The Intruders (40 page)
“I said to meet inside,” I reminded him.
“Threw us out,” L.T. answered.
I offered him a cigarette, a folded fifty lying on top of the pack. He took the note, along with two cigarettes, winked at his friend.
“So?”
“Nobody come out,” he said. “They still inside.”
“You want to earn another fifty? Each?”
“Shit,” L.T. said, which I took as assent.
“Either of you holding?” They shook their heads. “No, really.” After a beat, both nodded. “You don’t want to be,” I said. “Stash it somewhere. Now.”
They touched hands with the lightness of magicians, and then the tall one trotted around the corner to hide their drugs.
“Okay,” I said when he got back. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” I pointed down the street. “I want one of you on each of those corners.”
“And do what?”
“Just stand in the middle of the sidewalk. Eyefuck anyone who looks like they’re heading your way, but don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Okay? I just want five minutes without too many people passing that building.”
“What this shit about?” L.T. asked.
“None of your business.” I gave him the money. “When you can’t see us anymore, you can go.”
L.T. took the cash, nodded at Fisher. “This dude ever say anything?”
“He’s choosy. Only talks to other narcotics cops. And he’s seen where you hide your shit. Understand?”
L.T. made the money disappear. “Don’t you want to know about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Little girl I told you about, man.”
“Not really,” I said. “Why?”
“See her again, last night. She come back later, go right up to the door. Keep pressing a buzzer. But there ain’t nobody answer. And then I see her later watching outside some new bar, a couple blocks downtown. Way after little-girl bedtime, you know?”
“Great,” I said. “Now go stand where I told you to.”
Gary and I waited as the two guys crossed the street. L.T. took the corner nearest us. His friend loped down to the other end of the block. Within a couple of minutes, most pedestrians were electing to cross to the other side rather than walk close to either of them.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I went across the street and straight up to the door of the building, Gary following right behind. “Get out your phone,” I said. “Make it look like you’re placing a call. Glance up at the building once in a while.”
I got out my key ring. I took it slow, trying to feel confident that the combination of a largely empty sidewalk behind me and a colleague who looked like he was trying to get hold of someone in the building to achieve legitimate entry, would make me invisible for long enough.
“Christ,” Fisher said after a couple of minutes. “There’s a police car.”
“Where?”
“Down at the intersection.”
“Keep an eye on it.”
I kept moving the tool. Trying just to feel the metal inside the lock, the balance of tensions, the ways the hidden components did and did not want to move. It wasn’t happening. I switched to a more flexible tool.
“Fuck—he’s gone,” Fisher said, looking up the street the other way.
“The police?”
“No—your friend. L.T. Just vanished, didn’t even see him go.”
“What are the cops doing now?”
“They’ve pulled over. Where that other guy is.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“He’s running this way.”
“Oh, crap,” I said. I glanced around and saw L.T.’s friend pounding up the sidewalk. One cop was running after him, the other stood at the car, on the radio.
“Stupid fucker kept L.T.’s drugs,” I said. “You can’t trust any one.”
“Jack, he’s heading toward us.”
“I know that. Put your back to the street.”
I turned to the door again, closed my eyes. I heard the sound of the foot pursuit, the cop shouting at the running suspect, but tried to concentrate only on the feel of the thin piece of metal in my hands.
“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.
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.
A man was sitting behind the desk, his face bathed in the pale light of a laptop screen. He looked up mildly. I stared at him.
“Ben?” I said.
Fisher stopped in his tracks. Ben Zimmerman looked at him, then at me.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “You were right.”
“Who?” I said. “Was right? About what?”
“I did warn you,” said another voice. I turned to see Bobbi Zimmerman standing by the other wall.
“First time she met you,” Ben said, to me this time. “Bobbi said you were trouble. I should listen more often.”
“Yes, you should,” his wife said.
Ben went back to typing. I realized I was still pointing my gun at him. I lowered my arm. It hadn’t seemed to unsettle him much. He looked different from any way I’d seen him in Birch Crossing. Instead of the usual battered khakis and sweater, he was wearing a dark suit with a shirt and tie, and his entire posture was altered. Gone was the stooped air of benign neglect. He didn’t look like a history professor anymore, and I knew immediately where I’d seen his likeness.
“Jack,” Fisher said. “How do you know this guy?”
“He’s my neighbor,” I said. There were blotches of color on Fisher’s cheeks, and the lines around his eyes were more pronounced than ever. “His name is Ben Zimmerman.”
“No,” Fisher said. He sounded like a petulant child. “It’s Ben Lytton. He’s one of the Cranfield lawyers. He’s the one who came to our office in Chicago.”
I pulled out the photos that had been there since Fisher gave them to me, only a couple days before and five minutes’ walk away. “So how come you couldn’t tell he was the man you photographed with Amy?”
Fisher looked at the photo, back at Ben. He seemed baffled. “I was a block away. I didn’t see his face.”
Ben ignored the whole exchange.
“Which is it?” I asked him. “Your name?”
“Zimmerman,” Ben said, without looking up.
“So why did you say it was Lytton?” Fisher said.
Ben’s fingers kept on going tap-tap-tap. “It’s traditional,” Bobbi said. “Lytton has been dead for quite some time. As has Burnell. This is rather an old firm.”
Fisher stared at her. “And who the hell are you?”
Ben looked up at me. “Mr. Fisher was never judged to be worth troubling about, what with…his situation. But you I foresee problems with, Jack. Something might have to be done.”
“Is that a threat? If so, be careful.”
“I’m well aware of your record.”
Fisher looked at me. “What’s he talking about?”