Air Time

by Jeff Baker

“Did you see him leave?” Gina said, glancing from the big glass front door to the rows of washers.

“No,” Jack said, looking panicky. “I glanced over there at the two way mirror in the other wall and when I looked back at his chair, Tommy was gone!”

“I was up by the front door. I didn’t see him leave,” Gina said over the sound of the washers and dryers there in the laundromat. And he can’t hide. Look up.”

The ceiling was covered with those half-dome silvery mirrors that hid security cameras. They could clearly see the rows of washers and dryers and that they were the only ones in the room. The room was longer than it was wide with five rows of four washing machines each running from near the back to the front with large dryers in the left hand wall with a locked office with a two-way mirror by the back corner, and metal chairs and benches along the right side wall, across the back and on either side of the big glass door at the front.

“Wait,” Gina said. “You were looking in the mirror. Could you see Tommy in the mirror?”

“No,” Jack said, brushing his stringy red hair out of his face. “I was standing up and my reflection blocked where he was sitting. But I didn’t see him run past me…”

“Maybe when you were turning,” Gina said.

“But he would have had to run down that aisle by the wall and you were there at the end of it. You would have noticed him!”

“Yeah,” Gina said. “And I was looking back there when I heard you yell.”

Jack shook his head. “And he couldn’t have run past me…wait! It’s crazy…”

“So was Tommy.” Gina said.

“Maybe he hid in one of the washers. They are big!” Jack said.

“Tommy was a six-footer. He might just have been able to squeeze in…hang on, stay there!”

Gina quickly went through the rows of washers, opening the doors of the machines that weren’t running. No Tommy. She walked past the big dryers built into the one wall. Big, clear doors, nothing inside but drying clothes. Lastly she tried the door to the employee office. Locked with the same padlock on the outside that was there when they came here fifteen minutes earlier.

Jack saw her expression.

“And he didn’t come up here, either,” he said. The two of them walked to the back of the laundromat where Tommy had been sitting in one of the chairs fixed to the floor.

They stared at the chair.

“His cellphone!” Gina said.

The cellphone was still there on the metal armrest of the chair Tommy had been sitting in, charger plugged into the wall. Jack picked it up and swiped a finger across the screen.

The image came up. Tommy had been making a call. The air time minutes were displayed.

“Hello?” Jack said.

—end—