Disclaimer: This work of fan-fiction is not intended for personal profit. All the Cause of Death canonical characters used in this fan fic are the property of Electronic Arts and/or other designated copyright and/or trademark holders.
Chapter 3: As One Door Closes
To his surprise, Mal got called back the morning after. He had left his name and phone number, so anyone running even a cursory background check would have picked up his SFPD career.
The man's voice over the phone had said, "Mr. Fallon, this is Gary Jackson, Head of Building Security at 345 California Center. When can you come in for an interview?"
Mal responded, "ASAP, Mr. Jackson."
He heard the man chuckle through the receiver. "Well, it won't need to be quite that soon, but my schedule's pretty open today. Why don't you come down around eleven o'clock for an interview?"
"Done."
After the call ended, Mal looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock in the morning, so he wasted no time in getting ready for the day. Thankfully, he had had a good suit dry-cleaned about two months before; it was still in the plastic wrap, even.
He paused to look in the mirror and checked that his tie was straight. He shook his head and laughed ruefully. Here he was, putting on his good suit and tie and shoes for what – night watchman, wearing some dumb uniform, making nine bucks an hour for the rest of his life?
How the mighty do fall, he thought.
But a job was a job, and Mal Fallon knew he didn't have much of a choice.
.oO[CoDCoD]Oo.
Mal strode briskly into the elegant office tower and made his way past hotel guests, office workers, and the occasional delivery driver bringing a package to someone. He was looking for the security office, and after getting a sense of how the ground floor was laid out, found the door with SECURITY imprinted on it.
Inside was a young man in a suit, seated behind a desk. Mal had stepped into what was obviously a reception area: some chairs and a water cooler were placed against the wall opposite the man's desk, making a waiting area, and the desk was so situated that Mal couldn't go past it except between it and an ornamental cactus plant. Behind the desk was a hallway that led to several other offices. Mal assumed their observation HQ would be behind one of the doors.
He looked at the name plate on the young man's desk. It simply read RECEPTION. He said, "Hi. I'm here for an interview with Mr. Gary Jackson."
"Of course. Your name?"
"Mal Fallon. He'll know who I am; he called me this morning and asked me to come in for the job interview for night security." Mal remained standing near the desk. He might not be a cop anymore, but he still knew all the tricks to not let the other guy think you were a pushover.
The man reached for his phone and dialed a number. "Yes. Gary? A Mal Fallon here to see you … okay, I will." He stood and said, "Come with me."
As Mal circled around the desk and joined the young man, he could see the nameplate on his suit read RANDY.
"So, Randy. They make you wear that so you don't scare the hotel guests?"
Randy chuckled. "Yeah. P.R. people are more comfortable if they can put a name to the person they're pouring out their troubles to." He shrugged. "It's mostly an easy job. Stay at the desk, make sure nobody comes in who isn't supposed to be in, deal with the occasional person who forgot their access pass, stuff like that."
Mal sized the guy up. "You play a little football in school?"
"Some, yeah." Randy frowned. "How'd you guess?"
"Must be my keen powers of observation." Mal grinned, and he saw Randy smile just a bit.
They had been walking down the corridor. Randy gestured as they reached a T intersection. Mal could see more doors down each arm of the T, and the door which faced the hallway they had just come down. That door was marked "GARY JACKSON, Security Head".
Randy knocked briefly and said, "I've brought him."
A muffled "Go ahead" could be heard through the door. Randy gestured for Mal to go in and briskly walked back the way he came.
The office was large but comfortable. A heavyset, muscular-looking older man was at a wide oak desk. Mal's brain automatically began running through a physical description, as if he were still assessing suspects for cases: white male, brown hair, uncertain eye color – probably hazel or brown, about six feet tall, approximately two hundred pounds, late thirties or early forties, no other identifying features or marks.
The man at the desk signed a report in front of him and then pushed it aside. He stood up, his hand extended. "Hi! Gary Jackson."
"Mal Fallon. Pleased to be here." He extended his hand, and felt the other man's strength through the handshake.
Gary smiled. "Good. Have a seat there, huh?"
Both men took seats, Mal taking one of the two comfortable chairs opposite Gary, who sat back down behind his desk.
Gary continued. "All right, so to get some preliminaries about this interview out of the way, you should know I ran a background check as soon as I caught your name. Now it seems you resigned at kind of an … odd time? I kind of asked around and it seems you left just before you could wrap up the Freezer Case at the SFPD. You want to tell me anything about that?"
"I left for personal reasons. That's it," Mal replied in clipped tones.
