by Dean Koontz
“Time to think of another way out,” she said. “Come on, Graham. We’re wasting too much time. He’ll be on this floor any second now.”
Less reluctantly than the first time, but still without enthusiasm, he followed her into the elevator shaft.
On the platform he said, “You go first. I’ll bring up the rear, so I won’t knock you off the ladder if I fall.”
For the same reason, he had insisted on going first when they descended.
She put her arms around him, kissed him, then turned and started to climb.
He ran the length of the corridor and opened the door to the south stairs. He stood on the landing for almost a minute, listening intently for movement. He heard none.
In the corridor again, he searched for an unlocked office door until he realized they might have gone back into the elevator shaft. He located the maintenance supply room; the red door was ajar.
He approached it cautiously, as before. He was opening the door all the way when the shaft beyond was filled with the sound of another door closing on it.
On the platform, he bent over the railing. He stared down into the vertiginous depths, wondering which one of the doors they had used.
How many floors had they gained on him?
Dammit!
Cursing aloud, overcoat flapping around his legs, Bollinger went back to the south stairs to listen for them.
“Don’t slow down,” Connie said.
“Trying not to.”
“Use the rail as much as you can. Pull yourself along. ”
“How far are we going?”
“One more floor.”
“Eternity.”
“After that we’ll switch back to the elevator shaft.”
He liked the ladder in the shaft better than he did the stairs. On the ladder he could use his good leg and pull with both hands to keep nearly all of his weight off the other leg. But on the stairs, if he didn’t use the lame leg at all, he would have to hop from one step to the other; and that was too slow.
“One more flight,” she said encouragingly.
Trying to surprise himself, trying to cover a lot of ground before the. pain transmitted itself from leg to brain, he put on a burst of speed, staggered up ten steps as fast as he could. That transformed the pain into agony. He had to slow down, but he kept moving.
Nothing.
He looked over the railing. Squinting, he tried to see through the layers of darkness that filled the spaces between the landing.
Nothing.
He went back into the hall and ran toward the north stairs.
29
Billy drove into the alley. His car made the first tracks in the new snow.
A forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-deep service courtyard lay at the back of the Bowerton Building. Four doors opened onto it. One of these was a big green garage door, where delivery could be taken on office furniture and other items too large to fit through the public entrance. A sodium vapor lamp glowed above the green door, casting a harsh light on the stone walls, on the rows of trash bins awaiting pickup in the morning, and on the snow; the shadows were sharply drawn.
There was no sign of Bollinger.
Prepared to leave at the first indication of trouble, Billy backed the car into the courtyard. He switched off the headlights but not the engine. He rolled down his window, just an inch, to keep the glass from steaming up.
When Bollinger didn’t come out to meet him, Billy looked at his watch. 10:02.
Clouds of dry snow swirled down the alley in front of him. In the courtyard, out of the worst of the wind, the snow was relatively undisturbed.
Most nights, squad cars conducted random patrols of poorly lighted back streets like this one, always on the lookout for business-district burglars with half-filled vans, muggers with half-robbed victims, and rapists with half-subdued women. But not tonight. Not in this weather. The city’s uniformed patrolmen would be occupied elsewhere. The majority of them would be busy cleaning up after the usual foul-weather automobile accidents, but as much as a third of the evening shift would be squirreled away in favorite hideouts, on a side street or in a park; they would be drinking coffee-in a few cases, something stronger-and talking about sports and women, ready to go to work only if the radio dispatcher insisted upon it.
Billy looked at his watch again. 10:04.
He would wait exactly twenty-six minutes. Not one minute less, and certainly not one more. That was what he had promised Dwight.
He bent over the railing, looked down. Nothing but other railings, other platforms, other emergency light bulbs, and a lot of darkness. Harris and the woman had gone.
He was tired of playing hide-and-seek with them, of dashing from stairwell to stairwell to shaft. He was sweating profusely. Under his overcoat, his shirt clung to him wetly. He left the platform, went to the elevator, activated it with a key, pushed the button marked “Lobby.”
On the ground level, he took off his heavy overcoat and dropped it beside the elevator doors. Sweat trickled down his neck, down the center of his chest. He didn’t remove his gloves. With the back of his left hand and then with his shirt sleeve he wiped his dripping forehead.
Out of sight of anyone who might come to the street doors, he leaned against the marble wall at the end of the offset that contained the four banks of elevators. From that position, he could see two white doors with black stenciled letters on them, one at the north end and one at the south end of the lobby. These were the exits from the stairwells. When Harris and the woman came through one of them, he would blow their goddamned brains out. Oh, yes. With pleasure.
He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of this before.
Ahead of him, Connie realized that he had stopped. “What’s the matter?”
“Look here.”
She came back.
“If we set it off,” Graham said, “it’ll bring the security guards up from downstairs.”
