Mackey grinned. “You mean, like a buzzer to open the garage gate? I looked, believe me.”
“And I looked around here,” Parker said, as Williams came down the hall.
Mackey turned to him, saying, “I’ve got the owners’ apartment, what’ve you got?”
“Storage rooms,” Williams said, “and down at the end, a gym, with exercise machines. Nothing to give us a damn bit of help.”
Parker told them about the duct in the Web site room, but neither of them wanted to explore that route. “It’s the big room we want,” Mackey said.
So they went back to the room with the display cases, many of them now with shattered glass, making jagged reflections in the small lights. Without discussion, they moved out into the dim room, each studying the place on his own, seeing it in a different way from the first time they’d come in here.
Parker moved to the right, to the exterior side wall of the building. This room was thirty-six feet long, with four windows spaced evenly along this wall. The windows were a foot wide and four feet high, with arched tops, and started at chest height. They were inset into the middle of a wall four feet thick, with decorative wrought-iron bars on the outside. Parker looked out at nighttime traffic, silent from in here, and the street seemed very far away. The deep-set narrow windows were like looking through the wrong end of binoculars.
So the windows were too narrow, too deep, and too barred to be of any use. Parker moved around to the front, with three more windows exactly like the others, and came to Williams looking at the closed front door. Through the glass they could see a brushed-steel articulated panel closed down over the entryway, the same as the one they’d seen earlier downstairs at the garage entrance.
Parker said, “We can’t do anything in this direction.”
“I know,” Williams said. “But I’m beginning to think we can’t do anything in any direction. If we could break through that, we don’t care if it sets off alarms, or if the doorman out there hears us. If we get through, we take off.”
“But we won’t get through,” Parker said. “Not here. It would take too long and it would make too much noise. The doorman could have the law here before we had the thing opened up.”
From above, Mackey’s voice called, ’You can forget the ceiling.”
Parker looked up, and Mackey had climbed ladder rungs mounted into the front wall. He was standing on the metal gridwork up there, holding a vertical support and looking down. He shook his head, and called to them, “Standing here, the ceiling’s still too far away to touch. I don’t know if there’s anything up there might help us, but there’s no place to get a whack at it.”
Parker said, “Then it has to be something down here.”
As Mackey came back down the ladder, Williams said, “What about a fire?”
“I don’t think so,” Parker said.
Jumping the last few feet, Mackey said, ’You don’t think what?”
Parker said, “Williams thought, maybe start a fire, we go out when the firemen come in.”
Williams said, “If nothing else works.”
“I don’t know,” Mackey said. Looking around, he said, “It’ll take them a while to get in, won’t it? We’re down with smoke inhalation, they’re still banging away with axes.”
Parker said, “That’s the problem, we’d have to make it a big enough fire to get noticed, but not big enough to knock us down.”
Pointing at the left side wall, Mackey said, “If there’s a way, it’s there. The other side of that is the dance studio.”
Williams said, “That’s the new wall they put in when they converted. It won’t be as tough as these outside walls.”
“The only thing,” Mackey said, “is mirrors. Brenda told me, they’ve got the big workout room where she was, it’s got a whole mirrored wall. If we hit a mirror ten feet by twenty, it’ll make a sound when it comes down, and somebody’s gonna hear it.”
Parker said, “What else did Brenda tell you about the dance studio?”
“Not much,” Mackey said. “You know, she wasn’t casing it, she was just going there. Lemme see, there’s an office up front, and one time she said, when she’s looking at the mirror in the room where she was taking the classes, she was thinking, all that jewelry’s just the other side of that mirror.”
Williams said, “Do we want to go up front, then, so we don’t hit the mirror?”
Mackey shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s gonna be too close to the lobby and the doorman, we don’t want him to hear demolition.”
Parker said, “Is it all studios along here?”
“I’m not sure.” Mackey frowned, trying to remember. “I think the big room where she was, it was maybe third back. First the front office, then a locker room where they changed, and then the big room with the mirror. And beyond that I think there’s smaller rooms, but I don’t know. And I don’t know about any more mirrors.”
Parker said, “What about all the way back? Williams, what’s at that end of the hall?”
“The gym,” Williams said. ’The end door opens into it, and it’s across that whole space.”
“Same kind of wall as this?”
“Painted Sheetrock, yeah. There’s mirrors, but they’re on the back wall.”
“If we go through at the rear corner back there,” Parker said, “we might be able to figure out what the wall’s made of before we go too far in.”
Williams said, ’There’s tools in the janitor’s closet along that hall.”
“Good,” Parker said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
The three left the main room and went back down the hall to the door they’d come in from the stairs, then turned right and Williams led them to the janitor’s closet, with brooms and mops and an electric floor polisher on one side, shelves piled with cleaning supplies on the other. Part of one shelf was tools; two hammers, a pliers, half a dozen screwdrivers. They took everything and went to the end of the hall, where Williams opened the door and they went on into the gym, which was dark.
“We need light,” Parker said. “No matter what happens.” He found the switch beside the door, and fluorescents in the ceiling flicked on, showing a broad white room with black composition flooring. One of the tall narrow windows was in the wall to the left, with a long mirror fastened beside it. Exercise equipment stood on the floor or was fixed to the walls. To the right were a bathroom and a storage closet. Attached to the wall that interested them were weights with pulleys. Mackey went over to look at how they were held in place, and said to Parker, “This has got to be a pretty good wall, if it takes this. Just screws into studs, with all this weight and people pulling on it, somebody’d yank it right out.”
“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.
Macke
y 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 that thing.”
Th
e 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 readjust 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 get to 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’s not gonna have security as tough as everything else around here.”
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