Gary shrugged. "All right. Well, as far as I'm concerned, you'd pass a background check. Fair enough. You should know we work security not just for the offices, but also the hotel up top. So as you can appreciate, there are more delicate situations, given the necessarily twenty-four-hour operation of a hotel, than would be typical of night security watch."
Mal replied, "So don't get in the way of a guy and his 'girlfriend', and if someone's wandering around drunk, try to get them to their room quietly. If a guy's so-called girlfriend is outside his room and angrily wants back in, get 'em away from there. And if someone's obviously wandering around trying to slip into rooms that aren't theirs, offer to check which room they're registered in and if they stick around, they're legit. If not, they'll take off."
"The idea being, of course, to convince someone who shouldn't be around to go quietly rather than make a scene." Gary nodded. "I like that. Good sense of discretion."
Mal decided he liked his chances, and asked, "So besides night patrol, what other regular duties would you be expecting from me?"
Gary ran his hand through his still-thick brown hair, and leaned back in his chair. "Well, it's pretty much routine building patrols, checking office doors to make sure they're closed and locked, discreetly dealing with the occasional hooker who makes a scene, making sure nobody's trying to break into hotel rooms, that kind of thing.
"Honestly, though, I'm pretty sold on you right now. You're an ex-cop, so you know how to spot shady folks and aren't going to freeze up in situations that need an immediate response. Job's going to be kind of basic compared to chasing psycho axe murderers, though." Gary chuckled.
Mal smiled. "That's true. If you'll take me, I can start work right away."
"Great!" Gary reached across his desk and shook hands. "Welcome to building security for 345 California Center."
So now Malachi Fallon had a job. But given how easily Gary had skated over his troubled resignation from the Force, Mal suspected he'd be having to look a gift horse in the mouth pretty soon.
.oO[CoDCoD]Oo.
Mal had been used to shift work as a cop, but having to work graveyard shifts all the time (being low man on the totem pole) was surprisingly hard on him. He would leave work at seven in the morning, be home by about 7:30, and be just bone-tired enough to not want to leave the house, but not tired enough yet to sleep. But always, by around eleven, his eyes would droop one too many times while watching TV, and he'd take that as his cue to haul his ass to the bathroom and brush his teeth, then get ready for bed. Wake up at eight PM or so, get ready for the night, have a coffee and catch the news on TV, then roll in for the eleven PM shift.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The nights when his eyelids would start drooping as he walked around the building were the worst, though.
What he began noticing real quick was that while he and the other guy (named Evan, six foot four, olive skin, black hair, two hundred, athletic build) regularly scheduled for weeknights, would switch off patrolling and watching the banks of hallway cameras, Evan would always insist on taking first watch at the cameras, eleven PM to three AM.
Mal had frowned the first time he'd heard it. "Doesn't policy say we have to rotate these duties? Like, I take first watch one night and you take first watch the next?"
Evan had stood up from the chair in the semi-dark room. He was tall, even taller than Mal by a couple of inches. He was broad through the shoulders, and he looked like he hadn't been long out of high school. Probably played basketball, Mal judged. Evan then scowled down at Mal and said, "Not negotiable. You're new here, so I get first call and I say I get first watch. There gonna be a problem with that?"
Mal might never be a scholar and a diplomat, but he wasn't stupid enough to start a fight over something so seemingly trivial. He'd just shrugged, backed off, and said, "Great. I'll just relax for the last four hours before I take off to go home."
Evan had nodded brusquely. "We won't have a problem, then."
And they hadn't. Evan was always polite after that incident when they would switch off around mid-shift.
But as Gary had said, it was really, fundamentally, boringly routine. Floor after floor of vacant, silent, dark offices, lit only by the moonlight and streetlight, as well as the sparse, harsh fluorescent lamps that lit the elevator areas on each floor. To keep himself from getting too soft, Mal resolved to always take the stairs up and down, no matter what. Even if his footsteps reverberating up and down the concrete stairwells was more than a little creepy sometimes.
The hotel levels were a little more interesting. The first time he'd come up to the hotel level through the fire exit, he hadn't been prepared for the bright indirect lighting that lit the corridors as though it were daytime. He had stood, blinking for a couple of moments, only to be startled by a woman's giggling.
At the reception desk about twenty feet away, a slim blond woman (white, five-six, one-forty, moon earrings, no necklace or rings on fingers, wearing business casual clothing) was covering her mouth with her hand. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to laugh. You just looked so startled!"
Mal recovered himself, forced a smile, and walked over. "Hey. I'm one of the security guys. Mal Fallon."