“If they aren’t dead.”
“Even if they are dead, it’ll bring the fire department on the double. Bollinger will have the crimps put to him.”
“Maybe he won’t run when he hears the bells. After all, we know his name. He might hang on, kill us, sneak out past the firemen.”
“He might,” Graham agreed, unsettled by the thought of being stalked through dark halls full of clanging, banging bells.
They stared through the glass at the steel alarm lever that glinted in the red light.
He felt hope, like a muscle relaxant, relieve a fraction of the tension in his shoulders, neck and face. For the first time all night, he began to think they might escape.
Then he remembered the vision. The bullet. The blood. He was going to be shot in the back.
She said, “The alarms will probably be so loud that we won’t hear him if he comes after us.”
“But it works both ways,” he said eagerly. “He won’t be able to hear us. ”
She pressed her fingertips to the cool plate of glass, hesitated, then took her hand away. “Okay. But there’s no little hammer to break the glass.” She held up the chain that was supposed to secure a hammer to the side of the alarm. “What do we use instead?”
Smiling, he took the scissors from his pocket and held them up as if they were a talisman.
“Applause, applause,” she said, beginning to feel just enough hope to allow herself a little joke.
“Thank you.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“Stand back.”
She did.
Graham held the scissors by the closed blades. Using the heavy handles as a hammer, he smashed the thin glass. A few pieces held stubbornly to the frame. So as not to cut himself, he broke out the jagged splinters before he put one hand into the shallow alarm box and jerked the steel lever from green to red.
No noise.
No bells.
Silence.
Christ!
“Oh, no,” she said.
Frantically, the flame of hope flickering in him
, he pushed the lever up, back to the green safety mark, then slammed it down again.
Still nothing.
Bollinger had been as thorough with the fire alarm as he had been with the telephones.
Billy glanced over his shoulder, through the rear window, at the green garage door, then at the other three doors.
The time was 10:15.
Where in the hell was Dwight?
When he looked up from the drawer, he saw that Connie was lost in thought. She was standing just inside the door, staring at the floor in front of a light blue photographic backdrop. Climbing equipment—coils of rope, pitons, etriers, carabiners, klettershoes, nylon jackets lined with down, and perhaps thirty other items—lay in a disordered heap before the screen.
“See what I found?” he said. He held up the blades.
She wasn’t interested. “What about this stuff?” she asked, pointing to the climbing equipment.
Coming from behind the desk, he said, “This issue we’re running a buyer’s guide. Each of those pieces was photographed for the article. Why’d you ask?” Then his face brightened. “Never mind. I see why.” He hunkered in front of the equipment, picked up an ice ax. “This makes a better weapon than any draftsman’s tool.”
“Graham?”
He looked up.
Her expression was peculiar: a combination of puzzlement, fear and amazement. Although she clearly had thought of something interesting and important, her gray eyes gave no indication of what was going through her mind. She said, “Let’s not rush out to fight him. Can we consider all of our options?”
“That’s why we’re here.”
She stepped into the short, private hallway, cocked her head and listened for Bollinger.
Graham stood up, prepared to use the ice ax.
When she was satisfied that there was nothing to listen for but more silence, she came back into the room.
He lowered the ax. “I thought you heard something.”
“Just being cautious.” She glanced at the climbing equipment before she sat down on the edge of the desk. “As I see it, there are five different things we can do. Number one, we can make a stand, try to fight Bollinger.”
“With this,” he said, hefting the ice ax.
“And with anything else we can find.”
“We can set a trap, surprise him.”
“I see two problems with that approach.”
“The gun.”
“That’s sure one.”
“If we’re clever enough, he won’t have time to shoot.”
“More important,” she said, “neither of us is a killer.”
“We could just knock him unconscious.”
“If you hit him on the head with an ax like that, you’re bound to kill him.”
“If it’s kill or be killed, I suppose I could do it.”
“Maybe. But if you hesitate at the last instant, we’re dead.”
He didn’t resent the limits of her faith in him; he knew that he didn’t deserve her complete trust. “You said there were five things we could do.”
“Number two, we can try to hide.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Maybe look for an office that someone forgot to lock, go inside and lock it after us.”
“No one forgot.”
“Maybe we can continue to play cat and mouse with him.”
“For how long?”
“Until a new shift of guards finds the dead ones.”
“If he didn’t kill the guards, then the new guards won’t know what’s going on up here.”
“That’s right.”
“Besides, I think maybe they work twelve-hour shifts, four days a week. I know one of the night men. I’ve heard him curse the long shifts and at the same time praise the eight hours of overtime he gets each week. So if they come on duty at six, they won’t be off until six in the morning.”
“Seven and a half hours.”
“Too long to play cat and mouse in the elevator shaft and on the stairs. Especially with this bum leg of mine.”
“Number three,” she said. “We could open one of your office windows and shout for help.”
