‘I’m guessing concrete block,’ Williams said.
Parker said, ‘There’s one way to find out.’ Crossing to the far left corner, where the dance studio wall met the rear of the building, he swung the claw of the hammer into the white-painted Sheetrock, twisted, and pulled away a long vertical powdery V of the panel. He slashed at it again, this time crosswise, and a second zigzag piece broke free. Behind it was one-by-three lath, attached to gray concrete block.
Parker nodded at it. ‘That’s what we have to go through,’ he said. ‘Before morning.’
2
The only way to attack this wall was to go after the mortar between the blocks of concrete. To do that, they had to wedge a flat-head screwdriver against the mortar, as though it were a chisel, and hit it with the hammer. They worked two abreast, one hitting a vertical line, the other the horizontal line below it to its left, hitting the mortar leftward, to spray the wall beside them.
It went so slowly it didn’t look at first as though anything was happening at all. Gray dust and rubble formed on the black floor, but how much had they removed? A quarter of an inch? Half an inch? Williams took over from Parker, and Mackey from Williams, and then Parker again, and they were no more than two inches into the mortar below and beside that one block.
Mackey was resting again, watching the other two at work, when he said, ‘A concrete block’s eight inches thick. Those screwdriver blades are four inches long.’
They stopped to look at him. Williams said, ‘We don’t accomplish anything if we only go halfway.’
‘Let me see what I can find up front,’ Mackey said, and took the flashlight and left.
Parker said, ‘We might as well keep going.’
To hit the mortar at an angle shortened the reach of the screwdrivers even more. They were three inches deep into the wall, and nearly at the end of the screwdrivers’ reach, when Mackey came back with two lengths of chrome-covered metal. They were parts of the frame of one of the display cases that he’d broken off by bending them backward and forward, leaving jagged ends. They were L-shaped, less than an inch on a side.
‘Let me straighten these,’ Mackey said. Taking one of the hammers, he laid first one, then the other, length of metal on iron weights taken from the exercise equipment and hammered the right angle out of them. Finished with that, he bent each length over on itself and hammered the crease. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we can get in there with the V of the bend, scrape it back and forth. Slower than the screwdrivers, but it should break up the mortar.’
It did. They used small towels from the gym closet to protect their hands, and scraped back and forth into the narrow slits they’d already made with the screwdrivers, pulling the crumbled mortar out, two working at a time, the third resting.
They’d been at it just over an hour when Parker, at the horizontal line, suddenly stopped and said, ‘It’s through. Mackey, give me something to mark the metal.’
Mackey gave him a screwdriver, and Parker scored the metal where it met the concrete block. ‘We know that’s how far to go. We don’t want to push too hard. We need to know what’s beyond this.’
It was only a few more minutes before both slits appeared to be through to the far side of the block, where they could feel an empty space back there. They started on the other two sides of the same block, the left and the top, and it went faster now that they knew how to do it. It was tiring work, and it felt hot in the gym, even with the thermostat off and the hall door open, but they kept working, and in just under an hour the block suddenly lurched downward, shutting the slit beneath it, widening the space above.
The problem now was how to get a purchase on the block to pull it out. Parker tried wedging the hammer claw into the top space to pry it out, but the block wouldn’t lever, it just dug hard against the block below it. They had to come at it from the sides, pounding one hammer’s claw into the space with the other hammer, prying it out, feeling the block move an eighth of an inch, then wedging the hammer in on the other side to do it again.
This part went even more slowly, or at least it seemed that way. It was very hard work, to force the hammer in, force the block to move, a small and grudging move every time. When it was out an inch, protruding from the wall around it, Williams crouched beneath the loose block to push up on it while Parker and Mackey pressed the heels of their hands against the exposed sides and tried to lever it out.
But it was too soon, they couldn’t get enough purchase on it. They had to go back to the hammers, taking turns, beating the claw into the space, prying out, the block not seeming to move at all. Finally, when it was two inches out, twice as far as the first time, they tried again, doing it the same way, and this time the block suddenly jolted out another inch, and then another.
Williams got out of the way, and Parker and Mackey juked the block out by hand, back and forth, back and forth, hearing it scrape along on the mortar rubble, pulverizing it more. They got it almost all the way out and it hung there, angled downward, the top edge against the bottom edge of the block above.
Parker said, ‘We’ll both pull out, bottom corners.’
They wrenched, and the block jumped out of the space to fall hard onto the floor. Williams picked it up and carried it out of the way while Mackey shone the flashlight into the oblong hole. ‘Sheetrock,’ he said, seeing it an inch beyond the end of the concrete block wall, one furring strip a vertical line of wood near the right edge.
Mackey scraped the Sheetrock with the jagged edge of the metal bar. ‘I think there’s something else behind it. Hold on, let me try. Parker, take the flashlight, will you?’
Parker held the light on the rectangle of Sheetrock and Mackey worked the bar back and forth, scraping away Sheetrock, trying not to simply puncture it. ‘Yeah, there’s something.’ He prodded some more, breaking strips of Sheetrock away, and they looked through at another surface beyond the Sheetrock, dull white.
