I got out my key ring. I took it slow, trying to feel confident that the combination of a largely empty sidewalk behind me and a colleague who looked like he was trying to get hold of someone in the building to achieve legitimate entry, would make me invisible for long enough.
“Christ,” Fisher said after a couple of minutes. “There’s a police car.”
“Where?”
“Down at the intersection.”
“Keep an eye on it.”
I kept moving the tool. Trying just to feel the metal inside the lock, the balance of tensions, the ways the hidden components did and did not want to move. It wasn’t happening. I switched to a more flexible tool.
“Fuck—he’s gone,” Fisher said, looking up the street the other way.
“The police?”
“No—your friend. L.T. Just vanished, didn’t even see him go.”
“What are the cops doing now?”
“They’ve pulled over. Where that other guy is.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“He’s running this way.”
“Oh, crap,” I said. I glanced around and saw L.T.’s friend pounding up the sidewalk. One cop was running after him, the other stood at the car, on the radio.
“Stupid fucker kept L.T.’s drugs,” I said. “You can’t trust any one.”
“Jack, he’s heading toward us.”
“I know that. Put your back to the street.”
I turned to the door again, closed my eyes. I heard the sound of the foot pursuit, the cop shouting at the running suspect, but tried to concentrate only on the feel of the thin piece of metal in my hands.
“Jack—”
“Shut up, Gary. I’m nearly there.”
The sound of chaos got closer. “He!” someone was bellowing breathlessly. “He, there! He the man!”
L.T.’s friend had stopped running. He was twenty feet away, pointing straight at me. The pursuing cop was slowing, hand on his gun, figuring this new twist. His partner was heading our way, too, now. I could hear sirens in the distance.
“He,” the tall guy said again, jabbing his finger in my direction. The closest cop was approaching him warily, but casting looks in my direction. “He pay me, he tell me be there. I ain’t sell no shit to no one.”
The second cop had made the sidewalk now. While his partner grabbed the tall guy’s arm, he walked toward Gary and me.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said loudly. “You got any idea what this guy is talking about?”
“Sorry, no,” I said, looking at him with an honest citizen’s unthinking deference. There was a faint click at my hands as the tumblers finally fell. I pushed the door open behind me as if it were a twice-daily occurrence. “Is there a problem?”
The cop looked at me a beat longer, then lost interest and went to help his colleague subdue the tall guy, who was kicking and shouting and raising hell.
I stepped into the building, Fisher right behind.
chapter
THIRTY-SEVEN
After the door closed, we were in pitch darkness. I hadn’t wanted to fumble for a switch with the cops right there.
“Christ,” Fisher said. “That was…”
“…fine.” I said. “Keep your voice down.”
I pulled out the cheap flashlight I’d bought in the convenience store. I pointed it back toward the door, ran the beam along the wall at shoulder height. Saw a bank of switches. Flicked them one by one. Nothing happened. Pointed the light down at the floor instead. There was nothing lying there.
“No power,” Fisher said.
“But no mail or junk either. Someone picks up.”
We were standing in a wide, high-ceilinged corridor, peeling paper on the walls and an uneven floor. Once it had been tiled in a simple, businesslike way. Now many of the tiles were broken or missing. I made my way along it, treading carefully. The building smelled damp and fusty and old. Ten feet away a door hung ajar slightly, on the right. It opened into a long, narrow kitchen, the ser vice area of the coffee shop that had been the last occupant of the front part of the building. In the glow thrown by the lamp, it looked like the proprietors had left work one evening and decided never to come back. Broken cups, rusty machinery, the scent of rats’ passing, and beneath all that the smell of Seattle itself, old coffee and fog. This building was dead. It was like being in the hold of a shipwreck, hundreds of feet under the sea.
The two doors farther along the corridor were both open onto a wide, dark area cluttered with large pieces of display furniture, dating back to when the place had been a department store, moved out from the walls and left stranded in the space like more tall, abandoned ships.
I came back out and found a door in the back wall, too. I gave this a shake. It didn’t move at all. This must be the one we’d seen in the parking lot. There was another door around the back of the staircase. I opened it, looked down. Pitch-black and cold, with narrow wooden stairs leading to a basement.
I went back and headed up the stairs, climbed quietly to the next floor, shifting my weight along the banister until I was sure the treads of the staircase were sound. Fisher followed. When I got up to the second level, I gestured to keep him still and listened.
No sound of conversation or movement, no creaking floorboards.
All the doors on this level were shut and locked. The same on the next. Someone had gone to some trouble to make sure fire precautions had been followed, closing the doors to stop a blaze flooding from room to room. On the third level, I chose the door at the front of the building and quietly jacked the lock.
The other side was a wide, empty space, the full width of the building’s street frontage, faint lines of light around boarded-in windows. A flick around with the lamp revealed a few pieces of furniture, extension cords running the perimeter and up and down the walls, and a collection of rolls of mildewed backdrop tilted into one corner. Presumably this was the area that had been used as a studio. I tried to imagine a much younger Amy perched in one of those chairs, cradling a coffee, watching a shoot. I couldn’t.
