them were weights with pulleys. Mackey went over to look at how they were held in place, and said to Parker, ‘This has got to be a pretty good wall, if it takes this. Just screws into studs, with all this weight and people pulling on it, somebody’d yank it right out.’
‘I’m guessing concrete block,’ Williams said.
Parker said, ‘There’s one way to find out.’ Crossing to the far left corner, where the dance studio wall met the rear of the building, he swung the claw of the hammer into the white-painted Sheetrock, twisted, and pulled away a long vertical powdery V of the panel. He slashed at it again, this time crosswise, and a second zigzag piece broke free. Behind it was one-by-three lath, attached to gray concrete block.
Parker nodded at it. ‘That’s what we have to go through,’ he said. ‘Before morning.’
2
The only way to attack this wall was to go after the mortar between the blocks of concrete. To do that, they had to wedge a flat-head screwdriver against the mortar, as though it were a chisel, and hit it with the hammer. They worked two abreast, one hitting a vertical line, the other the horizontal line below it to its left, hitting the mortar leftward, to spray the wall beside them.
It went so slowly it didn’t look at first as though anything was happening at all. Gray dust and rubble formed on the black floor, but how much had they removed? A quarter of an inch? Half an inch? Williams took over from Parker, and Mackey from Williams, and then Parker again, and they were no more than two inches into the mortar below and beside that one block.
Mackey was resting again, watching the other two at work, when he said, ‘A concrete block’s eight inches thick. Those screwdriver blades are four inches long.’
They stopped to look at him. Williams said, ‘We don’t accomplish anything if we only go halfway.’
‘Let me see what I can find up front,’ Mackey said, and took the flashlight and left.
Parker said, ‘We might as well keep going.’
To hit the mortar at an angle shortened the reach of the screwdrivers even more. They were three inches deep into the wall, and nearly at the end of the screwdrivers’ reach, when Mackey came back with two lengths of chrome-covered metal. They were parts of the frame of one of the display cases that he’d broken off by bending them backward and forward, leaving jagged ends. They were L-shaped, less than an inch on a side.
‘Let me straighten these,’ Mackey said. Taking one of the hammers, he laid first one, then the other, length of metal on iron weights taken from the exercise equipment and hammered the right angle out of them. Finished with that, he bent each length over on itself and hammered the crease. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we can get in there with the V of the bend, scrape it back and forth. Slower than the screwdrivers, but it should break up the mortar.’
It did. They used small towels from the gym closet to protect their hands, and scraped back and forth into the narrow slits they’d already made with the screwdrivers, pulling the crumbled mortar out, two working at a time, the third resting.
They’d been at it just over an hour when Parker, at the horizontal line, suddenly stopped and said, ‘It’s through. Mackey, give me something to mark the metal.’
Mackey gave him a screwdriver, and Parker scored the metal where it met the concrete block. ‘We know that’s how far to go. We don’t want to push too hard. We need to know what’s beyond this.’
It was only a few more minutes before both slits appeared to be through to the far side of the block, where they could feel an empty space back there. They started on the other two sides of the same block, the left and the top, and it went faster now that they knew how to do it. It was tiring work, and it felt hot in the gym, even with the thermostat off and the hall door open, but they kept working, and in just under an hour the block suddenly lurched downward, shutting the slit beneath it, widening the space above.
The problem now was how to get a purchase on the block to pull it out. Parker tried wedging the hammer claw into the top space to pry it out, but the block wouldn’t lever, it just dug hard against the block below it. They had to come at it from the sides, pounding one hammer’s claw into the space with the other hammer, prying it out, feeling the block move an eighth of an inch, then wedging the hammer in on the other side to do it again.
This part went even more slowly, or at least it seemed that way. It was very hard work, to force the hammer in, force the block to move, a small and grudging move every time. When it was out an inch, protruding from the wall around it, Williams crouched beneath the loose block to push up on it while Parker and Mackey pressed the heels of their hands against the exposed sides and tried to lever it out.
But it was too soon, they couldn’t get enough purchase on it. They had to go back to the hammers, taking turns, beating the claw into the space, prying out, the block not seeming to move at all. Finally, when it was two inches out, twice as far as the first time, they tried again, doing it the same way, and this time the block suddenly jolted out another inch, and then another.
Williams got out of the way, and Parker and Mackey juked the block out by hand, back and forth, back and forth, hearing it scrape along on the mortar rubble, pulverizing it more. They got it almost all the way out and it hung there, angled downward, the top edge against the bottom edge of the block above.
Parker said, ‘We’ll both pull out, bottom corners.’
They wrenched, and the block jumped out of the space to fall hard onto the floor. Williams picked it up and carried it out of the way while Mackey shone the flashlight into the oblong hole. ‘Sheetrock,’ he said, seeing it an inch beyond the end of the concrete block wall, one furring strip a vertical line of wood near the right edge.
Mackey scraped the Sheetrock with the jagged edge of the metal bar. ‘I think there’s something else behind it. Hold on, let me try. Parker, take the flashlight, will you?’
Parker held the light on the rectangle of Sheetrock and Mackey worked the bar back and forth, scraping away Sheetrock, trying not to simply puncture it. ‘Yeah, there’s something.’ He prodded some more, breaking strips of Sheetrock away, and they looked through at another surface beyond the Sheetrock, dull white.
‘Tile,’ Parker said. ‘It’s a tile wall.’
Mackey reached in to pull a strip of the Sheetrock away. He held it in both hands and they looked at the face of it, which was pale green. ‘It’s waterproofed,’ Mackey said. ‘We found a bathroom.’
Williams said, ‘We won’t know if there’s a mirror on it until we break it.’
