“It ain’t the worst job in the world,” he said, pulling his T-bar from his hip bucket and swiping at the window. “Decent hours, decent pay. And you never know what you’re gonna see.”
He chuckled and swapped his T-bar for a squeegee. The cage dangled three stories above the ground. He’d been at it for over two hours and chatting the entire time, bringing up the weather twice and the Pittsburgh Steelers too many times to count.
“I once watched this guy urinate in his boss’s ficus. It was after five on a Saturday, so I assume the guy was bent out of shape about having to come in on the weekend. Or maybe he just really had to pee, what do I know?”
He lowered the cage another level, and as if talking about accidental espionage had conjured the scene before them, they saw two men alone in a conference room facing off on the other side of the glass. One wore a tailored business suit, the other a track suit. Each pointed a gun at the other.
“Marlon?” the window washer said, dropping his squeegee.
The man in the track suit opened fire, and the business man crumpled to the floor, blood splattering against the inside of the window.
The window washer shouted and lowered the cage to ground level, unlatching his carabiner and tumbling out. He sprinted to his truck and tore out of the parking lot.
A few minutes later, both men, clothes covered in fake blood, emerged from the building.
“Do you think he bought it?”
“Yes, sir,” the other window washer said as she released her own carabiner and climbed over the railing. “The van is tracking him now.”
“All right, Mr. Window Washer, let’s see who you run to first.”
Mary Elizabeth Summer is the author of the young-adult Trust Me mystery series. She lives in Beaverton with her wife, their daughter, their dog, and their evil overlor—er, cats.
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