"Pleased to meet you. I'm Colleen Cameron." She extended her hand, and Mal quickly shook it. She briskly said, "Now, I'm supposed to check that your earbud works if you need to check in." She indicated the small walkie-talkie sitting beside her computer.
Mal tapped his earbud once and muttered behind his hand, "Testing, testing."
The walkie-talkie crackled and his voice could be heard through it. Colleen nodded. "Great! I'll be here if you need anything, all right?"
Mal tapped his bud again to turn it off, then asked, "Anyone in particular I gotta watch out for?"
"Huh! You're on the ball for a new guy." She grinned and pointed as she cocked her eyebrow. "Ex-cop, right?"
Mal tried not to let the sudden twinge in his stomach affect him as he blandly said, "Yes, ma'am."
"I knew it. I like it when we get guys like you on shift. You always move with that sense of purpose." Colleen blushed. "Sorry, listen to me go on. I'd better not keep you."
"It's all right. Anyway, anyone to watch for?" he prompted.
Colleen shook her head. "Not tonight. Sometimes we get some really rich guys who come in and think they can just do whatever they want, or their bodyguards get a little too big for their britches. But tonight – no problems. See you when you come back down."
"Gotcha." Mal turned and began walking through the hotel levels, only occasionally encountering a night-owl hotel guest. Once or twice, an older man would be with an obviously younger woman, entering or leaving a room, but Mal ignored them. He wasn't a cop anymore, and busting them for solicitation was, he reflected, bound to make the hotel manager a touch annoyed with the security folks.
And that was pretty much his routine: Walk the empty offices, check desultorily for intruders, chat up Colleen for a minute or two, then walk the hotel's carpeted hallways perpetually lit in that indirect lighting, day or night. Then down to the banks of security cameras, where he would stare at TV screen after TV screen flicking between different views of the cameras on different floors.
Mal noticed that Evan would take the elevators from the ground floor (where the main security HQ room was) to the hotel reception level, chat very briefly with Colleen, then duck into the public men's restroom on that level. Mal reflected that the Big Gulp sized coffee mug Evan brought to work probably didn't help his bladder any.
After Evan left the bathroom, he'd patrol in much the same way as Mal did: up to the top floor by floor, then take the stairs back down and patrol through the office levels and meet up with Mal just after six-forty-five in the morning.
They would spend the last fifteen minutes filling in their shift incident reports, then part ways at the parkade level.
After a couple of months of this, two things happened on two consecutive nights that made Mal's life a little more interesting.
.oO[CoDCoD]Oo.
The first night, Mal was entering the hotel level, and he spotted Colleen and waved hello. He'd grown to like coming up to that floor; their conversations had gotten beyond perfunctory how-are-you's and she seemed to like seeing him come up as much as he liked seeing her at her desk.
It turned out they were scheduled on the same overnight shifts, and he'd learned quite a bit about her. She inevitably learned a bit about him, but he hadn't become an expert in questioning suspects by letting the other person know everything about you first.
Mal found out that Colleen grew up in San Francisco, went to the university in Santa Cruz, and that she was a single woman who had dated off and on over the years, but never seemed to quite settle. Among other things, she liked thai fusion and had been an avid swing dancer when she was younger.
That night, she smiled widely and said, "Hey! How's the night cop doing?"
Mal chuckled. "Can't complain, really. Things could be worse." He leaned against the counter, his arms resting on the tabletop.
"Yeah," replied Colleen.
Mal looked more closely at her, then snapped his fingers. "Hey, are those new earrings you're wearing? They're golden spirals, aren't they?"
The golden earrings shone in the light, complementing her blond hair nicely, Mal thought. He then realized her hair looked different: tonight, it had been pulled back into a ponytail. He liked the way she looked with the new style.
Colleen preened. "You noticed! My sister in New York sent them to me. It's my birthday coming up and she sent me an early present."
Mal began to notice a light, pleasant aroma with a hint of musk. He realized it was also a new perfume. Colleen's usual wasn't this noticeable.
"Really, your birthday, huh?" Mal grinned. "Would you mind if I bought you dinner? I have weekends off and it'd be nice to go out and do things like a normal person."
"I'd love dinner! Why don't you let me know tomorrow what time you want to get together? We both start Monday overnight, so either Friday evening or Saturday evening'll be the best time. We can even have a really late dinner, like nine or tennish if you want."
"Not a problem. I know a couple of good restaurants." He tried to ignore the sudden sinking feeling as he realized he couldn't take her to Rip Van Winkle's, his favorite seafood restaurant.
