‘A mirror in a bathroom,’ Mackey decided, ‘this far to the back of the building, isn’t gonna wake anybody up. If it comes down to it, I’ll volunteer for the bad luck.’
‘We’ve all got the bad luck already,’ Williams told him. ‘Parker and me, we already broke out once, and here we are again.’
Picking up a hammer and screwdriver, Parker said, ‘We’re running out of time,’ and went back to work.
3
The others were easier to get at, but still hard work. It was almost three in the morning before they’d removed the six blocks they needed to get out of their way; the one just above waist height they’d done first, then the two centered below that, the one below that, and the two below that. Now they had an opening in the wall thirty-two inches high and effectively sixteen inches wide.
‘Shine the light,’ Parker said, and went to one knee in front of the opening. The bottom of it was just about at knee height; Parker reached in with the hammer and rapped a tile just above the next lower concrete block. He had to hit it twice, but then it cracked and fell backward, taking parts of two other tiles with it.
They looked through the new small hole into the darkness beyond, the flash gleaming on something glass, near to them, pebbled to bounce and refract the light. Mackey said, ‘What the hell is that?’
‘A shower stall,’ Parker said. ‘That’s the door.’
‘A nice door,’ Williams said. ‘At last.’
Now that they knew there was nothing except the tile in their way, they quickly hammered it out of there, then clawed the one furring strip in their space with a hammer, weakening it so they could snap it in the middle and break the pieces off at top and bottom. Now they had a new doorway.
Mackey went through first, with the flash. The other two followed, as Mackey opened the shower door and stepped out to the bathroom. He switched on the lights there, and Williams said, ‘I think we oughta turn out the light behind us. No need to attract attention before we have to.’
‘Good,’ Parker said.
They waited while Williams went back to switch off the gym lights, then came back through the new opening to join them in what turned out to be an apartment connected to the dance studio.
‘All these people,’ Mackey said, ‘they build themselves little nests at work, and then don’t use them.’
Williams said, ‘Better for us if they don’t.’
Once out of the bathroom, they limited themselves to the flashlight, moving through the rest of the dance studio area. They were out of the jeweler’s now, but they were still inside the Armory, and the problem of getting out was still the same. The exterior walls on all sides were impregnable, windows too narrow to be useful, and a twenty-four-hour doorman at the only exit. And time running out.
Moving through the dance studio, they went first through the small neat apartment, then the offices, then the studios themselves. They saw the long mirror Brenda had told Mackey about, and Mackey laughed at it: ‘We coulda called attention with thatthing.’
The receptionist’s room at the front was faintly illuminated by streetlights. A mesh barrier was closed over the front window and door; not impossible to get through but impossible to get through immediately and without noise.
As they turned away from that useless exit, Williams said, ‘We gotta get next door, into that lobby.’
Mackey said, ‘Not another wall. Don’t give me another wall.’
‘Maybe there’s a door,’ Parker said.
There was. It took them twenty minutes to find it, but then there it was, a spring-locked door on the far wall of the main office, toward the rear, just in front of the apartment. The door opened inward; Parker pulled it ajar, just enough to look through, and saw the lobby, dim-lit, with elevators nearby to the left and the front entrance far away at the other end of the low-ceilinged space.
Parker stepped back, letting the door shut. ‘That’s the lobby,’ he said. ‘But I can’t see the doorman from here, and you know he’s going to have video monitors.’
‘Lemme look,’ Williams said. ‘I’m pretty good at finding those things.’
He hunched in the doorway, peering through the narrow space, then leaned back, shut the door, and said, ‘Two. One over the doorway this side of the desk, aimed at the elevators, and one over the elevators, aimed at the front.’
Parker said, ‘And the stairwell door, that’s just this side of the elevators.’
‘He’ll see it,’ Williams said, ‘on his monitor.’
Parker shook his head, angry at the obstacles. ‘If we try to just go straight through the front, deal with him along the way
‘
‘He’ll be on the phone,’ Williams said, ‘before we can get to him. We could getto him, but the cops would be on the way.’
Mackey said, ‘We don’t want that kind of footrace.’
‘There has to be a way past him,’ Parker said. ‘If we can get into the stairwell, get down to the parking area, that’snot gonna have security as tough as everything else around here.’
Williams said, ‘He’ll have a monitor shows him the garage.’
‘If we don’t take a car,’ Parker said, ‘if we just walk out, walk along the side wall and out, we won’t give him a reason to get excited. But first we’ve gotta get down there.’
‘Somebody switch on the lights in here,’ Mackey said, ‘I got an idea.’
