The larger crowbars he looked over carefully, but in the end he decided they would be too large and conspicuous, and he limited himself to the little one.
Besides, it was cheaper.
He followed that up with a sturdy rechargeable flashlight, after hesitating briefly over a pump-charged version.
The hand-pump light couldn’t give out on him, but the rechargeable was brighter and easier to hold.
While waiting at the door he’d thought about guns, and decided against buying one. He wasn’t sure whether Hechinger’s even carried them, anyway. He’d never owned one, hadn’t fired one since high school back in Massachusetts, and had no idea what the local laws were about permits, concealed weapons, discharging firearms, whatever.
Besides, guns were too dangerous. He might shoot too soon or too late, he might miss what he aimed at, he might get himself killed or arrested. The crowbar was better.
All the same, he added a good-quality four-inch-blade jackknife to his collection, as back-up for the crowbar.
He tried to think what else he might need, but his brain didn’t want to work. As he hefted the crowbar his knees seemed to weaken, and his shins trembled slightly. The solid reality of the wrecking tool in his hand seemed to bring home, more than all his plans or the weird late-night visitations, that he was involved in something real, something serious, something dangerous.
He forced a deep breath down, held it for a second, and then marched up to the check-out with his supplies.
The yawning clerk barely glanced at him as she rang up the bar, light, and knife. He handed her his MasterCard, and she gave the slip of plastic more attention than she had its owner.
“You want a bag for that?” she asked, handing back the card.
“Don’t bother,” he said, slipping the jackknife into one hip pocket, his wallet into the other. He took the receipt from her, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, then picked up the bar and light and left.
Back in the car he dropped the crowbar and flashlight on the passenger seat and started the engine.
Was there anything else he needed?
A sudden revulsion at further delay made him thrust that thought aside. He needed to get at it; he needed to find out what was going on. He released the brake and rolled.
Getting from the parking lot back out onto 355, and into the rush-hour traffic, took a few minutes; then he crept along past the IBM plant, surrounded by commuters, until he reached the turn for 124.
Traffic was lighter there, and thinned out even more once he was past the entrance ramps for I-270.
When he turned onto Clopper Road he was going against the traffic. He sailed past the turn for the MVA, past the townhouses and the new construction, to the left turn onto Barrett.
The morning sun slanted down through the trees, flickering across his windshield, as he drove through the state park; it poured down steadily over the lake as he crossed the dam back into Diamond Park.
He almost missed the turn he wanted. His apartment, the whole Bedford Mills complex, was on Barrett, so his habits were all set for that, but that wasn’t where he was going this time. Instead he took the right fork onto Willow Street.
Willow Street was empty, and the emptiness was suddenly oppressive; he turned on the radio and got Harris In The Morning on WCXR, introducing another forty-five minute block of non-stop classic rock. He turned left onto Orchard Heights Road to the sound of Pat Benatar.
The trees vanished on the right, replaced by bare dirt and weathered two-by-fours behind chain-link fence. He pulled over, slowing gradually to a stop, in front of the unfinished centerpiece building of the Orchard Heights Office Park.
He set the brake and turned off the engine, and the sound of the radio died away abruptly, leaving him in near-silence. The hum of distant traffic was barely audible, and a bird was singing somewhere.
He sat for a moment, listening, and looking over the site.
The builder had gotten the steel frame up, and the floors, and had had the brick facade about half-done when the money ran out. The south wall rose up above the three-storey frame in an unsupported brick gable, a pink brick triangle stabbing at the sky; the west wall, facing him, was three stories high at the south end, only one at the north, the steel frame behind it thrusting up on the left like the bare flesh revealed by an off-the-shoulder gown.
The east wall, the far side, was invisible. The north end wasn’t there at all.
The whole thing looked crooked, and he wondered why the builder had done it that way, instead of building the walls up evenly on all four sides.
Then he shrugged; it didn’t matter. He got out of the car, the crowbar in hand.
5.
The fence was no problem. It wasn’t a permanent structure, with poles set into the ground, but just a temporary affair strung hurriedly around the property to discourage vandals, the uprights set in old wheel-rims filled with concrete. At one point it passed over a large pile of dirt left by the bulldozers, with a single post set atop the hump, leaving openings on either side where the ground fell away more steeply than the fencing.
Squeezing through one of these spaces got powdery dirt on the legs of his good brown pants, but presented no real obstacle, any more than the No Trespassing signs did.
Once inside he stood up again, bar in his right hand and flashlight in his left, and looked the ground over.
There were footsteps in the dirt at the north end of the unfinished building, hundreds of footsteps, a broad track left when the inhabitants of the Bedford Mills Apartments had marched up into the light and headed back through the little patch of woods that separated the two complexes.
He followed the trail around, and saw where a section of the fence had been torn down and trampled on. He could have kept his pants clean if he had bothered to go around.
He looked through the trees at the apartment parking lot. He had never seen it from this angle, but it was still thoroughly familiar. Through the leaves he could see the windows of his own apartment, gleaming in the morning light.
The lot looked rather full for this time of the morning, he thought, and he tightened his grip on the light.
A momentary urge to just walk on through the trees and go home came to him, but he fought it down. He had other things he wanted to do before he dared go home.
He forced himself to turn away and to look into the open north end of the unfinished building.
The eastern wall was mostly open, and bright sunlight poured warmly in across a sand-strewn expanse of bare plywood flooring. A dark opening gaped in the center, a hundred feet away, with a crude railing of knocked-together two-by-fours leading down into it. Above it, a matching opening in the ceiling let in more light, but no stairway or railing led to the upper levels.
That hole in the floor was the basement, of course. That was what he had come to look at.
After all, why had all those people gone down there and hidden, instead of just going to other buildings, or sheltering behind the fragmentary brick walls?
A car buzzed by without stopping, out on Orchard Heights Road.
He stepped in onto the plywood, his feet thumping heavily.
The stairs leading down into the basement were in place, heavy red-painted metal with black non-skid treads. The rough railing went only as far as the landing.
He turned on his flashlight and shone it down into the opening, revealing loose dirt, concrete floor, and scraps of lumber.
Cautiously, he descended, one step at a time, shining the light around as he went.