by Bill Mason
Throwing the hook over a wall that high wasn’t easy; I missed with my first three tries but caught the ledge on the fourth. Soon I was up and over, and got my detailed look at the boiler room and the wire mesh covering the window.
I decided it could be done.
The next new moon came on a Friday night. I would have preferred it midweek, when Bender would be less likely to be wearing her best stuff, but there’s no negotiating with nature.
I had all my tools and gear in a backpack, which would make the climbing less awkward than using a shoulder bag. This time I got the grapple to grab the pool-deck ledge on the first throw. Some might take that as a good sign, but I didn’t take it as anything other than less noise I’d be making.
The climb was tougher with the weight of all that equipment hanging on my back, but I had been diligent about staying in shape. It wasn’t any harder than going up the rope in my backyard with an eight-year-old hanging on to me, and I could use my legs against the wall to help. I kept it slow and careful so as not to make any noise. Soon I had both hands on the ledge and began pulling myself up the last yard. As my head cleared the ledge, I heard a scraping noise and came to a stop just as the door on the other side of the pool opened. I watched in shock as a guard came out of the building and onto the deck.
The first thing I did was nothing. A heavy dose of adrenaline had shot into my bloodstream and I fought back the primal urge to do something—anything—to protect myself. But the best thing was just to keep still, for which adrenaline, that instant boost of pure energy that evolution had conjured up for running away from lions and the like, was not only useless but potentially harmful.
I dropped back as slowly and carefully as possible, then hung there so only my fingers would be visible should the guard cast his eyes this way. I figured that his seeing my hands wasn’t a risk I had to worry about, considering that a triple-pronged grappling hook was still straddling the ledge and ought to be plenty to get his attention on its own if he chose to look in this direction.
I heard him walking, and strained to make out the direction. He was heading right toward the wall. I looked down, craning my neck to see over my shoulder. What would happen if I just let go and dropped down? I rejected it instantly. Even onto soft sand, a forty-foot drop would probably result in a broken leg or two. No, if I decided to take off, I’d have to shinny down that rope. The guard wouldn’t be able to easily dislodge the grappling hook with my weight on it, and I could probably make it down before he even figured out what was happening.
His steps didn’t sound deliberate, nor did they sound hesitant, and I didn’t get the feeling he’d found something amiss. He wasn’t walking right toward me, either, but seemed to be heading for a spot further along the wall. His footsteps stopped, then came a rustling sound, then . . . a match being lit? The guy was lighting up a smoke.
I heard him exhale lazily. He was probably just staring out at the ocean. My arms were starting to ache a little, but I kept still. Aside from the waves breaking on the shore a hundred yards away, I couldn’t hear a thing. For all I knew, the guard was staring right at the hook, right at my fingers. Maybe he’d figured it all out and was tiptoeing back to grab a chair to smash onto my hands. Maybe he was motioning at the camera to get another guard’s attention.
A thin cloud of blue smoke passed over my head. My arms were really hurting now, and I wanted desperately to transfer over to the rope so I could wrap my legs around it and take a rest, but no matter how careful I was, one of the prongs would probably move and make noise. There was nothing below the top edge of the wall I could get a foot or elbow onto, either, so I just hung there, dangling by my fingertips four stories up in the air. I tried to shift the bulk of my weight from one hand to the other to give at least one arm at a time some relief, but it didn’t do much good. I was better off keeping my weight equally divided.
Fuck me . . . how long could it take to smoke a goddamned cigarette! I tried to imagine how much remained, and prayed this guy wasn’t a right-down-to-the-filter type. Who was to say he’d even leave once he’d finished it? What if he was a hard-core nicotine addict and lit another one? Then it occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t my only worry. I’d been hanging here for at least three minutes, although it seemed more like half an hour. What if somebody on the beach had spotted me? What if I’d been spotted from one of the rear-facing units in the building itself? What if—?
A shooting star caught my eye and I turned my head to see it, watching as the sparks flew from a cigarette butt that was hurtling down toward the beach. Then a shuffling sound, the guard pushing away from the wall and turning around. Footsteps, the scrape of the door again, the sound of a latch clicking into place.
My muscles screaming in protest, I hauled myself up once more until I could get one hand across the ledge, then the other. My arms now parallel to the ground, I waited a few seconds for some blood to start flowing again, then swung a leg over and dropped onto the deck. I rolled toward the boiler room windows and lay there for about a minute. The pain of my arms coming back to life was worse than when they’d been above my head bearing my full weight with blood draining out of them. When I was finally able to move them around, I rubbed my shoulders to try to relieve some of the stiffness. It hurt like hell, but I forced myself to keep massaging my arms because I was in a dangerous position and needed to get going. I had no way to know if I’d been spotted. I wasn’t about to abort the job on that kind of flimsy possibility, but I did need to get away from the area quickly.
