Something began scratching at the underside of the trapdoor, as if testing the wood, probing it. The scratching stopped. Something hit the trapdoor, hard. It hit it again, just as solidly. A man’s voice swore, faint, muffled by the thick wood.
They’d taken a two-by-four from downstairs, used it to ram the trap door. That it was bolted shut told them someone was on the fifth floor.
My mind flashed ahead. They’d think of my tools, scattered in the kitchen. They’d choose the electric circular saw; I had nothing else that could cut through thick wood. They’d know it would take them a long time to cut through the floor, even wielding a circular saw, but they were figuring they had at least four or five hours until sunrise.
I had those hours, too.
I rolled off the trapdoor and quietly stood up. I had the knife, the baseball bat handle, and the flashlight.
I opened the slit window facing the spit of land. I could yell out, wave the flashlight beam, and hope someone on Thompson Avenue would hear. The window, though, was narrow, and with the first three floors lit up by my work lights, a flashlight beaming from the fifth floor might be hard to spot. It would be better if I went up to the roof. I could wave the flashlight up there like a beacon.
Footfalls pounded the circular stairs below. They were running down to the kitchen for my tools.
I moved the ladder under the trapdoor to the roof. Once outside, I’d pull the ladder up behind me and use it to wedge the trapdoor shut. Then, in my pea coat and knit hat, I could dance myself crazy to stay warm as I shouted and waved my flashlight signal into the sky. Sooner or later, some late-night denizen would focus foggy eyes on me long enough to yell for the cops.
The metal stairs rang again. They were charging back up to the fourth floor. I had plenty of time. They’d soon learn it would take hours to cut through the planking to get to the fifth floor. Then they’d think they’d have to do it again, to get to the roof. Except that was impossible. The roof timbers were over a foot thick, impossible to cut with a circular saw. I would be absolutely safe, up on the roof.
I climbed the first rungs of the ladder. Halfway up, my fingers grazed the heavy braided pull rope for tugging the roof door closed. I climbed five more rungs and reached for the first of the twin side bolts. I’d greased them in October, the last time I’d been up on the roof. The first bolt slid back as if it had been buttered. The second slide bolt was tougher but loosened on the third tug.
They started pounding beneath the floor below. For a moment, I paused, confused, as metal thudded against wood, clanging every third or fourth blow. I guessed they were swinging my crowbar at the heads of the metal bolts that fastened the hinges through the oak. Let them swing. The old carriage bolts were blacksmith hardened; a week’s worth of beating wouldn’t crack them loose.
Twin side bolts undone, I reached up and pushed against the trapdoor. It didn’t move.
Down below, the pounding stopped.
They were thinking. They’d have to use that circular saw. I had plenty of time to work the roof door loose.
The pounding started again.
I moved up another rung, got better leverage, pushed up with flat palms. The trapdoor did not budge. Bile worked up the back of my throat: The roof was new, thick and well insulated. The kind of roof designed to keep heat trapped in the turret, where it couldn’t melt away the twenty-four inches of snow that had fallen since December.
Furious at my cockiness, at my stupidity, I ducked my head, lunged up with my shoulder. Once, twice, and again. The trapdoor didn’t flex an inch. It was frozen to my new roof under a winter’s worth of snow and ice.
The pounding stopped.
I gave the roof door a last push. Nothing. I started down the ladder.
The slit window facing Thompson Avenue would have to do. Yell and wave my flashlight; somebody would notice. If not now, then later, when the lizards and the city hall staffers passed by on their way to work. The floor was thick; there was time. I jumped off the ladder while I was still two rungs up. No need to worry about noise.
Excited laughter came from down below. Laugh, you bastards, I thought as I moved to the window.
I pushed the window all the way open. And stopped.
New spears of light lay on the snow down below, farther out from those cast by the first three floors. They were from the fourth floor, just below me-but these weren’t white from incandescent bulbs. These were orange…and flickering.
I looked down at the floor, not believing. Faint threads of orange light danced in the gap around the trapdoor. I dropped to my knees, pressed my nose against the crack.
Fire.
I jumped up and ran to close the window that would turn the turret into a gigantic flue, sucking the flames up toward me. The Kovacs brothers could stay down on the lower floors and wait in safety. For me to come to them.
They laughed, down below, crazed men, excited by the spectacle.
Die of smoke. Die of burns. Die of gunshots or of beatings.
Don’t die suffocating, waiting to choose.
I grabbed the knife, slid back the locking bolt. I tugged open the trapdoor-and jumped.
Forty
A bone in my ankle snapped as I hit the floor, crumpling me forward, to my knees, screaming from the pain.
They laughed, dropped the flaming papers they’d been waving to make the smoke and the fire, and slugged the back of my head, to drop me, unconscious, like a swatted fly.
A wave of glacier water shocked me awake, running frozen between the tape on my mouth and the tape over my eyes, into my nose and my ear. I tried to roll to my side, to sneeze it away, to breathe, but they’d taped my arms and my ankles, too. I couldn’t get the momentum to roll over. I fought panic, focused on breathing through my nose. Air came, but it was ragged and exaggeratedly slow, like gasps from a dying man.
The toe of a shoe nudged at the side of my head. “You awake?” The voice was flat, midwestern.
It was good that he was talking. I made a noise into the tape across my mouth.
“What’s that?” a different voice asked. “You hear that, Butch? Piss-head grunted. Think he expects us to understand?”
“Sure as shit, Sundance. Grunted like a pig.”
Butch and Sundance. They were playing with cowboy names from an old movie. At least it wasn’t Starsky and Hutch. I couldn’t have stood it if it was Starsky and Hutch.
Butch giggled a noise. Then the toe came again, from the direction of his voice. Not hard. Not yet.
“We don’t speak pig,” Sundance said. “We’re going to take the tape off your mouth, so you can answer real polite. Got it?”
I made frightened noises into the tape a second before he ripped at my mouth. It wasn’t a reach.
“Where’s the money?” Butch said.
“There’s a file-”
The toe kicked the front of my ear, snapping my head sideways. “The money, asshole.” The tip of the boot came back, to play with the pain.
I made myself see Maris, trapped inside her Rambling house as the wind howled outside and she fought to not cry.
“Indiana-” I gasped.
He kicked me again, not as bad as the first time.
“We seen the file,” Butch said.
“Then you saw it all. He put the money in a bank in Indiana.”
“How’d he get it?”
“She came to him scared, probably because she found Severs poking around. She said she knew something about a bank robbery, maybe even said something about having the money. Aggert convinced her to appoint him executor of her will, in case something happened. That gave him access to everything she owned. Then he killed her.”