Grudgingly, he allowed that there were other places, anyway.
To change the subject, he said, "It'll be nice to do this. Usually I just veg and watch TV or get some grocery shopping done, but other than that…"
Colleen placed her hand on his arm. "Tell me about it! I like the quiet hours, and my boss is pretty good about letting me read a book or do a little web browsing when I'm not helping customers here, but my God, I feel like such a hermit sometimes."
She leaned forward a little as her gaze shifted. Mal's eyes were drawn to her cleavage, now visible down her shirt. He realized too late he'd been staring and brought his eyes back up to her face as he blushed a bit. Mal groaned mentally. He wasn't in high school anymore, for God's sake! What was he doing blushing?
"It's okay, Mal." She laughed lightly and ducked her head for a moment. She looked him in the eye and put her hand on top of his. "Actually, I was kind of hoping you'd… notice me."
"Well, I like what I see, that's for sure." Mal grinned.
Colleen arched her eyebrow. "You do, do you?"
Mal nodded, his heartbeat quickening as he realized what might happen…
Colleen bit her lip, then began lifting her hand off Mal's. "I should probably—"
Mal reached out and gently snared her hand. "Seems pretty quiet tonight. How about showing me around one of the hotel rooms? Not like I've had a chance to see one yet." He looked at her steadily.
Don't be offended, don'tbeoffended, don't…
Colleen glanced quickly at her computer screen, then back up at him. Her nostrils flared; her pupils were dilated. She licked her lips and said in a low voice, "Room eleven-twenty-one. Down the hall, to the right."
Mal let go of her hand and nodded. He then turned and began walking, his heart thudding in his ears as he tried not to think how long it had been since he'd last been in bed with a woman. He hoped to God Evan downstairs wouldn't say anything about the camera feed; that said, he knew the odds were somewhat in his favor, since there were only so many TV screens compared to the number of cameras in the building.
He rounded the corner, found the door which read 1121, yanked his all-access card out of his suit pocket and then swiped it through the maglock. It clicked obligingly, and the red indicator switched to green. He cracked the door and reached inside to flip the light switch, then cautiously swung the door open all the way.
The room was empty. He let the door swing shut behind him, and checked the room out: the short hallway had a door which led to a bathroom, and it opened to a larger room with one double bed, a small kitchenette, minibar – your basic hotel room for a businessman on a tight schedule who spends most of his time out of the room, not in it.
The click of the latch startled Mal; he whipped around, then relaxed as Colleen stepped inside and locked the door. Her skirt flattered her legs, and she wore shiny black high-heeled pumps.
Colleen kicked off her shoes and strode up to Mal, reaching up for his suit lapels. She pulled him against her and tilted her face up a bit to kiss him. He tilted his head down, accepting the kiss, tentatively at first; then the kiss deepened. He reached out, holding her hips as she in turn reached up for his shoulders, holding him for balance as she slowly withdrew from their kiss.
"I want you, Mal," she said huskily.
"And I want you," said Mal.
It was times like this Mal was thankful he still kept a condom on his person.
.oO[CoDCoD]Oo.
Mal had taken a very quick shower, and was putting his clothes back on. "Sorry it was so… y'know, quick this time." He looked at Colleen apologetically. She was lying on the bed, relaxing.
Colleen waved it off and lifted her head to check the clock beside the bed. "Don't worry about it. Actually, it's good that way, because we've already been about twenty minutes in here and that's kind of on the long side to have a bathroom break." She smirked. "Besides, you can show me a much better time after that birthday dinner you're buying me, hmm?"
Mal grinned. "It's a date."
"Okay. We can do dinner, then go back to my place."
"Will do." Mal asked, "You going to stay in here?"
Colleen nodded. "I need to get in the shower real quick myself. It's better if we're not both seen leaving this room at the exact same time, anyway."
"Yeah. Hotels must do this to people, I bet."
Colleen laughed and sat up. "Oh, you would not believe some of the stories I could tell! But later. You need to skedaddle."
Mal nodded and left the room, his suit exactly as he'd worn it before and not a hair out of place on his head. Back downstairs at their changeover time, Evan said nothing, from which Mal deduced he either had a really good poker face, or he legitimately hadn't seen his and Colleen's little get-together session.
That night's activities put a spring in his step as he went home, but the next night proved to be a lot less entertaining for one Mal Fallon.
Author Notes: I'd like to again extend my thanks to Ayala, my coauthor, for helping with the chapter title and in particular for catching some errors in flow in this chapter.