Once I had enough range of motion back, I shrugged off the backpack and crawled back to the wall to pull up the rope. Using a heavy-duty cutter I’d brought, I clipped enough of the wire mesh covering the window to make a hole to crawl through. There was a narrow sill on the other side, wide enough for me to kneel on with my backpack next to me. Balancing on the sill in the pitch-black darkness, I tried not to think about the boiler room floor far below me—it was concrete, not sand—as I used some stiff wire to put the cut-up mesh back in place. It wasn’t a neat job, but it was good enough so a casual observer wouldn’t notice that anything was wrong. I tied the rope onto the part of the mesh I hadn’t cut, put my pack back on, then lowered myself down to the floor. I kept my eyes closed; for some reason it’s much easier to visualize things that way, even in a room so dark you can’t see a thing anyway.
Once down on the floor, I gave myself a moment of inactivity just to recover a little. This was a safe time, because there were no visible signs that anybody had gotten into the building. And if I’d been spotted, I could probably hide somewhere in the boiler room for a while. One thing about South Florida and its elderly population: People were always thinking they were seeing thieves and murderers engaged in nefarious pursuits, and oftentimes the police were less than prompt in responding and less than zealous in checking things out when they did arrive.
I listened for any noises that might indicate the guards had been alerted to something—shouts, running, doors slamming, sirens—then got my breathing back to normal. By then my eyes had adapted enough for me to make out vague shapes in the room. I crossed over to the door and cracked it slightly, waited, then stepped out into the lower hallway and walked toward the stairwell. At the bottom there was a door leading outside to the beach. It was for emergency use only and was alarmed.
I began the seventeen-story climb to the top of the building, pausing below each landing to listen for sounds from the hallway. There was a time-clock station on every second floor. My guess was that there was one on each intervening floor as well, but somewhere else other than the stairwell. That way the guard would have to walk the halls to hit all the clocks, instead of just going up and down the staircase. That was good: The last thing I needed was to bump into some guard making his rounds, but if one should happen into the stairwell, the odds were that his next move would be up or down one flight and back into a hallway. I’d be able to get around his floor without being spotted.
I made it to the
roof level without incident and jimmied open the door with a strip of celluloid. Once again, a cheap lock protected a door that everybody assumed didn’t really need any protection in the first place.
The night air felt cool and sweet. Even the breaking waves sounded soothing, despite the fact that they would tend to drown out any slight sounds that might be useful to me. I looked around to find the lineup points—stacks, wires, antennas—that would orient me to where Elizabeth Bender’s balcony was, then tied one end of the rope around a vent pipe and peered out over the edge.
It doesn’t matter how many times you do this; looking straight down from nearly two hundred feet in the air is a knee-weakening experience. Looking back on it now, I still don’t know how I managed to climb over the low protective ledge and onto the outer wall, with nothing but my hand and arm strength and a single strand of rope between me and an unpleasant death. I don’t know how I managed to do a lot of the things I did, but I guess I was younger then. Sure as hell I was crazier.
This particular situation was somewhat less precarious than others. The way I was lined up, even if the rope broke or I slipped, there was a good chance I’d end up on the balcony that was sticking partway out from the side of the building just fifteen feet down rather than on the concrete at ground level, if I didn’t get too far from the wall. It only took a couple of seconds to reach the balcony the safe way, though.
Sure enough, the sliding door was unlocked. I can’t say I blamed Bender, or anybody else living that high up. In fact, locking a door like that might even look to some people like paranoia. Even if you stretched your imagination to consider someone trying to come in from the roof, there was still the assurance that nobody could get on the roof in the first place. The real estate agent had made that impossibility perfectly clear. I didn’t care who called me paranoid, and did my standard check of the entire suite to make sure it was really empty.
As experienced at this as I was by now, I still couldn’t shake that feeling of violating someone by snooping around in their private space. That feeling was a little bit stronger right now because this was a woman living alone, which heightened the sense of her vulnerability.
She had locked the front door and also set the alarm. Is there something at work in us that makes us assume that the bad guys think as we do (well, as you do, anyway, me being one of the bad guys)? Surely if someone were to rob the place, they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.
When I was sure I was alone, I headed for the bedroom, always the first place I looked. There was a big jewelry box right out in plain sight. You could almost see a sign on the side of it: “As long as you made it this far, help yourself.” (Here’s a little tip: Put a few minor trinkets in the bedroom jewelry box, and the really good stuff in the laundry room or the garage.) I flipped open the top of the box and gasped aloud at what was inside.
Elizabeth Bender apparently liked heart-shaped diamonds, and she had some extraordinary examples. Earrings, necklaces, bracelets and a ring with a ten-carat stone that I was sure was flawless. It was absolutely gorgeous, first-rate stuff. The lady had seriously good taste.
I didn’t waste much time admiring the goods, but scooped them into a bag, closed the top of the box (it might delay the discovery of a theft only by five minutes, but if I needed four minutes somewhere along the line, it could make all the difference) and got the hell out. The front door was alarmed, so it was back out onto the balcony, up the rope and onto the roof. I put my ear to the door and didn’t hear anything, so I entered the stairwell and had gotten down only one floor when I heard a door open somewhere below me. I froze, then heard the sound of a key being inserted into a time clock. These were special keys, attached by a chain to a box the guard carried around with him. Thankfully, they made a lot of noise. I figured he was about five floors below me.
