sure that there was no one else upstairs, that no one could come up from behind and surprise her when she made her way down to investigate the storage area below.
She moved quietly toward the farthest hall door and grasped the knob. Moving slowly, she turned it as silently as she could until she felt the latch recede.
She held her breath as she counted silently.
3…
2…
1…
She flung the door open quickly and cast her tiny light across the room.
Completely empty.
She checked behind the door and then gave the room a slower, more thorough look.
There was nothing there.
She lowered her light.
It was odd. She’d almost expected there to be someone waiting for her inside. Her senses were still on high alert from thinking she might run into kryptonite, but her instincts were screaming something else at her, too.
As if she weren’t alone in this building.
She stepped back out of the room and moved toward the second door.
Grasping it tightly, she cautiously turned back the latch and held her breath again, for luck.
3…
2…
1…
Her penlight swept the room.
Nothing.
Huh.
She’d felt sure that there had been someone in here.
She glanced behind her into the hall.
No one.
“Clark, are you here?” she whispered as quietly as she could.
Silence.
“Clark, this isn’t the time to jump out and yell ‘boo.’ This place gives me the creeps.”
He might joyfully tease her through these situations, but if he was nearby, he’d be able to hear her hammering heartbeat, and he’d go out of his way to keep her from being afraid.
That meant he wasn’t here.
She really was on her own for this one.
To ease her mind, she swept her penlight over the empty room a second time.
And that’s when she saw it.
The open window.
She threw her light across the room again, into the corners and across the ceiling before stepping inside and checking behind the door.
There was no one else in the room.
Crouching down, she moved her light across the floor near the window. The bare floorboards didn’t look particularly weathered.
She cautiously crossed the room and placed her palm on the wood below the sill. It has been a chilly, wet spring and a rainy summer in Metropolis. The windowsill showed none of the warping that you’d expect from wood that had been exposed to the elements for weeks. So it hadn’t been open all summer, she concluded.
That meant someone had opened it recently.
She ran her hand questingly around the whole frame, but the window didn’t offer her any other clues.
She quickly crossed the room again, back the way she’d come, shutting the door behind her. After flicking her light across the hall to be sure she was still the only one there, she switched it off.
There was no one upstairs.
She looked toward the black expanse of the descending staircase.
It was time to see if that was also true of the floor below.
She stood with her back to the door, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. If she was headed downstairs, the staircase was her only option. But if there was someone else in the building, she’d be a sitting duck heading down the stairs with a light. Maybe if she snuck down in the dark, it wouldn’t be as easy to spot her.
Once she could see well enough to make out the silhouettes of the other doors in the hall, she crossed to the stairs and crouched down. Holding onto the railing, she took two steps down.
The stair creaked beneath her.
She froze.
If someone was there, they’d have heard that.
She strained her eyes to peer into the darkness in front of her for several silent seconds.
It was as still as a cemetery.
No one sounded an alarm or came running. Her brow furrowed as she considered the possibilities. Maybe whoever had been here had come and gone already? She slowly took one more step down, aiming for the side of the staircase where the wall opened up. She leaned down to look beneath the wooden railing, and the first floor came into view.
It was
very dark. What little light came in from the windows was obstructed immediately by the first row of crates nearest them. The crates that she was here to search were stacked everywhere, in some places up to the ceiling, giving the warehouse a labyrinthian quality. It looked spooky at best.
She threw a quick prayer out to the universe that the winding trails through the building were the only similarity to a labyrinth that she’d encounter tonight. Because labyrinths weren’t just dangerous because you could get lost in them. …They usually had a monster protecting them from intruders.
Stop it, she told herself bracingly.
Forget the creepy nightmare, and get the kryptonite. Scanning the floor below, she didn’t see anyone else’s lights or movement as she panned across the graveyard of Lex’s crumbled empire, and that was the important part.
She stayed low. Crablike, she tiptoed her way down the staircase. Pausing at the bottom, she looked for labels on the three closest crates. ‘Cables,’ ‘pipes’ and a general ‘electrics’ tag. Her upper lip rose in distaste at her findings. Not what she was looking for. She chose the path beyond the crate labeled ‘electrics.’ On that first investigation with Superman as her partner, they'd figured out that anything labeled 'electrics' was really hiding something much more illicit. Maybe the coded tag for drugs would lead to the more illicit cargo, like a box with the coded tag for kryptonite?
As she moved, she glanced down at the floor, and with a shock, stopped still.
There were footprints.
The hair rose on the back of her neck. Usually, she’d be thrilled to find evidence that she was on the right track. But the haunted house feeling had paired with this investigation’s constant reminders of Lex in her mind, and by this point, she couldn't ignore the clawing fear that she was heading toward a monster in the heart of the labyrinth after all.
Her eyes flicked nervously from side to side, scanning the darkness again.
Why had the only night Clark was truly unavailable been the one night she just had to come sneaking through one of Lex’s eerie mystery warehouses?
In spite of the chill she was fighting off from the sight of the footprints in the dust, she decided to follow them.
She skulked along down a row of boxes, keeping her footsteps light while constantly checking back over her shoulder. Being in the maze, it felt like there were even more crates than it had looked like from above. She read the labels on them as she passed.
Still following the footprints, she came to the corner of her row of crates when her eye caught something.
The label on the side of this crate read ‘Fertilixer.’
Her muscles tensed.
This was what she’d been looking for!
Please let it be here! She begged the universe.
If she could rid the world of just
one piece of kryptonite, she might be able to make up for some of the pain she’d caused him over the Lex debacle. If she could just find
one piece, Clark would be that much safer. She remembered what it had been like during those desolate months after she thought he’d been shot. Her whole world had become unbearably bleak.
And back then they’d only been friends. Plus, she’d still have had Superman to rely on. She wouldn’t have that kind of fallback now, if anything really happened to him. And now that they were so much more…
No, she couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to Clark now.
When this was over, they really needed to have a talk about the rest of their lives. Over the last few months, it had become more than apparent to her that he was hurting and not healing from the loss of his non-super life. Her initial flicker of desire that they needed to do something about his frozen emotional recovery had built to a near-inferno that was now threatening to escape and light them both on fire, invulnerable or not. She vowed that she was going to do whatever it took to stop Clark Kent from letting his life pass him by.
But first, she thought, with renewed determination,
she was going to destroy this kryptonite.
