Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter

jarheads stationed at the Yakota base outside Tokyo. It was so bad that now when Franco saw Tamayo, he ran in the opposite direction. That one of our top-ranking Keystone Kops was afraid of a Japanese-American stand-up comic was not very confidence-inspiring.
    Also not very confidence-inspiring: the day Hector patrolled the offices, with his typical affected law-enforcement swagger, one thumb hooked into his beltloop, the other hand on his gun, and a Kick Me sign on his back. Until Pete and Franco saw it, which showed you how much respect people had for our Barney Fife.
    â€œThese are only the tapes from the commercial elevator. What about the freight elevator?” I asked.
    It turned out the other tapes had been sent over to the cop shop without anyone running dubs, so now I had to wait for the cops to dub them for me.
    No matter. These were the tapes I was most interested in. They were grainy, black and white, but also time-coded, with hour, minute, and second, which would help match the names in the sign-out book to real people.
    Back in my office, I scanned them on fast forward. You couldn’t see much when the elevator was full except the tops of people’s heads. After I did a quick log of the daytime tapes, I popped in the after-hours tape. Not many people went up and most who did got off on twenty-six or twenty-eight, where there were several accountants’ offices. Nothing unusual about that, since it was tax season.
    At 9:11:54, a man went up to the twenty-sixth floor. Oblivious to the security camera in the ceiling corner, he picked his nose, examined the result, then wiped it on the elevator wall. Eeuw.
    As I was watching this unenlightening tape, Phil the enlightened janitor came by. He took priority in my eyes, so I paused the tape. Every day Phil came in to empty the trash, shoot the shit, and fill me in on the company gossip. An older guy, late sixties, early seventies, who had been in the States for only a few months, he claimed to have spent the last fifteen years working his way around the world as a janitor or handyman. During his life he had had all these near-death close calls, or so he said, starting when he was fifteen (“I looked eighteen”) and served in the British army in North Africa. Rommel’s Afrika Korps launched a surprise attack on Phil’s unit and when it was over and Rommel had rolled past, Phil got up, looked around, and saw he was the only person still alive. “I felt dead sorry for me mates,” he told me. “But me first thought was, ‘Ha! Rommel, you missed one, you sorry bastard.’” He then made his way back to British lines. Later, he said, he was a fireman in Liverpool and had saved many babies and old women from fires.
    Since then, it had been one adventure and close call after another.
    I didn’t really believe he’d been the only survivor of a ferry sinking in Bangladesh, or that he’d walked away from a small plane crash in the Himalayas, or that a cobra had come up the loo in Calcutta and tried to “bite me bum.” (What a nightmare, huh?) I wanted to believe all his stories, though. They were entertaining and weirdly truthful, and I liked his philosophy. “I’m just too silly to die, I guess,” he always said.
    â€œGlad to see you back, Phil,” I said. “Over that flu?”
    â€œOh yeah. It’s tough on a man me age. Imagine, all the things I survived, to get nailed by a microbe or a virus.”
    â€œHeard anything from the executive suite?” I asked.
    Since the recent custodial cutbacks, Phil had been emptying the poobah trash upstairs as well as that of some of the features offices at ANN.
    â€œMadri Michaels is being taken off the air, pushed into a PR job,” he said. “Bianca de Woody is to replace her.”
    An allergic reaction to having her lips cosmetically plumped had taken Madri off the air for a while. It took two weeks for the redness and swelling to