“What. Was. That!?”
   An excellent question. It was asked, in a wavering voice, by the woman with the flaming red hair and flowing skirts. But all of us in the elevator were no doubt wondering the same thing. What was that horrific bang? The sound was loud and sharp and seemed to have come from somewhere above us. The obvious, though pessimistic view, was that it was exactly the sort of noise that a cable snapping under tension would make. It was certainly the only idea that I could come up with. My hands tightened their grip on the pizza carrier. My stomach dropped. The elevator kept rising.
   “Whoa!”
   “No! Really! What was that!?”
   “I knew I should’ve taken the stairs.”
   “Are we going to die?”
   “Well, we just passed the eighth floor. So, ya, probably.”
   “Whoa!”
   Despite having my nose pointed at the doors and my back to everyone else, I had no trouble identifying who was saying what. Being the last to get on, there had been some jostling around to make space for me and the large Hawaiian pizza that I was trying to keep flat. Which was eons of time for me to make a detailed inventory. I’m good that way.
   Off my left shoulder was an older man holding a spectacular bouquet wrapped for delivery. He wore a rumpled old-fashioned suit and a look of resigned fatigue. Which gave the impression of someone arriving sixty years too late for the prom. Beside him were a mother and son (judging by their matching pale freckled skin and red hair). Before the interruption, the two of them had been engrossed in a lively discussion about missing dental elastics and the unreliability of both orthodontist office hours and ex husbands. She was in West Coast hippy chic with layered skirts, a hemp woven carryall, and an uncountable number of scarves and shawls. The son wore a striped tie and a private school crested jacket.
   “It’s an Otis Gen3 elevator. They’re usually fairly reliable.”
   “Usually? What does that mean? Usually!?”
   The last bit was from the two on my right. One was a woman in orange coveralls with eyes, skin, and hair all in complimentary shades of espresso. I guessed she was maybe ten years older than me, somewhere in her mid-thirties. With her outfit and toolbag, I put her down as an electrician on the job. The other, somewhere on my right, was Thimoty “Tim” Angulalik, a cyber security specialist originally from Inuvik. We’d never met before, but I knew all about him. Tim was the guy whose computer I had come to steal.
   From outside, three more bangs followed in rapid succession—each louder and sharper than the one before. There was some whimpering behind me, but most of us seemed to have held our breaths. Still, we didn’t plunge to our deaths. The elevator just came smoothly to a stop, and the doors slid open on the ninth floor without a hitch.
   As I’m short, I wasn’t blocking anyone’s view of the two serious men in dark suits standing in the lobby outside. One of them was bald and huge. Not just absurdly tall, but proportionally broad in all directions with the solid build of a rugby forward. His hands were so massive that the cellphone he held by his fingertips looked like a toy.
   The other guy was much more regular-sized, though decades older. The deep lines of his face seemed permanently etched with a world-weary expression. He wasn’t holding a phone. Instead, he had a large and very shiny chrome-plated handgun.
   And they weren't alone.
   Blue-grey smoke drifted over a third man. He was sprawled in a wheelbarrow. It was parked so close to the elevator that I could only just see him over the edge of the pizza carrier. His body lay inside with all four limbs hanging limply over the sides. Like the other two men, he also wore a dark suit, though in his case the light-coloured shirt underneath was mostly a splotchy brick-red.
   There was a frozen moment of complete silence.
   Then, a small squeak of protest came from the pizza carrier as it crushed under the clench of my hands. The next sound was the crinkle of the bouquet’s plastic wrapping when it brushed my shoulder, as the old man leaned forward for a be er look. And finally, a piercing shriek rang out from the mother or the electrician, or maybe both together.
   Aside from a slight lift of his eyebrows, the man with the gun hardly even altered his expression. There was a scuffle of shoes and I sensed space opening behind me as everyone tried to back away, even though there was nowhere to go. I felt an ice-cold rush of goosebumps from head to toe as the man slowly raised the gun away from the wheelbarrow, higher and higher until it was level and pointed straight at my head. At that angle, the shiny chrome disappeared and all I could see was the end of the barrel, looming black and huge.
   This was a moment for clear thinking. The kind of scenario that my Uncle Rupert had lectured me about so many times. When things go sideways, you have to stay in control. Be calm. Be cool. Above all, don’t do anything rash or impulsive.
   Solid advice.
   So I hucked the pizza carrier as though it was a frisbee—as hard as I could—straight at the gun.