“Jack—”
“Shut up, Gary. I’m nearly there.”
The sound of chaos got closer. “He!” someone was bellowing breathlessly. “He, there! He the man!”
L.T.’s friend had stopped running. He was twenty feet away, pointing straight at me. The pursuing cop was slowing, hand on his gun, figuring this new twist. His partner was heading our way, too, now. I could hear sirens in the distance.
“He,” the tall guy said again, jabbing his finger in my direction. The closest cop was approaching him warily, but casting looks in my direction. “He pay me, he tell me be there. I ain’t sell no shit to no one.”
The second cop had made the sidewalk now. While his partner grabbed the tall guy’s arm, he walked toward Gary and me.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said loudly. “You got any idea what this guy is talking about?”
“Sorry, no,” I said, looking at him with an honest citizen’s unthinking deference. There was a faint click at my hands as the tumblers finally fell. I pushed the door open behind me as if it were a twice-daily occurrence. “Is there a problem?”
The cop looked at me a beat longer, then lost interest and went to help his colleague subdue the tall guy, who was kicking and shouting and raising hell.
I stepped into the building, Fisher right behind.
chapter
THIRTY-SEVEN
After the door closed, we were in pitch darkness. I hadn’t wanted to fumble for a switch with the cops right there.
“Christ,” Fisher said. “That was…”
“…fine.” I said. “Keep your voice down.”
I pulled out the cheap flashlight I’d bought in the convenience store. I pointed it back toward the door, ran the beam along the wall at shoulder height. Saw a bank of switches. Flicked them one by one. Nothing happened. Pointed the light down at the floor instead. There was nothing lying there.
“No power,” Fisher said.
“But no mail or junk either. Someone picks up.”
We were standing in a wide, high-ceilinged corridor, peeling paper on the walls and an uneven floor. Once it had been tiled in a simple, businesslike way. Now many of the tiles were broken or missing. I made my way along it, treading carefully. The building smelled damp and fusty and old. Ten feet away a door hung ajar slightly, on the right. It opened into a long, narrow kitchen, the ser vice area of the coffee shop that had been the last occupant of the front part of the building. In the glow thrown by the lamp, it looked like the proprietors had left work one evening and decided never to come back. Broken cups, rusty machinery, the scent of rats’ passing, and beneath all that the smell of Seattle itself, old coffee and fog. This building was dead. It was like being in the hold of a shipwreck, hundreds of feet under the sea.
The two doors farther along the corridor were both open onto a wide, dark area cluttered with large pieces of display furniture, dating back to when the place had been a department store, moved out from the walls and left stranded in the space like more tall, abandoned ships.
I came back out and found a door in the back wall, too. I gave this a shake. It didn’t move at all. This must be the one we’d seen in the parking lot. There was another door around the back of the staircase. I opened it, looked down. Pitch-black and cold, with narrow wooden stairs leading to a basement.
I went back and headed up the stairs, climbed quietly to the next floor, shifting my weight along the banister until I was sure the treads of the staircase were sound. Fisher followed. When I got up to the second level, I gestured to keep him still and listened.
No sound of conversation or movement, no creaking floorboards.
All the doors on this level were shut and locked. The same on the next. Someone had gone to some trouble to make sure fire precautions had been followed, closing the doors to stop a blaze flooding from room to room. On the third level, I chose the door at the front of the building and quietly jacked the lock.
The other side was a wide, empty space, the full width of the building’s street frontage, faint lines of light around boarded-in windows. A flick around with the lamp revealed a few pieces of furniture, extension cords running the perimeter and up and down the walls, and a collection of rolls of mildewed backdrop tilted into one corner. Presumably this was the area that had been used as a studio. I tried to imagine a much younger Amy perched in one of those chairs, cradling a coffee, watching a shoot. I couldn’t.
Fisher had stayed in the doorway, his face a paler patch in the gloom. I pointed at the ceiling.
“Try them again.”
He called. We could hear a phone ring on the floor above, the kind that sounds like someone hammering frenetically on a tiny bell, a dusty, echoing sound. It wasn’t answered, and no machine clicked in.
The tension in my stomach and shoulders was starting to fade back, and I felt a sense of focus that had been lost to me for over a year.
“Are you okay?” Fisher whispered. His face was pinched and nervous, and he was looking at me strangely.
Not at my face, but down at my right hand. I realized that the tension had not faded at all, merely spread so it was throughout my entire body.
And also that, without any recollection of doing so, I had taken out my gun.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I walked past him to the end of the corridor, crooked my head to look up the next flight of stairs, directing the little light obliquely off the side wall. Held my hand up again to keep Fisher back.
I went halfway up, stepping carefully. Stopped and listened. I could hear nothing except the faint sounds of traffic outside the building, a drip of water somewhere. I gestured for Fisher to follow and made it up the rest of the way. I waited where I was until he stood next to me on the top level, at the mouth of the staircase.
This landing was arranged in the same way as the lower floors with a long return, doors to spaces at the front and side areas of the building. I switched the flashlight off. Darkness. The long arm on our left was as featureless as the void of space.
But beneath the door to the room at the front of the building, there was a faint glow. Fisher saw it, too.
I stepped quietly over to the door, cupped the end of the light in my hand, and turned it back on. Close up, you could see that this door was different from the ones on the lower levels. Thicker, newer, reinforced. A padlock the size of my fist hung off the handle.
I turned the light back off, slipped it into my pocket. I felt my right thumb flicking the safety off my gun and decided not to interfere. Reached for the door handle and pushed the door inward a breath, to give the mechanism a chance to turn soundlessly.
It was heavy, but the doorknob turned all the way.
Holding it steady, I moved to the right and gestured with my head for Fisher to come behind me. Then I pulled the door open. It moved slowly and silently.
I stopped when the gap was less than two inches wide.
The space on the other side was dimly lit by a lamp on the corner of what looked like a desk, one of the old low lamps with a folded green shade. I could make out a narrow strip of wall beyond, a bookcase lined floor to ceiling with leather spines. Now that the door was cracked open I could hear a faint skittering sound.
At first I thought it might be a rat, or rats, pattering across a wooden floor within. Then I recognized it. It was a sound I had made myself from time to time, though not lately.
You don’t take a breath before entering a room. You just do it.
I stepped right into a space that was, except for the desk and shelves, completely empty. The dividing walls on the floor had been removed, creating one very large, L-shaped area. Bare floorboards. No chairs. The windows boarded over. Just that single lamp.