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’sgonna 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
