Parker had the flashlight. He shone it across the room, found the light switch by the opposite door, and crossed to turn it on. Two lamps on side tables made a warm glow, showing walls filled with prints of various kinds of dancers, in performance.
Mackey went to the desk, sat at it, lit a lamp there, and looked in drawers until he found a phone book. He leafed through it, read, and gave the open page a satisfied slap. ‘That’s what we like,’ he said. ‘Twenty-four-hour service.’
Parker and Williams sat in comfortable chairs in front of the desk while Mackey pulled the phone toward himself, dialed a number, waited, and then said, ‘Yeah, you still delivering? Great. The name’s O’Toole, I’m in the Armory Apartments, apartment C-3. I want a pepperoni pizza. Oh, the eight-inch. And a liter of Diet Pepsi, you got that? Great. How long, do you figure? Twenty minutes, that’s perfect.’
He hung up and grinned at them. ‘By the time they work it out, we’re in the stairwell, and this goddam place’s history.’
It was twenty-five minutes. They had the office lights switched off again, and took turns watching through the narrow crack of the open door, and at last they heard the building’s front doorbell ring and heard the sound of the chair as the doorman got to his feet.
The delays were grinding them down. They had to get out of here before it was morning and the world was awake and in motion, but every time they moved they were forced to stop again. Stop and wait. All three of them had nerves jumping, held in check.
Five seconds since the doorbell rang. They stepped out of the office, single file, moving on the balls of their feet. They angled across the dim lobby and through the door into the stairwell.
Where the stairs only went up.
4
Parker said, ‘It’s the goddam security in this place. They don’t want anybody in or out except past that doorman.’
‘Well,’ Mackey said, ‘that’s what people want nowadays, that sense of safety.’
Williams said, ‘Bullshit. There’s no such thing as safety.’
‘You’re right,’ Mackey told him. ‘But they don’t know that.’
Parker said, ‘That can’tbe the only way in or out, because garbage has to go out, and they’re not gonna send it out the front door. And deliveries have to come in.’
Mackey said, ‘It seems that way.’
‘The fire code,’ Williams said. ‘They can’t have a building this big, full of people living here, and only one staircase.’
Parker said, ‘So there has to be service stairs, leading to a service entrance. We go up one flight here, we look in the halls, we find that other way.’
Williams said, ‘What if there’s video cameras in the halls, too?’
‘Can’t be,’ Mackey said. ‘It’s too big a building, and one lone doorman. He can’t look at fifty monitors.’
‘We’ll check it out,’ Parker said, and started up the stairs.
This first flight was double in length, with three landings, to bring them higher than the ceiling of the former parade field next door. When they reached the first door, it had a brass 2 on it.
Stepping past Parker, Williams said, ‘Let me look for cameras.’
They waited, while Williams cautiously pulled the door open and looked out, moving his head from side to side rather than stretch out into the hall. Then he opened it wider, leaned out, looking, and shook his head back at Parker and Mackey. ‘Nothing.’
‘Like I said,’ Mackey reminded them.
They went out to a crossing of hallways, all quietly illuminated. The elevator bank was to their right, a hall extended to their left, and another hall ran both forward and back. A plaque on the wall facing the elevators read RENTAL OFFICE, with a bent arrow to show the office would be at the end of the hall to the front.
Without speaking, they went the other way, because the service stairs, if they existed, would be at the rear of the building. They moved silently, on pale-green carpeting, past apartment doors with identifying numbers and peepholes.
The door at the end of the hall had neither; instead, in small black letters, it said EMERGENCY EXIT. They went through into a barer, more utilitarian stairwell, all concrete and iron. At the bottom was a concrete landing with a broad metal door beside another of those tall narrow windows. The door had a bar across its middle to push it open, but the bar was bright red, with its message in block white letters: WARNING, WHEN DOOR OPENED, ALARM WILL SOUND.
Williams said, ‘Well? Do we push and run?’
Parker shook his head. ‘With no place to go to ground? Look out there, that street’s empty.’
Williams frowned out at the late-night emptiness, the closed stores across the street, this being a narrower street than the one in front. ‘Everywhere we go,’ he said, ‘there’s something to stop us.’
They were all silent a minute, looking out at the empty dark street, then Mackey, sounding reluctant, said, ‘What if I call Brenda?’
Parker said, ‘To come pick us up, you mean.’
‘I don’t like her in these things,’ Mackey told them, ‘but maybe this time we gotta. She drives over, we see the car, go out, let the alarm do what it wants to do, Brenda drives us awayfrom here.’
Williams said, ‘I can’t think of any other way.’
‘Neither can I,’ Mackey said.
