“I think I’m hitting a two-by-twelve here on the right. I’ll go the other way.”
The other three watched him, and Keegan bent low over his work, chopping six inches from his feet. He opened a hole as big around as a guard’s hat, and then stepped back again.
“I’ll get the flashlight,” Briley said. There were two metal toolkits on the roof out of the way, and Briley went to them and opened the one on the left.
Parker went down on one knee again, picked away the splinters from around the edge of the hole, and when Briley brought him the flashlight he bent low over the hole to shield the light while he looked inside.
The tar had been laid down on tarpaper, which had been tacked to wooden planks. The planks, Parker now saw, had been laid across two-by-twelve joists sixteen inches apart. A ceiling of planks was fastened across the underpart of the joists, closing this space off. There was neither electric wiring nor insulation anywhere to be seen.
Parker switched off the flashlight and got to his feet. “I think we’ve got an extra level to go through.”
“There’s always some damn thing,” Keegan said.
“I can use the workout,” Briley said.
Parker took the ax and took full swings, clearing the tar out of a wider area, bounded by the joists underneath. Keegan went back over to complain to Morris some more, but Briley stood impatiently waiting for Parker to be finished with his turn at the ax.
Briley ended the job at this level, swiping the ax down sideways, as though playing golf, stripping wood away even with the joist-edge on both sides. Then he and Parker pulled all the shards and splinters out of the hole.
Briley said, “That wood’ll be nothing to punch out.”
“We don’t know what’s under it. Hold the light for me.”
From the toolkits Parker got a hand drill and a narrow handsaw. He and Briley knelt across the hole from each other, and while Briley held the flashlight low, Parker drilled a hole in the planking near one of the joists, put the drill to one side, inserted the first few inches of the saw into the hole, and slowly sawed the one plank all the way across. Then Briley got a hammer and chisel, and while Parker held the light, he pried up one edge across the saw-mark. His hands around the edge of the plank, knees braced on the roof, Briley bent the plank upward and back until it cracked with a sound like a pistol shot in a barn.
“Got you, you son of a bitch.”
Grinning, Briley twisted the plank back and forth till it ripped entirely free. Keegan had come back over by now, and the three of them looked down in when Parker shone the light through the new hole. They saw fluffy pinkness, like clouds: insulation. Also a length of old-fashioned metal-shielded electric cable.
Keegan said, “Now where do you suppose the box is?” Electricity was his department.
Parker said, “We’ll have to assume it’s live.”
Briley said, “At least the saw won’t cut through it. I saw a boy do that once with the new wire.”
“It wouldn’t hurt him,” Keegan said. “Your saw handles are wood.”
Briley demonstrated with hand gestures, saying, “He had his left hand on the top of the saw for more pressure.” He grinned and said, “There’s a boy burned for his sins.”
“Kill him?” Keegan sounded really interested.
“No. Threw him about twelve foot.”
Parker began to saw again. After a while he gave the saw to Keegan, and in the silence before Keegan started, the music could be heard, very faintly. But an actual presence now, and not merely a vibration.
As each plank was sawn through, Briley gripped it, bent it up and back, and each one snapped near the opposite joist. When an area had been cleared about a foot square, Parker took a linoleum knife from one of the toolkits and used it to cut through the insulation, slicing across the same line over and over until he got down to the paper backing. He slit that across, reached his gloved fingers under, and ripped the insulation upward. It had been stapled to the joists on both sides, and came up in a series of quick jerks.
And underneath was sheetrock, which should be the ceiling of the room below. The surfaces, from top to bottom, were the tar and gravel on tarpaper on wood laid across joists set on wooden planks laid across more joists going in the opposite direction, against the bottom of which was the sheetrock. With the joists, vertical two- by-twelve beams, going one way in the top air space and the other way in the lower insulated airspace, that meant there would be no opening they could make larger than fifteen inches square.
It was twelve-thirty when Parker took the linoleum knife and began to score the sheetrock along the edge of one joist; they’d been at this twenty minutes. They’d opened an area larger than they’d be able to use, and the electric cable was just outside the section they were working on.
Parker scored the sheetrock three times down the same line, and the fourth time the knife broke through over the whole length. Briley was holding the flashlight again now; Parker dropped the knife on the sheetrock and got to his feet, saying to Keegan, “I did the left side.”
Keegan got down on his knees beside the hole. “Getting colder,” he commented, though it wasn’t, and went to work on the opposite side. When that was cut through, he scored a line bridging the cuts at one end, drew the knife down along that line again, and when he did it a third time, the whole section of sheetrock sagged downward.
Parker had been standing across from Keegan, watching. Now he said, “We want to lift it up, if we can.”
Keegan looked up, squinting into darkness after looking into the flashlight’s illumination. “Why not just kick it through?”
“Noise.”
“Who’d hear anything with that racket? That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?” Every time they removed a layer of roof, the music and the crowd noises got louder. Now it was at about the level of a busy country bar on Saturday night, as heard from the driveway.