‘Tile,’ Parker said. ‘It’s a tile wall.’
Mackey reached in to pull a strip of the Sheetrock away. He held it in both hands and they looked at the face of it, which was pale green. ‘It’s waterproofed,’ Mackey said. ‘We found a bathroom.’
Williams said, ‘We won’t know if there’s a mirror on it until we break it.’
‘A mirror in a bathroom,’ Mackey decided, ‘this far to the back of the building, isn’t gonna wake anybody up. If it comes down to it, I’ll volunteer for the bad luck.’
‘We’ve all got the bad luck already,’ Williams told him. ‘Parker and me, we already broke out once, and here we are again.’
Picking up a hammer and screwdriver, Parker said, ‘We’re running out of time,’ and went back to work.
3
The others were easier to get at, but still hard work. It was almost three in the morning before they’d removed the six blocks they needed to get out of their way; the one just above waist height they’d done first, then the two centered below that, the one below that, and the two below that. Now they had an opening in the wall thirty-two inches high and effectively sixteen inches wide.
‘Shine the light,’ Parker said, and went to one knee in front of the opening. The bottom of it was just about at knee height; Parker reached in with the hammer and rapped a tile just above the next lower concrete block. He had to hit it twice, but then it cracked and fell backward, taking parts of two other tiles with it.
They looked through the new small hole into the darkness beyond, the flash gleaming on something glass, near to them, pebbled to bounce and refract the light. Mackey said, ‘What the hell is that?’
‘A shower stall,’ Parker said. ‘That’s the door.’
‘A nice door,’ Williams said. ‘At last.’
Now that they knew there was nothing except the tile in their way, they quickly hammered it out of there, then clawed the one furring strip in their space with a hammer, weakening it so they could snap it in the middle and break the pieces off at top and bottom. Now they had a new doorway.
; Mackey went through first, with the flash. The other two followed, as Mackey opened the shower door and stepped out to the bathroom. He switched on the lights there, and Williams said, ‘I think we oughta turn out the light behind us. No need to attract attention before we have to.’
‘Good,’ Parker said.
They waited while Williams went back to switch off the gym lights, then came back through the new opening to join them in what turned out to be an apartment connected to the dance studio.
‘All these people,’ Mackey said, ‘they build themselves little nests at work, and then don’t use them.’
Williams said, ‘Better for us if they don’t.’
Once out of the bathroom, they limited themselves to the flashlight, moving through the rest of the dance studio area. They were out of the jeweler’s now, but they were still inside the Armory, and the problem of getting out was still the same. The exterior walls on all sides were impregnable, windows too narrow to be useful, and a twenty-four-hour doorman at the only exit. And time running out.
Moving through the dance studio, they went first through the small neat apartment, then the offices, then the studios themselves. They saw the long mirror Brenda had told Mackey about, and Mackey laughed at it: ‘We coulda called attention with thatthing.’
The receptionist’s room at the front was faintly illuminated by streetlights. A mesh barrier was closed over the front window and door; not impossible to get through but impossible to get through immediately and without noise.
As they turned away from that useless exit, Williams said, ‘We gotta get next door, into that lobby.’
Mackey said, ‘Not another wall. Don’t give me another wall.’
‘Maybe there’s a door,’ Parker said.
There was. It took them twenty minutes to find it, but then there it was, a spring-locked door on the far wall of the main office, toward the rear, just in front of the apartment. The door opened inward; Parker pulled it ajar, just enough to look through, and saw the lobby, dim-lit, with elevators nearby to the left and the front entrance far away at the other end of the low-ceilinged space.
Parker stepped back, letting the door shut. ‘That’s the lobby,’ he said. ‘But I can’t see the doorman from here, and you know he’s going to have video monitors.’
‘Lemme look,’ Williams said. ‘I’m pretty good at finding those things.’
He hunched in the doorway, peering through the narrow space, then leaned back, shut the door, and said, ‘Two. One over the doorway this side of the desk, aimed at the elevators, and one over the elevators, aimed at the front.’
Parker said, ‘And the stairwell door, that’s just this side of the elevators.’
‘He’ll see it,’ Williams said, ‘on his monitor.’
Parker shook his head, angry at the obstacles. ‘If we try to just go straight through the front, deal with him along the way
‘
‘He’ll be on the phone,’ Williams said, ‘before we can get to him. We could getto him, but the cops would be on the way.’
Mackey said, ‘We don’t want that kind of footrace.’
‘There has to be a way past him,’ Parker said. ‘If we can get into the stairwell, get down to the parking area, that’snot gonna have security as tough as everything else around here.’
Williams said, ‘He’ll have a monitor shows him the garage.’
‘If we don’t take a car,’ Parker said, ‘if we just walk out, walk along the side wall and out, we won’t give him a reason to get excited. But first we’ve gotta get down there.’
‘Somebody switch on the lights in here,’ Mackey said, ‘I got an idea.’
Parker had the flashlight. He shone it across the room, found the light switch by the opposite door, and crossed to turn it on. Two lamps on side tables made a warm glow, showing walls filled with prints of various kinds of dancers, in performance.
