by Dan Kelly
The suspense and accompanying stress and strain has become mind boggling and has put an end to all normal conversation. Jillian decides to try and lighten the mood and get their minds off the Chameleon and the threat he represents.
“Please, listen up everyone. We’re being ridiculous. The Chameleon is only one man, admittedly a very bright one, but still only one man and there are dozens of trained men poised to pounce on him as soon as he sticks his head out. Let’s leave the Chameleon to the pros and do something that’s fun. I have an idea.
“This penthouse is loaded with fun things to do. The beautiful pool and fabulous game room offer a host of opportunities for some friendly competition with the overall winner getting a ride in Rex’s plane to anywhere the winner wants to go. How about it, Rex? Will you go along with me on this?”
With an appreciative smile on his face for a respite from all the worry Rex says, “You got it, girl.”
Sweeping her hand in front of the rest of the group she says, “How about the rest of you?”
It was like a switch had been thrown. Buried smiles resurfaced, chatter erupted and anticipation grew as Jillian fleshed out her idea for them. “Each competition will be assigned points, ten for the first place winner, five for the second place winner and three for the third place winner.”
Joe asks, “What do the overall second and third place finishers get?”
“The second place finisher gets a Big Mac on me and the third place finisher gets a Dairy Queen on Red.”
Laughter breaks out and Jillian relaxes. She did it, at least for a little while. “Okay, Carducci, do something, damn it!”
Red’s thinking, “Yeah, she must have been one hell of a psychologist.”
Several hours later they are well into the competitions when Rex gets a call from Tucker. He hooks it into the penthouse intercom and the speakers out by the pool.
“Rex, the Chameleon just pulled up in a van in front of Clyde’s apartment house. Somebody’s with him. They’re unloading some five gallon cans of something and taking them around to the back of the building. Hold on a sec.” There’s some mumbling in the background and then Tucker comes back on the line. “”I have a guy posted up in a tree in the backyard. He says they’re taking the cans down into the basement via a stairway back there. I don’t want to move in because the guy with him might not be a willing helper. If shooting starts, the guy could get hurt.”
“Do you have any idea who that other guy might be?”
“I only had a quick glance, but he looks like his friend Sam Ferguson. When you first brought me on, I did a background check on him because of his relationship with Carducci and one of my men managed to get a snapshot of him without him knowing about it. I didn’t want him to know we were checking him out in case he might be secretly helping his friend.”
“If Sam is in cahoots with the Chameleon, that would explain how he’s been managing to pay for all the stuff he’s been using to carry out his vendetta. I agree with your decision to hold off moving in though. Sam could be a hostage. What are you going to do?”
“Well, those cans are giving me a very uneasy feeling. The Chameleon could be planning to set the place on fire and firefighters we’re not, so the first thing I’m going to do is call Nate and get him involved.
“Next, I sure could use Popeye. Ask him to haul his butt over here ASAP. He’s used to situations like this and he’s a crack shot if I need one. His muscles and martial arts skills could also come in handy if any of the tenants get cantankerous and refuse to stay out of our way. We’re strangers to these people and have no impressive ID or badges to show them. They might think that we’re some kind of trouble makers and raise a ruckus that would alert the Chameleon to our presence.”
Hearing what Tucker just said about Popeye, everyone’s eyes pop and jaws drop as he heads for the door with his cell in his hand, everyone’s except Rex’s Red noticed.
“Next, I have to find out what’s in that basement before I storm it. I hate surprises. I hope the janitor wasn’t surprised.
“Next, I’ve got to make sure Clyde’s bodyguards are alerted to the fact that the Chameleon is on the premises.
“Next, I’ve got to see if it’s feasible and safe enough to try and evacuate the building.
“And last, we wait for the right moment to move in and take the sucker down.”
“Popeye’s on his way. The rest of us will stay put until we hear from you.”
The line goes dead and the jitters are back in full swing.
Chapter 69
Tucker calls Nate and lucks out when he answers after the first ring. “Nate, our boy is making his move.”
After Tucker tells him what he’s seen, Nate asks, “What’s the address of the apartment building?”
Tucker gives it to him and Nate says, “That sounds familiar. Hold on a minute. Let me check something. A couple of minutes later Nate is back. “Sorry for the wait, Tucker. I just checked my computer file containing my reports on closed arson investigations. That’s the same building where the fire broke out that killed the Chameleon’s brother. I didn’t know that Clyde lived in the same building.
“I have copies of the architectural drawings as well as the schematics for the plumbing, heating and electrical systems for that building. They could be a big help to you.”
