This flat rooftop was wedged between two taller buildings. The brick building Dart now faced also looked flat-roofed, but a full story higher. A steel ladder fixed to the brick wall led up to the other’s roof. That meant that there had to be roof access between the two buildings.
“Ivy, don’t run! Don’t force me. We can talk!”
Dart paused and glanced over his shoulder. Zeller was through the window and coming toward him, the shotgun cradled in his arms. Talk? Dart wondered, eyeing the weapon. He could barely catch his breath. The trickle down his back was definitely blood; the top of his shirt was warm and damp with it. He hobbled along the wall, away from his pursuer, working the injured ankle. For the first time in his life he didn’t trust Walter Zeller. He’s out to kill me.
“Don’t!” Zeller warned loudly as Dart rounded the corner. “I know what you know,” he cautioned, in a voice that indicated he was running now. “Talk to me!”
Dart found the steel fire door that he had anticipated. The silver duct tape was not anticipated. It had been placed at the level of the handle-blocking the latch open-and told him immediately that Zeller had intended this door as part of a well-planned escape route. Anticipate the unexpected: a Zeller credo. The shouting at him had been for the specific purpose of distracting and stopping Dart before he discovered a way off the roof. Confine the suspect to a specific area-Dart knew the tricks. He hoisted his sluggish arm, forced his unwilling fingers around the handle, and tugged hard on the door. It swung open.
Tearing the tape from the doorjamb, he ducked inside. The door thumped shut and locked behind him.
The enormous room spread out twenty feet below him like something from a science fiction film, and smelled immediately familiar: huge gray machines lying like sleeping beasts, cheek by jowl, their metallic skins glistening in the dull light of half a dozen exit signs, the unmistakable odor of cleaning solvents. Dart was inside Abe’s Commercial Cleaners.
A few steps down was a wooden balcony with offices to the left. Dart stumbled down the stairs, dragging his bad ankle as if it belonged to someone else. Zeller had chosen his route wisely: The heavy machinery would offer good cover. With this idea foremost in mind, Dart hurried to the far staircase, his vision limited by the darkness, and made for the ground floor.
Two successive shotgun blasts ruptured the door he had come through and flung it open as if it were made of paper.
“I-vy …,” the familiar voice called out threateningly. Zeller sounded furious. Dart had witnessed the consequences of this temper enough times to know that the possibility of negotiation had passed. Zeller made statements; he would make one now. The shotgun would do that.
Dart hobbled down the final step and onto the shop floor.
Giant commercial laundering machines made up the first row. Dart cut through this to the next-a long line of dry cleaning machines-dodging fifty-five-gallon drums of cleaning solvents and reminding Dart that this was no place for small weapons fire. He heard Zeller come down the metal staircase to the shop floor. The thought of entering into a firefight with the man seemed absurd, and yet the deeper he moved into this maze of behemoth equipment the more vulnerable he felt-and the more it seemed inevitable. Zeller obviously knew his way around here. Dart did not.
Dart headed for the nearest illuminated exit sign, cutting through a row of enormous dryers. He threw his hip into the panic bar and smacked his head against the unwilling door. Chained shut.
“They chain ’em shut at night, Ivy,” came the casual voice of Zeller from somewhere out on the floor. “You’re shit out of luck.”
Dart checked the padlock-number coded. The speed key wouldn’t do him any good. But there had to be at least one exit out of here-Zeller’s planned escape route. But where? He instinctively moved toward the back, away from Seymour Street. Where? he kept thinking as he moved along the row of dryers installed cheek by jowl. If all the exits are chained … He tried to make sense of this, knowing that Zeller had more than just the rooftop exit at his disposal.
Not the roof … not the doors … He spotted it then-a black shape in the farthest corner of the vast room: a drain.
The faster he ran, the larger the building seemed to him. The back wall was not drawing any closer. Impossibly, the far wall seemed to move away from him.
“Bad choice,” Zeller hollered, his voice echoing in the cavernous structure. “Bad thinking, Ivy.”
Dart glanced around, realizing he had entered a box canyon of sorts, the brick wall to his left, the line of interconnected dryers to his right. The dryers were too sheer, too high to attempt to climb. His only other way was to reach the drain and hope it was Zeller’s exit-or turn around and get back out into the center of the building where he would be less confined. He limped badly the harder he ran-he wasn’t going to reach the drain in time.
Running at a sprint, he looked right: the machines; he looked left, the wall. He looked right again …
And then the obvious hit him.
Out of breath, Dart stopped. He was facing a clothes dryer.
CHAPTER 39
Dart pulled himself up into the clothes dryer, drew his legs in, and curled into the all-too-familiar position. Thrown into a storm of memory, he all but lost track of where one life left off and the other began: suddenly ten years old again, the footsteps avidly pursuing him. He was a driver who had lost hold of the wheel, a pilot who had lost track of the horizon. Bitter fear seared his throat.
The latch mechanism on the commercial machine was far more serious than what he had faced as a child. His fingers studied it quickly, attempting to decipher its secrets. Whereas his family machine had had a friction catch, this behemoth, used for carrying a hundred pounds of wet laundry, closed via a locking tongue operated solely from the outside. To get out, Dart needed to block the tongue from catching. Removing his wallet from his back pocket required an act of gymnastics. A credit card was too thick; a photo, too thin. His fingers located his laminated driver’s license, held it firmly against the metal jamb, and drew the door slowly closed so that the springed latch was held out of its hole by the card. Dart snugged the door into place, firmly shut.
He was swallowed in a darkness and smell whose familiarity overpowered him. Rationally he knew where he was-who he was. But somehow the past won out. In the darkness of the dryer, a film played before his eyes and he saw his drunken mother stumbling toward him. For Dart, there suddenly was no Walter Zeller, only memories of terror. It felt as if his lungs were burning. His throat tickled. He was hiding from the Beast. Nothing, but nothing, would make him give himself away.
Her footsteps grew louder. His heart swelled painfully, choking him, beating as fast as the clanging wheels of a runaway train. His body steamed with sweat. She’ll kill you! a voice inside him warned. This time she’ll kill you.
He’ll kill you! a deeper voice echoed. He has nothing to lose.
White sparks filled his vision like fireflies. The smell of his own fear overpowered the tangy lint-flavored metal that had meant sanctuary. The back of his shirt was damp with his blood and his ankle throbbed. The sound of shoes approaching-dragging on the cement floor-grew closer.
The Beast was upon him.
The person out there was so close Dart could hear the breathing. He felt a fool for sitting awaiting his fate-a passive acceptance, a relinquishing of control. He wanted to do something, not just sit by and await the hell that might come.
“Bad choice, Ivy,” Zeller shouted, bringing him back.
A nearby dryer kicked into action. Then another switched on, closer this time.