Fisher had stayed in the doorway, his face a paler patch in the gloom. I pointed at the ceiling.
“Try them again.”
He called. We could hear a phone ring on the floor above, the kind that sounds like someone hammering frenetically on a tiny bell, a dusty, echoing sound. It wasn’t answered, and no machine clicked in.
The tension in my stomach and shoulders was starting to fade back, and I felt a sense of focus that had been lost to me for over a year.
“Are you okay?” Fisher whispered. His face was pinched and nervous, and he was looking at me strangely.
Not at my face, but down at my right hand. I realized that the tension had not faded at all, merely spread so it was throughout my entire body.
And also that, without any recollection of doing so, I had taken out my gun.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I walked past him to the end of the corridor, crooked my head to look up the next flight of stairs, directing the little light obliquely off the side wall. Held my hand up again to keep Fisher back.
I went halfway up, stepping carefully. Stopped and listened. I could hear nothing except the faint sounds of traffic outside the building, a drip of water somewhere. I gestured for Fisher to follow and made it up the rest of the way. I waited where I was until he stood next to me on the top level, at the mouth of the staircase.
This landing was arranged in the same way as the lower floors with a long return, doors to spaces at the front and side areas of the building. I switched the flashlight off. Darkness. The long arm on our left was as featureless as the void of space.
But beneath the door to the room at the front of the building, there was a faint glow. Fisher saw it, too.
I stepped quietly over to the door, cupped the end of the light in my hand, and turned it back on. Close up, you could see that this door was different from the ones on the lower levels. Thicker, newer, reinforced. A padlock the size of my fist hu
ng off the handle.
I turned the light back off, slipped it into my pocket. I felt my right thumb flicking the safety off my gun and decided not to interfere. Reached for the door handle and pushed the door inward a breath, to give the mechanism a chance to turn soundlessly.
It was heavy, but the doorknob turned all the way.
Holding it steady, I moved to the right and gestured with my head for Fisher to come behind me. Then I pulled the door open. It moved slowly and silently.
I stopped when the gap was less than two inches wide.
The space on the other side was dimly lit by a lamp on the corner of what looked like a desk, one of the old low lamps with a folded green shade. I could make out a narrow strip of wall beyond, a bookcase lined floor to ceiling with leather spines. Now that the door was cracked open I could hear a faint skittering sound.
At first I thought it might be a rat, or rats, pattering across a wooden floor within. Then I recognized it. It was a sound I had made myself from time to time, though not lately.
You don’t take a breath before entering a room. You just do it.
I stepped right into a space that was, except for the desk and shelves, completely empty. The dividing walls on the floor had been removed, creating one very large, L-shaped area. Bare floorboards. No chairs. The windows boarded over. Just that single lamp.
A man was sitting behind the desk, his face bathed in the pale light of a laptop screen. He looked up mildly. I stared at him.
“Ben?” I said.
Fisher stopped in his tracks. Ben Zimmerman looked at him, then at me.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “You were right.”
“Who?” I said. “Was right? About what?”
“I did warn you,” said another voice. I turned to see Bobbi Zimmerman standing by the other wall.
“First time she met you,” Ben said, to me this time. “Bobbi said you were trouble. I should listen more often.”
“Yes, you should,” his wife said.
Ben went back to typing. I realized I was still pointing my gun at him. I lowered my arm. It hadn’t seemed to unsettle him much. He looked different from any way I’d seen him in Birch Crossing. Instead of the usual battered khakis and sweater, he was wearing a dark suit with a shirt and tie, and his entire posture was altered. Gone was the stooped air of benign neglect. He didn’t look like a history professor anymore, and I knew immediately where I’d seen his likeness.
“Jack,” Fisher said. “How do you know this guy?”
“He’s my neighbor,” I said. There were blotches of color on Fisher’s cheeks, and the lines around his eyes were more pronounced than ever. “His name is Ben Zimmerman.”
“No,” Fisher said. He sounded like a petulant child. “It’s Ben Lytton. He’s one of the Cranfield lawyers. He’s the one who came to our office in Chicago.”
I pulled out the photos that had been there since Fisher gave them to me, only a couple days before and five minutes’ walk away. “So how come you couldn’t tell he was the man you photographed with Amy?”
Fisher looked at the photo, back at Ben. He seemed baffled. “I was a block away. I didn’t see his face.”
Ben ignored the whole exchange.
“Which is it?” I asked him. “Your name?”
“Zimmerman,” Ben said, without looking up.
“So why did you say it was Lytton?” Fisher said.
Ben’s fingers kept on going tap-tap-tap. “It’s traditional,” Bobbi said. “Lytton has been dead for quite some time. As has Burnell. This is rather an old firm.”
Fisher stared at her. “And who the hell are you?”
Ben looked up at me. “Mr. Fisher was never judged to be worth troubling about, what with…his situation. But you I foresee problems with, Jack. Something might have to be done.”
“Is that a threat? If so, be careful.”