“From the fortieth floor? Even in good weather, they probably couldn’t hear you on the sidewalk. With this wind, they wouldn’t hear you even two floors away.”
“I know that. And on a night like this, there’s not going to be anyone out walking anyway.”
“Then why’d you suggest it?”
“Number five is going to surprise you,” she said. “When I get to it, I want you to understand that I’ve thought of every other possible out.”
“What’s number five?”
“Number four first. We open the office window and throw furniture into the street, try to catch the attention of anyone who’s driving past on Lexington.”
“If anyone is driving in this weather.”
“Someone will be. A taxi or two.”
“But if we toss out a chair, we won’t be able to calculate the effect of the wind on it. We won’t be able to gauge where it’ll land. What if it goes through the windshield of a car and kills someone?”
“I’ve thought of that.”
“We can’t do it.”
“I know.”
“What’s number five?”
She slid off the desk and went to the pile of climbing equipment. “We’ve got to get rigged out in this stuff.”
“Rigged out?”
“Boots, jackets, gloves, ropes-the works.”
He was perplexed. “Why?”
Her eyes were wide, like the eyes of a startled doe. “For the climb down.”
“Down what?”
“Down the outside of the building. All the way to the street.”
part four
FRIDAY 10:30 P.M. SATURDAY 4:00 A.M.
30
Promptly at ten-thirty, Billy drove out of the service courtyard behind the highrise.
The snowfall had grown heavier during the past half hour, and the wind had become downright dangerous. Roiling in the headlight beams, the sheets of powder-dry flakes were almost as dense as a fog.
At the mouth of the alley, as he was pulling onto the side street, the tires spun on the icy pavement. The car slewed toward the far curb. He turned the wheel in the direction of the slide and managed to stop just short of colliding with a panel truck parked at the curb.
He had been driving too fast, and he hadn’t even been aware of it until he’d almost crashed. That wasn’t like him. He was a careful man. He was never reckless. Never. He was angry with himself for losing control.
He drove toward the avenue. The traffic light was with him, and the nearest car was three or four blocks away, a lone pair of headlights dimmed and diffused by the falling snow. He turned the corner onto Lexington.
In three hundred feet, he came to the front of the Bowerton Building. Ferns and flowers, molded in a twenty-foot-long rectangular bronze plaque, crowned the stonework above the four revolving doors. Part of the enormous lobby was visible beyond the entrance, and it appeared to be deserted. He drove near the curb, in the parking lane, barely moving, studying the building and the sidewalks and the calcimined street, looking for some sign of trouble and finding none.
Nevertheless, the plan had failed. Something had gone wrong in there. Terribly, terribly wrong.
Will Bollinger talk if he’s caught? Billy wondered uneasily. Will he implicate me?
He would have to go to work without knowing how badly Dwight had failed, without knowing whether or not Bollinger would be-had been?-apprehended by the police. He was going to find it difficult to concentrate on his job tonight; but if he was going to construct an alibi to counter a possible confession from Dwight, it would help his case if he was calm tonight, as much like himself as he could be, as thorough and diligent as those who knew him expected him to be.
Billy was gone by now, the schedule destroyed. Bollinger hoped he might salvage the plan. But at the same time he knew that wasn’t possib
le. The situation had degenerated to this: slaughter them and get the hell out.
Where is Harris? he wondered. Has he sensed that I’m waiting here for him? Has he used his carnival act, his goddamned clairvoyance to anticipate me?
He decided to wait five minutes more. Then he would be forced to go after them.
Beside him, Connie put one hand on his arm. “Why is it impossible?”
“It just is.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I can’t climb it.”
“It’s not a climb.”
“What?”
“It’s a descent.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Can it be done?”
“Not by me.”
“You climbed the ladder in the shaft.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Besides, you’ve never climbed.”
“You can teach me.”
“No.”
“Sure you can.”
“You can’t learn on‘the sheer face of a forty-story building in the middle of a blizzard.”
“I’d have a damned good teacher,” she said.
“Oh, yeah. One who hasn’t climbed in five years.”
“You still know how. You haven’t forgotten.”
“I’m out of shape.”
“You’re a strong man.”
“You forget my leg.”
She turned away from the window and went back to the door so that she could listen for Bollinger while she talked. “Remember when Abercrombie and Fitch had a man scale their building to advertise a new line of climbing equipment?”
He didn’t look away from the window. He was transfixed by the night. “What about it?”
“At that time, you said what that man did wasn’t really so difficult.”
“Did I?”
“You said a building, with all its ledges and setbacks, is an easy climb compared to almost any mountain.”
He said nothing. He remembered telling her that, and he knew he had been right. But when he’d said it he never thought he’d be called upon to do it. Images of Mount Everest and of hospital rooms filled his mind.
“This equipment you chose for the buyer’s guide—”