In the security room, Vernon Klick divided his attention between only two of the six plasma screens. One was a full-screen view of the short north wing of the west hall on the third floor, outside the north elevator, the other a shot of the north hall on the same floor.
He had watched the senile flatfoot, Logan Spangler, ring the bell at the jackass senator’s apartment, watched him phone someone—probably the kiss-ass superintendent, Tom Tran, who dressed like the guest of honor at a geek convention—and then watched him enter the apartment with a passkey. Vernon had been waiting ever since for Spangler to come out of 3-D, where he was probably stealing old slop-bucket Blandon’s ninety-year-old Scotch, sucking it out of the bottle with a straw.
Vernon Klick was not a patient man. He was thirty years old and on his way to the top, and anyone who delayed his rise to riches and fame, even for so much as five minutes, earned a place on his enemies list. The list was long, filling twelve pages of a lined legal-size tablet. The day was coming when he would have the resources to screw each of those people, one way or another, in such a fashion as to let them know exactly who had paid them back.
If not for the powers that be and their numerous despicable toadies, Vernon would have already gotten to the top. But the game was fixed against guys like him. He had to work three times as hard as those for whom the game was rigged and be ten times more clever in order to achieve the success he deserved. Even to get where he was now, he had needed to push past countless obstacles that were put in his way by the Jews, the Wall Street bankers, the Wall Street bankers who were also Jews, the oil companies, the Republicans, all the New York publishers who conspired to keep truth tellers of exceptional talent out of the marketplace, the scheming Armenians, the state of Israel—which was, no surprise, run by Jews—and not least of all, two stupid high-school guidance counselors who really deserved to be fed alive to wild hogs, even thirteen years after their treachery.
Vernon was so close to attaining his long-held dreams that this would be the next-to-last night he spent as a security guard in the Pendleton, this cesspool of greed and privilege, among all these snotty bitches and smug bastards, not to mention old hags like the Cupp sisters and ancient freaks like Silas Kinsley, who for years had nothing to offer society yet continued to suck up its resources instead of doing everybody a favor and dying. Only two apartments remained that Vernon needed to explore and to photograph, and the residents were out of town through the coming weekend.
For months, Vernon worked first the graveyard shift and then the evening shift, using the security team’s universal key to go anywhere he wished to go in the building. In his large briefcase were a camera and spare memory sticks, a laptop computer, and a pocket recorder on which he could dictate notes as he conducted his explorations and collected his evidence.
Toward the end of his eight hours, he always hacked into the security-camera video archives and deleted the portions of the recordings that showed him walking hallways and entering vacant apartments when he should have been manning the guard desk here in the basement. No one noticed the editing because no one reviewed the boring video unless there had been an incident—a medical emergency, a false fire alarm—during that shift. Besides, Logan Spangler was an old crock who knew even less about computers than the Dalai Lama knew about big-game hunting; the geezer assumed the video archives were immune from tampering simply because they had been designed to be safe. Old Flatfoot Spangler wasn’t prepared for someone as brilliant and skilled and destined for greatness as Vernon Klick.
But until Spangler stopped sucking down Scotch in the idiot senator’s apartment, returned with the precious universal key, put it in the drawer where it was always kept, and went home to his withered hag of a wife and his flea-bitten cat, Vernon had no way to complete his secret work. He stared intently at the plasma screen, watching that north hall, waiting for Spangler to leave 3-D. He muttered, “Come on, come on, you stupid old fart.”
At the farther end of that hallway from the Blandon apartment, Mickey Dime stepped out of 3-F, closing the door behind him. He walked toward the camera, past the thieving senator’s apartment, turned the corner, and boarded the north elevator.
Vernon had no interest in Dime. Weeks earlier, he inspected the man’s apartment and found nothing of interest. Dime didn’t indulge in appalling luxuries other than having an immense bathroom with an illegal high- pressure showerhead that wasted immense quantities of water and a sauna that was likewise an unnecessary drain on the city’s power supply. His furniture was modern, with clean lines, probably expensive but not shamefully so. On the walls were several large ugly paintings, but ugly in a way you had to like them because you looked at them and said,
Dime kept a small collection of fancy women’s panties and other lingerie in a black-leather carryall on a high shelf in his master closet. But there were no photos of him wearing those garments and no reason to think that he did anything particularly strange with them. No doubt he liked to smell them and rub his face in them, as did Vernon with his own somewhat larger collection, but that wasn’t aberrant behavior and didn’t come close to the kind of outrage that he could use for the book he was writing and for the associated website. Probably most men had such collections, which explained why lingerie was always a profitable business, even in the worst of times, because
Where the
In the basement, Mickey Dime stepped out of the elevator. He turned away from the gym. He walked past the two pairs of double doors to the heating-cooling plant, past the security office, past the entrance to the superintendent’s apartment.
He liked the
Although the swimming pool was at the north end of the enormous basement and behind closed doors, the air everywhere on this level had a faint chlorine scent. Others might not notice. Mickey’s senses were highly refined. All six of them.
Mickey’s mother had helped him to refine his sixth sense: the ability to detect almost instantly the degree—and precise points—of physical and emotional vulnerability in others.
He turned left into the corridor that served the twelve-foot-square storage units, one per apartment.