“How long will it take you to get here?”
“With the siren and dome light flashing, twenty minutes, but I want to alert the fire chief so he can have fire fighting equipment on-site if the Chameleon does torch the building. They can approach without sirens and flashing lights so as not to alert the Chameleon. Getting hold of the Chief might delay me for five or ten minutes. He’s not a desk jockey and sometimes he can be hard to track down.”
“Okay, make it snappy. I don’t know how much time we’ve got.”
While he’s waiting for Nate and Popeye to arrive, he alerts Clyde’s bodyguard about what’s taking place and calls all of his men in and positions them around the perimeter of the apartment building.
Twenty three minutes later, with the siren and dome light now off, Nate is coming around the corner and driving past the apartment building across the street. Three doors up he spots Tucker checking out some puppies in the window of a pet shop, so he slows down, taps his horn and five seconds later they’re driving away.
Tucker says, “Pull around the corner here and drive down until you spot a wide alley. Pull into the alley and about halfway down you’ll come to an open area where you can park. Two of my men and I are positioned on the roof of the office building bordering that lot. We can take the back stairs up to the roof.”
A few minutes later, with the drawings and schematics spread across a big slab of plywood resting on a couple of sawhorses, Nate is shaking his head and saying, “This isn’t good. If the Chameleon can find where everything is located, he can shut that building down, both the electricity and water.”
Tucker says, “Maybe that’s why nothing has happened yet. He could still be checking things out.” Turning to one of his men he says, “Jimmy, go over to the lobby of the apartment building and see what you can find out. Try to find the janitor. He might be able to help us.”
Turning back to Nate he says, “I was anxious to have a look at those drawings because I was hoping they would show another way to get into the building besides through the lobby or the basement. Unfortunately, there isn’t. What are these partitions for in the basement?”
“Those are storage areas for the tenants to use. The partitions aren’t made of wallboard but of solid brick and each area has a thick metal door. They’re made that way to prevent thievery.”
“Damn. They’ll also provide excellent cover for the Chameleon if lead starts flying. From what I’ve heard about this guy, picking the locks on any of those doors would be a piece of cake for him.”
Both of the men fall silent, trying to think of something that could help them deal with the dilemma facing them.
A few minu
tes later Tucker voices his frustration over his failure to come up with anything. “What a mess. If we storm the building, we’ve got to be able to get into the basement some way. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do that without the high possibility of someone getting shot who might not deserve to be shot. We might have to do that anyway if another solution doesn’t pop up pretty damn soon. That guy has been in there for a while now. He’s got to be near ready to do what he came here to do.”
A few more minutes go by and then Jimmy returns, accompanied by Popeye and another man. He’s the bearer of some more bad news. “All of the elevators are out of commission and Don here who’s the janitor for the building says that all of the water has been turned off as well.”
“I was up in one of the apartments replacing some washers in a bathroom sink when that happened. I had to take the stairs down to the lobby, but couldn’t get down to the basement to look for the cause of the problem because the freight elevator, the only way down to the basement from inside the building, wasn’t working. When I tried to get into the cellar through the door in the back of the building, it was locked.
“On my way down the stairs, I noticed something else that gave me the willies. All of the windows on the landings that open up onto the fire escape have been nailed shut.
“Oh, there’s another problem. The front doors to the apartment building can only be opened from the outside with a key card. With the power off, no one can get into the building that way. They can be opened manually from the inside, but that doesn’t help you guys at all.”
Nate says, “He’s going to set fire to the building, guys. He wants to destroy it and everything and everybody in it. He’s going to start fires with whatever is in those cans in the basement and lower stairwells which will act like a funnel, carrying the flames to the upper floors. The sprinkler system isn’t working, so the fire will grow in intensity as it finds more fuel to consume. People will have no way to get out of the building because the elevators are inoperable and the stairwells will be filled with flames. The doors to the stairwells open from the inside only. Once they close, they lock. You need a key to open them from the stairwell landing. Anybody caught in those stairwells after the fire starts will be trapped.
“The windows and glass front doors are made of specially designed glass that can withstand the high winds normally coming in off the lake as well as the treacherous winds that are generated during a severe storm. The glass can be broken, but it requires a great deal of force to do so and a lot of noise would accompany the effort. The noise could freak the Chameleon out and cause him to act even sooner than he’s planning to. Think people, we’re just moments away from catastrophe. There’s got to be a way to stop him.”
