ground floor windows. Tiny pyramids of glass embedded themselves in Parker’s shin and cheek and the back of his right hand.
He looked up; the wall loomed up featureless and blank, the glass blood-red in the windows on the lower floors, reflecting the sun. The yellow bricks of the wall were tinged with rose color.
The amateur was up there, on a high storey, above the levels where the glass had already been fixed in place.
As Parker looked, a dusky shimmer extruded from high up the wall like the phantom of a slender tongue. It bent, it arched, it broke free of the wall and sliced downward; another heavy sheet of glass, three feet wide and four feet long and half an inch thick, slicing through the air like an invisible sword.
Parker dove through the hole in the building where the amateur had already smashed a window in. Behind him, the second glass torpedo sprayed itself into oblivion, musically.
He was in what would be a basement storage room, the interior walls made of concrete block and painted a dull blue gray. A metal door stood open onto a concrete block corridor.
Parker moved cautiously, the Beretta insignificant in his hand. The corridor led him to the left to gaping holes in the wall where some day the elevators would hang. Opposite, another metal door led him to a stairway, the rough plaster walls painted an unfortunate yellow. He took the stairs up to the first floor.
He was now in what would be a lobby or entrance hall of some kind, a broad, dim, white painted echoing cavern with a low-hung free form ceiling, shaped like a swimming-pool. Light fixtures sprouted all over this ceiling like the faceted eyes of flies.
From here on, every part of the building was incomplete. A metal staircase, without the walls that would enclose it, stood off to the left, leading upward. Parker went that way, sliding his feet noiselessly across a floor that seemed to he, but was not, marble.
Beside the staircase a white bag fell and exploded, puffing whiteness out everywhere. A bag of cement, dropped too early. Parker ran through it, a white mist like a smokescreen in wartime, and started up the stairs. The stairs went forward to a landing, backward to the second floor. Forward again to another landing, backward to the third floor. And so on, and so on. And between the stairway halves was an empty space running down the middle’ of the stairwell, down which, like down some’ madman’s oubliette, the amateur hurled whatever he could get his hands on. Long warped one by-twelve planks went bumping and thumping by, bouncing from metal railing to metal tailing. More cement bags dropped by like torsos to make soft white explosions on the lobby floor. Hammers and wrenches fell by, rattling and clanking.
Parker kept to the far edge of the stairs, and kept moving upward. The windows had been glassed in completely up to the eighth floor. More than two or three floors above that there probably wasn’t even any glass in readiness yet, lying around to be used as weapons. On floor nine, then, or floor ten or floor eleven he would find the amateur.
As he passed the sixth-floor level the rain of stupidity stopped from above. The amateur had been throwing out of fear, out of panic, and now either his panic had abated or he had run out of things to throw.
Why hadn’t he used his gun? Was he out of bullets, or had he lost the gun somewhere, or was he just too panic-struck to remember he had it?
The silence after the crash and clatter seemed to hum with emptiness. Parker moved more slowly, listening, listening through the silence, and wasn’t surprised after a minute to hear the hurried stealthy scuffing of feet on stairs. The amateur was climbing higher.
Parker was in no hurry. After the fifth floor, there were hardly any interior partitions up at all, and he could see there was no other way to go up or down but this stairwell. As long as he was below the amateur, and controlled the stairwell, there was no hurry.
Except the press of darkness. Half the sun had now disappeared below the horizon, and the top half glowered winter-red, tinging glass and plaster and metal with rose and saffron.
The sounds that came from above were like the sounds of mice in walls, but they were made by the amateur creeping up the metal stairs on hands and knees, wincing and grimacing, trying desperately and vainly to be silent. Parker could visualize him from the sounds and moved more openly himself now, not worrying so much about noise.
At the landing between the tenth and eleventh floors, set carefully and symmetrically in the middle of the floor, there was a little mound of money.
Parker stared at it. It was an offering, a sacrifice, like some South Sea Islander giving his virgin daughter to a volcano. The little mound of money left on the landing like an offertory on an altar.
Parker picked it up and counted it. There were forty twenty-dollar bills and eight ten-dollar bills: eight hundred eighty dollars.
He had some of the money!
Parker looked upward. The bastard hadn’t left all the money in the suitcases; he’d taken some of it with him, he had it on his person. And not just this much, just eight hundred eighty dollars. There’d be more of it.
Parker stuffed the sacrifice in his pocket and went more quickly up the stairs. It was now necessary to keep the amateur from falling or jumping, to keep him in a condition where his pockets could be searched.
And all with extreme care. There was only one bullet left in the Beretta, and that only .25 caliber and a very short-barrelled gun.
The amateur might jump, if he was terrified enough. Or fall, because of stupidity.
Noises again, six or seven flights up. Parker, at the fourteenth storey, stopped to listen. Scrapings, thump-ings, heavy sounds. But nothing coming down the stairwell, nothing immediate.
The noises went on and on as Parker kept climbing, and stopped as he was rounding the landing above the eighteenth story. He went two more flights and saw above him what the amateur had done.
A barricade. Strips of metal, bundles of wire, planks of wood, tools of all kinds, even a wheelbarrow, all piled and jumbled together at the head of the stairs to keep him down.
And was the barricade defended? Was this where the amateur would make his last stand?
