“Brother Blood’s penthouse is in the one on the right.”
“You go in the one on the left,” added Taps unnecessarily. “Not so much security.”
Runyan didn’t say anything at all. He wished Taps hadn’t come up with that idea about not leaving the penthouse with the bonds. He desperately wanted it not to mean the obvious but knew he was going to have to find out the hard way. He was five years older than Taps, with shiny black prison-chopped hair and piercing blue eyes.
Grace turned right at the next corner, then right again and stopped. They were now around behind the buildings. Runyan took a deep silent breath, gripped his black nylon stuff bag, and opened his door.
“Twelve minutes,” he told the back of Grace’s head as he stepped out into the street.
Without turning, she said, “I’ll be ready.”
Runyan closed his door without slamming it, went around behind the back of the waiting car to the curb side. Although the street was residential-area deserted, he could hear occasional cars on Wilshire two blocks away.
Louise reached a hand out of her window. When he took it her skin was warm, almost hot, as if she were slightly feverish. She was twenty-nine, the most beautiful woman Runyan had ever known, with shoulder-length black hair and a sensual face.
“Eight years,” Runyan said with a nervous grin. Eight years in the belly of the beast.
“Eight years better,” said Louise. Her wide-set emerald eyes, which seemed to glow with an inner light, caught and held his gaze.
Runyan nodded, suddenly jaunty; his jitters had disappeared when she had spoken. Taps stuck his head and one arm out of the rear window; the manicured nail of his long brown forefinger made tiny ticking noises against the crystal of his watch.
“The power goes off fifteen minutes after Grace goes in. Then you got ninety seconds to get on and off the cable, or—”
“Or I fry,” said Runyan.
“And remember Brother Blood owns the damn building, so when you’ve made the switch—”
“I know what to do,” Runyan said flatly.
Grace drove aimlessly to kill the minutes between went in. Taps leaned his forearms on the back of the front seat, his head behind and between those of the two women in front of him.
“We got a couple minutes for insurance. Swing by the dealer’s an’ make sure Brother Blood is where he’s s’pozed to be.”
They crossed Beverly Glen on Lindbrook, and near Holmby drove by a long black Mercedes limo with a middle-aged black chauffeur leaning against the front fender and smoking a fat brown cigar.
“Yeah!” exclaimed Taps. “We’re on!”
Grace drove the Cougar back the way she had come and stopped on a side street a block from the condos. Taps got out; he wore work clothes and a Dodgers souvenir baseball cap. He carried an electrician’s black metal toolbox.
“You got five minutes,” he warned Grace.
“I be late, shugah,” she drawled, “you fire my ass.”
Taps watched the car drive away. It was all expensive homes here, in the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar range. Pool man on Mondays, wetback Mexican gardeners on Wednesdays, private school for the kids, vacation in Puerto Vallarta with Europe every third year. Well, his turn now.
He walked quickly back to a manhole cover flush with the concrete, took a stubby wrecking bar out from under his windbreaker, inserted the bent end into the socket, and heaved the cover aside. It grated loudly in the still night air. He sat down on the edge, found the ladder with his toes, shot another look around, then went down out of sight. The cover grated back, clanging dully into place. The street was deserted again.
Grace had parked the Cougar in mid-block so that it wasn’t really in front of either high rise. Louise, leaned back against the locked door on her side of the car, watched Grace use the tipped-down rearview mirror to make herself into a whore. Grace caught her eye in the mirror and winked.
“Your man’s gonna be just fine, honey.”
“I thought you didn’t like him,” said Louise coldly.
“Said he was trouble.”
From a handbag big enough to hold an UZI machine gun, Grace took purple three-inch spikes and a bright purple silk scarf. She cinched the scarf tight around her middle, leaving the ends hanging over one hip. Then she jerked the zipper of her shimmery red jumpsuit down almost to her navel.
“I like you and him together, shugah,” she drawled. “You go by your gut feelin’ with a man, you don’t never be wrong.”
She wore no brassiere; her breasts were magnificent, bared almost to the edge of the areolas, but she frowned down at them, then began rolling her nipples between her fingers and thumbs until they stood out boldly against the thin satin material.
Finally she looked over at Louise. “How do I look?”
“Like a two-dollar quickie on the back seat.”
Grace winked again. “You got it, shugah.”
She opened her door and got out. Louise slid over under the wheel. She had always considered herself quite sophisticated; Grace made her feel young and naive as a virgin.
She called, “Good luck.”
Grace turned and gave her a street urchin’s grin and a thumbs-up signal, then cut at an angle across the carefully barbered and lit lawn toward the front entrance of the condo that did not have Brother Blood’s penthouse perched on top of it.
Picking any lock takes a certain amount of time and a great deal of skill. It is not the simple matter that television would have us believe. Nobody ever picked a lock with one pick; at the outset a tension tool — an L-shaped piece of spring steel — must be inserted into the keyhole and turned slightly so that as you raise each pin to its shear line, the tension will keep it from falling back down into the core.
Runyan had spent 2.5 minutes trying to “rake” the lock of the basement rear service entrance of the high rise — the quick and easy way that sometimes works in a matter of seconds — then had gotten serious: another 7.55 minutes with his tension tool and a curved-tip pick before the lock finally yielded.
He made no move to open the door, instead held it just fractionally ajar; he knew that a closed-circuit TV scanning camera was covering the inside of it. He checked the luminous dial of his watch: less than a minute to go.
Emery Samnic was forty-seven years old, had been married to the same woman for twenty-six years, and despite this — or because of it — had his sexual fantasies like any other man. For five nights a week he wore the uniform of a security guard and sat behind the security desk in the high-rise lobby.
It was good duty. Tipped back in his swivel chair, he had only to turn his head to examine the bank of TV-screen monitors set against the back of the security cubicle. The monitors covered the condo’s entrances, doorways, corridors, and the interiors of the elevators. In one a guard walked a hallway; the others showed nothing at all.
A beautiful black woman appeared in the front-entrance monitor to push the night buzzer. It sounded behind Emery’s desk. She waited with a hip thrust out provocatively, her big gaudy handbag tucked under one arm, tapping a three-inch spike against the pavement, a thin brown cigar between her lips.
There was no one else with her, but Emery stood up and loosened the Smith & Wesson .38 police special in his belt holster before pushing the button to release the door catch.
On the screen, the black woman opened the door and disappeared. The real Grace, in living color, simultaneously came across the lobby toward his desk, her heels clop-clopping on the terrazzo, everything moving the way women’s bodies moved in his fantasies. Her expression was go-to-hell, and she obviously wore no bra or panties under the clinging red jumpsuit.
Emery cleared his throat and said, “This isn’t your sort of place, sister.”