When I heard his descending footsteps, I knew the guard would drop down one flight and then head back into the hallway to hit the next box elsewhere on that floor. I figured that I could get almost to the bottom level by the time he came back into this stairwell, the way he seemed to be shuffling around.
I counted his agonizingly slow steps, knew just when he’d hit the next landing, and got ready to go. But instead of hearing a door opening, I heard the sound of more descending steps. What the hell was this?
It took forever for the slow-moving guard to get down to the next landing. I heard the chain on his key rattling, then the time clock being punched. Please go into the hallway! I begged him in my mind. But no dice. One painfully slow step at a time, he started down the stairs again. It looked like I’d guessed the time-clock configuration all wrong, and there was one every two levels in this stairwell only. It didn’t make a lick of sense—the guard would be able to check in at every station without even once setting foot in a residential hallway—but that’s the hand I was dealt.
Still, I couldn’t assume anything about what this guy would do. He’d entered the stairwell on about the twelfth or thirteenth floor, not the seventeenth, so I had no idea what his standard procedure was. He was humming to himself now, in that style peculiar to very bored people: tuneless, nonspecific, limited in range and annoying as hell. I was starting to get the impression that this guy was maybe ninety years old. What in the world did anybody expect him to do if he actually came across a bad guy? Of course, he wasn’t expected to do anything; the simple fact of his presence was supposed to serve as a deterrent.
I began making my way down as quietly as I could, figuring to stay at least three floors above him as he continued down. His hearing probably wasn’t the best, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I’d be patient and soon be back on the boiler room level.
Which sounded good on paper, but at the rate we were going, I thought I’d be out of there sometime around Christmas. I started to worry that Bender might come home, discover that she’d been robbed and sound the alarm. If the guards had any brains or experience at all, the first thing they would do was block all the exits, and then I’d be good and fucked. I briefly considered just walking down past the guard, like I belonged there, but it was way too risky. And if he put up a fuss . . . well, it didn’t matter how old and helpless he was, it wasn’t my style to get physical. So I looked at my watch, confirmed that there was still some time before Bender got home, and forced myself to be patient as we continued the slow descent.
By the time I got to the boiler room level, I was practically exploding from the tension that had been building up in me. Every time I’d heard a door close in a distant hallway, I was sure somebody was about to enter the stairwell overhead and trap me. I’d have to go into a hallway and there would be no place to hide until the stairwell cleared, and no other way out I could depend on.
But there we were, this old geek so slow he was still shuffling his way down the hall past the boiler room when I got there. I didn’t know where he was headed after that. Maybe it was the end of the line and he was going to turn around. What if he decided to walk all the way the hell back up the stairs? No way was I going to do that right along with him.
The stairway to the beach level was practically at my elbow. The door at the bottom was alarmed, but I said “Fuck it” right out loud, flew down the stairs and slammed my elbow into the latch bar on the door. The sound of that incredibly loud bell going off right near my ear rattled my head, but I hit the ground running and headed straight for the dark beach, turning only when my feet were practically in the water, trying to look like a jogger as I sprinted away.
It was one of the biggest hauls I’d ever taken, in one of the smallest packages. Because of the Fountainhead’s prestige in the area, Bender’s reputation and the value of the stolen goods, the theft got a lot of press. As usual, reporters referred to multiple perpetrators, and the guards, doubtless facing questions about how this could have happened, started in with th
e typical backpedaling about phantoms and human flies. There was even speculation about whether Bender had robbed herself, for the insurance money, but I’d inadvertently saved her from that ordeal: Ghosts and goblins aside, somebody for sure tripped the alarm on that door leading to the beach.
Of course, one eyewitness swore to the police he’d seen the door fly open but never saw anybody come out. At least not anything human.
You gotta love it.
7
Heat
POMPANO BEACH, Florida. Christmas. A straightforward, no-nonsense score, at least if you don’t count the drop down to the fifteenth-floor balcony from the roof of the high-rent apartment building. Pretty good haul, too, with one major surprise: a ring sporting a truly huge marquise-cut diamond. It’s so brilliant, I’m worried it’s shining right through my jacket.
Still wearing gloves, I pull the apartment door closed behind me and head down the corridor. Nobody around, no need to fake like I belong there, so I walk faster than I usually would but well short of a run.
“Halt!”
I’m certain my heart actually stopped beating for a few seconds. Raw adrenaline erupts in my chest, and the rush is so powerful I feel weightless. My reaction to the shouted order is instantaneous: I break into a run, the door at the end of the hall suddenly ten miles away.
Nothing happens, no more shouts. Just as I’m about to connect with the door and twist sideways to push a shoulder into it, a tremendous explosion threatens to rupture my eardrums. Sounds like a bomb, but I realize it’s a gunshot amplified by the close confines of the hallway. It comes to me at the same time that something traces a line across my stomach. It feels hot, but not really painful, and I envision the bullet that must have just barely touched my skin as it streaked by. If I hadn’t twisted away at the last moment . . . ?