“You’re right,” Mackey told him. “But they don’t know that.”
Parker said, “That can’t be 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 away from here.”
Williams said, “I can’t think of any other way.”
“Neither can I,” Mackey said.
Parker looked out. No traffic. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said.
5
Parker hated going back, but there was no choice. Turn around, go up the stairs, the other way along that hall, toward the rental office. Instead of getting out of the maze, turn around and go back into the maze. And less time than ever.
The rental office door was locked, but not seriously. They went through it, and found a suite of offices illuminated by a few pale narrow strips of light. The tall thin windows continued up here, though not in the apartments farther up, and these windows were just above the level of the streetlights outside. It was their glow, coming through the deep-set narrow windows, that made the stripes of light across ceiling and desks and walls.
Mackey sat at the nearest desk, just outside a band of light, and opened drawers until he found the local phone book, then called the place where Brenda was staying. He spoke with the clerk there, then hung up, shook his head, and said, “She’s got a no-disturb until her wake-up call at eight.”
“We need a car,” Parker said. “We need somebody with a car.”
“Shit,” Williams said.
They looked at him. Mackey said, “You got something?”
“I hate to think I do,” Williams said. “I called my sister, you know, I went—”
“No,” Parker said. “We didn’t know.”
“It wasn’t dangerous,” Williams promised him. “I left that beer company place where we were staying, late at night, I walked maybe five blocks, found a phone booth, called from there, came back. Nobody saw me, no sweat.”
Parker said, “The law is listening to your sister’s phone.”
“I know that,” Williams said. “I was just calling to say goodbye, because I gotta get away from here.” He looked around at the rental office. Disgusted, he said, “If I ever get away from here, I mean, then I gotta get away from this town.”
Mackey said, “You can’t call your sister again. She would definitely bring the cops down on us. Not meaning to; they’d just come along.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Williams told him. “I wouldn’t do a thing to mess up her life. But the thing is, when I called her, she told me, there’s this guy we both know, his name is Goody, or everybody calls him Goody, he already been in touch with her, soon as he heard I busted out, said to her she couldn’t help me because of the cops but he could, give me money, whatever, I should call him, he’d help out.”
Mackey said, “This is a good guy? Friend of yours?”
Williams shook his head. “This is a scumbag,” he said. “He’s a dealer, street dealer, works for some big-deal drug guy.”
Parker said, “So he told your sister, have Brandon get in touch with me, I wanna help him, but what he means is, he’ll turn you in.”
“Sure,” Williams said. “I knew that from the first second. I wasn’t gonna call Goody at all. But now, maybe so.”
Mackey said, “If you call this guy, tell him where we are, he just calls the cops, tells them where we are, goes back to bed, goes downtown tomorrow to collect the reward.”
Williams said, “Well, I’m the only local guy in this room, and he’s all I got.”
Parker said, “Then we’ll work with him.”
Williams looked at him. “How?”
“You’ll tell him a story.”
“What story?” Williams spread his hands. “Soon as I tell him to come here, he knows I’m here.”
“You don’t tell him to come here,” Parker said.
Mackey said, “Then what good is he?”
“Just wait,” Parker told him. To Williams, he said, “When we were looking out that back way, across the street, there were stores. There was one of them, second or third in from the corner, a camera shop, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Williams said. “Yeah, I been seeing that all my life, it’s, uh, Nelson’s Lens Shop, that’s what it’s called.”
“Okay.” Parker went over to one of the other desks, saying, “Come on over. Let’s write this down.”
Williams sat at the desk, found a pen and a sheet of letterhead stationery, and Parker said, “You call this Goody. You tell him you’re hiding out in Nelson’s Lens Shop, but you’ve gotta get out of there, you’ve gotta be out in— How fast could he get here, if you woke him up at home?”
“Half an hour.”
“Okay, good. You tell him — it’s almost three-thirty now — you tell him you’ve gotta be out of there by four. You just can’t stay after that, one way or another you’ve gotta get out of there, even if it means just walking down the street. You’ve got two thousand dollars for him, cash money, if he’ll come right now, pick you up, drive you to— What’s a place he’ll believe you want to go to, hide out?”