“I’m well aware of your record.”
Fisher looked at me. “What’s he talking about?”
“Jack has shown a certain facility with violence,” Bobbi said. “Didn’t you know?”
My face felt hot. I was finding it hard to understand how come these people knew a lot more than they had any right to about my life. Had Amy told them?
Fisher was still staring at me. “What does she mean?”
“There was an incident,” I said as I remembered that Amy had been at the Zimmermans’ the morning I’d called after waking up in Seattle—when Bobbi handed the phone to her. “I saw suspicious activity one night. Found that the back door of a house had been forced. I went inside.”
“And?”
“People got hurt.”
Suddenly the phone rang, the jangling we’d heard from downstairs. The sound was coming from Zimmerman’s laptop. Ben reached forward, hit a key.
“Coming to collect,” said a woman’s voice from the laptop’s speakers. It sounded like the voice that had called my phone to derail me from confronting Todd Crane a couple days before.
Ben stood and started gathering papers from around the desk. Bobbi came over and picked up a handful of manila folders. They seemed to be in a hurry.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Is Shepherd here yet?” Ben asked, looking up and smiling briefly. I realized he wasn’t looking at me.
“On his way,” said a voice.
I turned to see two men standing in the doorway. One was blond. The other had short red hair. Both were armed this time. I realized that Georj had been right after all. These guys hadn’t come into the alley for him.
That didn’t seem important right then, however, because between them stood a third person. A woman.
My wife.
My head felt cold and my body as if it had turned to air. I couldn’t move. “Amy?”
She didn’t even look at me. It was as if my voice had made no sound. The Zimmermans walked past me.
“Out the back,” Amy said.
The red-haired man raised his gun to point it at me. “Your weapon, please,” the other man said.
“Yeah, right.”
Finally Amy glanced at me. “Do as he says, Mr. Whalen.”
“Amy…what…”
She just reached out, took the gun from my hand, and gave it to the red-haired man. Then she turned and left.
The two men backed out of the room after her and pulled the door shut.
As Fisher and I stared at it, we heard it lock.
chapter
THIRTY-EIGHT
When the phone rang, Todd yanked it out of his pocket so fast it slipped and went skittering across the sidewalk. He crawled after it on hands and knees, people snorting and laughing and not moving out of the way. He was beyond noticing. He’d spent three hours walking the streets. He couldn’t have gone back to his office, dealt with Bianca or the rest of them. He couldn’t possibly go home. He had to do something, and so he’d walked, attempting to lose himself in the press of normal people, trying not to feel once again that the streets were even more crowded than they looked, growing more so as the evening came on, that this feeling was worse than ever before.
“Yes?” he said into the phone.
It was Rose. She gave him the address. It was where it was supposed to be. Todd knew it well. A long time ago, he’d spent many hours in the building, supervising shoots, sitting in a chair with his name stenciled on it, selecting which PA would receive the offer of a quick and expensive dinner somewhere discreet. Since then, more than once, he’d raised the question of selling it. He had not been allowed to. Even though it was never used anymore and had small trees growing out of the roof, apparently it had to be kept. Maybe now he knew why.
As soon as Rose had gone, he called his daughter’s number. He gripped the phone till it nearly broke. Finally the other end picked up.
“Todd.” The little girl’s voice.
“It’s happening,” he said. “Now.”
“Excellent.”
“It’s in—”
“Belltown?”
“How did you know she’d choose where you wanted?”
“Because I’m a clever little girl. They changed the locks. They have something there that belongs to me.”
“Let me talk to my daughter.”
“She’s fine. How else do you think I’m going to get there? You remember what her car looks like, I assume?”
“Of course I—”
“Keep an eye out for it.”
Todd shouted in the street, a hopeless sound. He reeled off the main sidewalk and into an alley between buildings, away from normal people. He knew that the police couldn’t help him now, that this was about that building, and those people, and the things he’d never tried to understand.
He started to run.
When he got to the address, he was appalled to see police cars parked in the street. A tall black guy was hollering as he was manhandled into the back of one of them, barely twenty feet away from the door to the building.
Todd’s head was pounding from the journey, and his lungs were on fire. He looked at his watch—he’d made it here in fifteen minutes. Would the police be moving on in the next twenty? If not…Todd suddenly came to believe he was about to have a heart attack.
He stopped, made himself breathe evenly. Walked across the street and positioned himself under the awning of a gallery that had closed for the night. He watched as the black guy fought the law, and he called upon whichever sleek god looked after admen of a certain age to send the junkie motherfucker a heart attack of his own. Now. Right now.
That god was not listening, however, unless he operated with kindness and through the offices of a cop from the second car, who eventually came over and helped his colleague shove the guy sharply into the backseat. Then the policemen stood around for a while, talking, pointing this way and that. Todd watched them, aware of nothing but these men, knowing dismally that they would take an hour or so to wrap this up and he would never see his daughter alive again.
But then, unbelievably, the cops all got in their cars and drove away. It was over. With five minutes to spare.
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