Tucker says, “Damn it. There’s no feasible way to evacuate the building without alerting the Chameleon.” and then asks, “Nate, “Did you get ahold of your Chief? If we don’t come up with something pretty damn quick, we’re going to need him and his men.”
“Yeah, I did. Fortunately, there’s a firehouse less than a mile from here. They’ve been alerted and are ready to roll if they get the call.”
Tucker walks away flipping his cell phone open. Nate hears him say Rex’s name and then he’s too far across the roof for Nate to hear anything else. Turning to Popeye he says, “I wonder if Tucker is coordinating with the police. A SWAT team might have something up their sleeve that could deal with this situation.”
“Nate, trust me. There’s not a SWAT team on the planet that’s better trained to handle a situation like this than Tucker and his crew.”
Nate’s about to ask him how he knows that when Tucker comes running back within ear shot and they hear him say, “When can it be here? Great!” Stuffing his cell in his jacket pocket he says, “Thanks to your brother, Nate, we might have a solution to our problem.”
“What did he come up with?”
“Red remembered that when the Chameleon robbed the Palladian Palace he escaped through a skylight and suggested that he could be planning to escape that way again. He said if it’s a way out of the building, it’s also a way in. He also said there should be some way for roofers and air conditioning service people and the like to access the roof from inside the building. He said there’s got to be a door somewhere. Let’s have another look at those drawings.”
After an agonizing five more minutes are wasted looking for anything they might have overlooked, they find nothing. Shaking his fists Nate screams, “Red’s right. There has to be a way to get on that roof.”
Don, who has been staying out of the way over by one of the air conditioning units and hasn’t been able to hear any of the conversation going on between the other men until Nate’s scream shouts, “There is.” as he walks over to them. “The skylight.”
Tucker asks, “There’s a skylight? It’s not in these drawings.”
“Well, I know nothing about your drawings, but I know there’s a skylight that opens up onto the roof. It’s situated over the attic which was used for storage until the fire department made us clean it out because it was a fire hazard. There’s a door off the 23rd floor landing, the top floor, that opens into the attic and then there’s a small flight of stairs leading to the hatch in the skylight.”
“Is the door to the attic kept locked?”
“Yes, because tenants were going up on the roof to party in the nice weather and leaving a mess. Plus, Mr. Crowley was worried about his liability if someone were to get hurt up there.”
“Who has the key?”
“I do.” and then sheepishly adds, “But it’s with my other keys and key card which I left in the basement.”
“So the Chameleon probably has found those keys and won’t have to waste any time picking the lock on the door to the attic. Man, some guys have all the luck!”
Jimmy says, “We could walk up the fire escape. It’s a long walk, but it looks like the only way to the roof now.”
Tucker says, “That will take too long and I don’t want to have all my men in one place either. It’s too dangerous.” Then smiling he says. “There’s another way.”
As if on cue, a big helicopter comes flying out of the sun, heading straight for the hotel next door. “Courtesy of Mr. Spaulding. There’s a helipad on the roof of that hotel. Come. That’s our way in.”
With an incredulous look on his face Nate says, “Tucker, that helicopter can’t land on the roof of that apartment building. There’s too much clutter, air conditioning units, venting pipes, chimneys, utility sheds, TV dishes, flashing red lights on poles twenty feet high, whatever. Besides, the roof won’t be able to support the weight of that thing.”
Tucker smiled and said, “Who said anything about landing. Come on. Follow me. I’ll explain on the way over to the hotel.”
Rolling up the drawings and schematics, Nate shoves them under his arm and rushes after Tucker and the rest who have already exited the roof and are tearing down the stairs at breakneck speed.
After Tucker explains what he has in mind, Nate winds up staring at Popeye in amazement, but things are happening so fast that he doesn’t have the chance to ask any questions.
What they’re planning to do is have the helicopter fly over the apartment building and hover high enough to be clear of anything sticking up from the roof. Then, Popeye, Jimmy and the other man that was on the roof of the office building with Tucker and Jimmy are going to rappel down to the roof.
Leaving the other man to guard the fire escape because that’s the only way the Chameleon could escape with Tucker’s men covering the back cellar door and the front doors, Popeye and Jimmy will enter the building via the skylight. Before Tucker found about the skylight, he was thinking they’d have to saw a hole in the roof. From there they’ll make their way down the stairs to the lobby. Once there, they’ll try to force open the doors of the freight elevator with crowbars they’ll bring with them to see if there’s any way to get from the elevator to the shaft. If they can and there’s enough room to maneuver, they can slide d
own the cables to the elevator doors in the basement. They’ll play it by ear from there.