Mackey went to the desk, sat at it, lit a lamp there, and looked in drawers until he found a phone book. He leafed through it, read, and gave the open page a satisfied slap. ‘That’s what we like,’ he said. ‘Twenty-four-hour service.’
Parker and Williams sat in comfortable chairs in front of the desk while Mackey pulled the phone toward himself, dialed a number, waited, and then said, ‘Yeah, you still delivering? Great. The name’s O’Toole, I’m in the Armory Apartments, apartment C-3. I want a pepperoni pizza. Oh, the eight-inch. And a liter of Diet Pepsi, you got that? Great. How long, do you figure? Twenty minutes, that’s perfect.’
He hung up and grinned at them. ‘By the time they work it out, we’re in the stairwell, and this goddam place’s history.’
It was twenty-five minutes. They had the office lights switched off again, and took turns watching through the narrow crack of the open door, and at last they heard the building’s front doorbell ring and heard the sound of the chair as the doorman got to his feet.
The delays were grinding them down. They had to get out of here before it was morning and the world was awake and in motion, but every time they moved they were forced to stop again. Stop and wait. All three of them had nerves jumping, held in check.
Five seconds since the doorbell rang. They stepped out of the office, single file, moving on the balls of their feet. They angled across the dim lobby and through the door into the stairwell.
Where the stairs only went up.
4
Parker said, ‘It’s the goddam security in this place. They don’t want anybody in or out except past that doorman.’
‘Well,’ Mackey said, ‘that’s what people want nowadays, that sense of safety.’
Williams said, ‘Bullshit. There’s no such thing as safety.’
‘You’re right,’ Mackey told him. ‘But they don’t know that.’
Parker said, ‘That can’tbe the only way in or out, because garbage has to go out, and they’re not gonna send it out the front door. And deliveries have to come in.’
Mackey said, ‘It seems that way.’
‘The fire code,’ Williams said. ‘They can’t have a building this big, full of people living here, and only one staircase.’
Parker said, ‘So there has to be service stairs, leading to a service entrance. We go up one flight here, we look in the halls, we find that other way.’
Williams said, ‘What if there’s video cameras in the halls, too?’
‘Can’t be,’ Mackey said. ‘It’s too big a building, and one lone doorman. He can’t look at fifty monitors.’
‘We’ll check it out,’ Parker said, and started up the stairs.
This first flight was double in length, with three landings, to bring them higher than the ceiling of the former parade field next door. When they reached the first door, it had a brass 2 on it.
Stepping past Parker, Williams said, ‘Let me look for cameras.’
They waited, while Williams cautiously pulled the door open and looked out, moving his head from side to side rather than stretch out into the hall. Then he opened it wider, leaned out, looking, and shook his head back at Parker and Mackey. ‘Nothing.’
‘Like I said,’ Mackey reminded them.
They went out to a crossing of hallways, all quietly illuminated. The elevator bank was to their right, a hall extended to their left, and another hall ran both forward and back. A plaque on the wall facing the elevators read RENTAL OFFICE, with a bent arrow to show the office would be at the end of the hall to the front.
Without speaking, they went the other way, because the service stairs, if they existed, would be at the rear of the building. They moved silently, on pale-green carpeting, past apartment doors with identifying numbers and peepholes.
The door at the end of the hall had neither; instead, in small black letters, it said EMERGENCY EXIT. They went through into a barer, more utilitarian stairwell, all concrete and iron. At the bottom was a concrete landing with a broad metal door beside another of those tall narrow windows. The door had a bar across its middle to push it open, but the bar was brig
ht red, with its message in block white letters: WARNING, WHEN DOOR OPENED, ALARM WILL SOUND.
Williams said, ‘Well? Do we push and run?’
Parker shook his head. ‘With no place to go to ground? Look out there, that street’s empty.’
Williams frowned out at the late-night emptiness, the closed stores across the street, this being a narrower street than the one in front. ‘Everywhere we go,’ he said, ‘there’s something to stop us.’
They were all silent a minute, looking out at the empty dark street, then Mackey, sounding reluctant, said, ‘What if I call Brenda?’
Parker said, ‘To come pick us up, you mean.’
‘I don’t like her in these things,’ Mackey told them, ‘but maybe this time we gotta. She drives over, we see the car, go out, let the alarm do what it wants to do, Brenda drives us awayfrom here.’
Williams said, ‘I can’t think of any other way.’
‘Neither can I,’ Mackey said.
Parker looked out. No traffic. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ he said.
5
Parker hated going back, but there was no choice. Turn around, go up the stairs, the other way along that hall, toward the rental office. Instead of getting out of the maze, turn around and go back into the maze. And less time than ever.
The rental office door was locked, but not seriously. They went through it, and found a suite of offices illuminated by a few pale narrow strips of light. The tall thin windows continued up here, though not in the apartments farther up, and these windows were just above the level of the streetlights outside. It was their glow, coming through the deep-set narrow windows, that made the stripes of light across ceiling and desks and walls.
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