19 Purchase Street (49 page)

He started the hoist engine.

Pressed the “rise” button on the control lever. The two sections of the hoist responded, worked like a flexing upper arm and forearm socketed by elbow the way they spread and elevated at the same time. In seconds Chapin was thirty-five feet up.

It seemed from that height that he was practically right above the wall of Number 19. He saw its photoelectric beam alarm running from relay to relay. Forty feet straight ahead was the groundkeeper's shed and the two story garage that it was attached to. Separate, larger, twenty feet off to the left of the garage was the main house, the rear of it, a number of rooms lighted at that moment. What lay between the wall and all else were the gardens and lawns. Veined with fuming sulfuric acid, the lovely blinding gardens and lawns, Chapin thought. It was too dark to make out any of the pathways or beds.

The lower section of the hoist was already angled sharply upward. Chapin reduced the angle somewhat, thus increasing the reach of that section. He used the control lever to rotate the entire hoist a full quarter-turn, brought it around so now he was truly above the wall, in fact, within its perimeter.

One final maneuver.

Most critical.

He lowered the upper arm, angled it downward, took the bucket and himself with it. How far down he could take it depended on clearance of the beam-alarm on the wall. It was difficult to tell the exact distance between the arm and the beam. Chapin pressed in and quickly let up on the lowering button several times, moving little by little. Until he felt he couldn't risk another inch.

He was still quite a ways from the ground and no telling precisely how far from the wall. He had studied Sweet's diagram of the pressure alarm grid. Located seven feet from the wall was a safe four foot wide strip and running off from that a mazelike series of safe lanes. But even Sweet had noted those measurements could be a foot or two incorrect in any direction.

Chapin looked to the ground. It was dark, nothing to go by. He looked to the wall. The black mass of it seemed less and then more than seven feet from him. Diagrams and measurements were useless now, he realized. He thought of using his whisper-com but, then, what good would it do to let Gainer know he was in trouble. It was his own decision. Go or no go.

He wanted a cigarette, a Dewars on the rocks, his cock in some part of a hooker.

He legged over the side of the bucket. Kept hold of the edge. Lowered himself. Hung on for a few seconds, because they might be his last.

Let go.

It was more of a drop than his knees expected. Needle pain shot from his heels to rump when he landed. He almost tumbled over, just did manage to remain upright. He waited, thought perhaps it might take a moment for the sprinklers to start spraying the fuming sulfuric acid.

Warm night bugs were sounding off.

A fragment of music came from a television set.

Chapin took a slow, deep-as-possible breath. By mere chance he was on some safe ground. Now, he had no choice but to find more of it.

The dark structure of the shed. Chapin guessed twenty feet to it. He had only what he remembered of Sweet's diagram to go by.

Four steps ahead. Each time he put his weight down on his forward foot he pictured the sod giving under him, pressing on the ungiving plate of the alarm.

Three steps to the left.

His shins met with low foliage of some sort. Flowers. He knelt, felt the petals. They were mums, a bed of mums. It was what he needed to determine the safeground pattern of the grid. Four cautious steps to the right, then turn right again for three, left for six.

The corner of the shed.

He'd made it.

He glanced up to that second floor above the garage. The alarm monitoring room and the quarters for the security men. Venetian blinds were drawn down on every window. If six men were on duty, as Sweet had said, six more were probably hanging around up there. Practically over his head.

His next step crunched gravel.

His next avoided that by keeping closer to the side of the shed. He made his way to the barnlike doors of it, oppositely hinged doors that could be swung open left and right. They were kept closed by a common hasp and a metal pin on a chain. After all, it was only a groundkeeper's shed. Chapin opened the door, slipped inside, pulled the door closed behind him.

Total darkness.

Chapin clicked on his flashlight that was not much larger than a roll of Life Savers but gave off a strong directional beam. A simple twist of its front collar changed its beam to a wide angle flood. He played the light around the shed.

One windowless room, twenty feet by twenty feet. Concrete floor. It smelled of fertilizers, insecticides and mildew. There was a large tractor mower and a couple of wheelbarrows. All sorts of gardening equipment hung neatly in place from the aged bare wood studs of the walls. Only the wall that adjoined the garage was Sheetrocked.

Along that wall was a workbench. Chapin went to it, cleared an area and climbed up, kneeled on it. He measured with the nine and a half inch spread of his hand, thumb to little finger, to determine where he should make the cut.

A thump from somewhere above made him pause. He heard heavy footsteps, the dribble of someone urinating, a toilet flush. That close.

The knife he used on the three-quarter inch thick Sheetrock was sharp enough to cut hair. He sliced out a foot square section, exposing pipes running vertically, two of copper, one of steel. The copper pipes were for water, Chapin knew. The other, the steel pipe, was the one he wanted. It was three inches in diameter.

He started on it. With a wire saw. A thirty inch length of steel wire coated with diamond particles and with a ring on each end. So sharp merely running one's fingers lightly along it would draw blood. He wound the wire once around the pipe, inserted his forefingers through the rings and kept tension on the wire. Pulled the wire saw one way then the other, just slightly. It made a faint gritting sound as it bit easily into the pipe.

Within five minutes Chapin had a section of the pipe cut away. It contained four sets of vinyl-covered electrical circuits. Red, green, blue, yellow. The circuits of the four alarms: the wall, the rear grounds, the roof of the main house and the upper hallway of the north wing. They connected individually into the console in the monitoring room above.

Chapin stripped the vinyl outer coating from the red circuit, exposing a black covered wire and a white covered wire. He separated the two, placed a device about the size and shape of a container of Four X condoms—Chapin smiled at the thought—between them. It had a clamp along one side that Chapin led the white wire through.

If successful, the device would neutralize the circuit by intercepting it, cause it to loop itself and function apparently as though it were connected all the way to the alarm.

Chapin abruptly squeezed the clamp shut. Its sharp metal teeth pierced and made contact with the enclosed live wire.

In the room above on the monitoring console the red light that corresponded with that circuit blinked once. The security man on duty at the console thought nothing of it. Birds and squirrels, a falling branch sometimes caused such brief blinks.

Chapin, working methodically, repeated the process with the blue circuit.

Crunch of gravel.

Someone just outside.

Chapin cut his light and let himself down from the workbench. Noiselessly he moved to the tractor mower, squatted behind it.

The security man on a routine round had noticed the metal pin removed from the hasp on the door to the shed. It was his acquired nature to be suspicious of even such a minor thing. He stepped inside the shed, shined his flashlight around. It cut through the dark above Chapin's head, ran along the assortment of gardening implements, across the wall above the workbench, passed over the hole in it that Chapin had cut. Came back to the hole. The security man walked over to examine it closer.

That put him on the other side of the tractor mower, six feet from Chapin. With the remnants of the stripped-off plastic and the section of cut away pipe and the exposed wires, the security man did not know exactly what he was looking at, obviously tampering of some sort. He had his back to Chapin.

Chapin stood.

The security man was about to turn and go to notify someone when Chapin took two swift, silent steps to him. In practically the same motion, Chapin looped the wire saw over the man's head and yanked at the loops on the ends of it.

The man's chin went up reflexively.

His back arched and he went up on his toes.

His arms tried to bring his hands up but before they could, the diamond-coated wire sliced into him. Cut easily through thyroid cartilage, severed the trachea, the esophagus and the common carotid artery.

The only sounds that came from the man were a sort of vacuum noise, like a croak from a frog followed by a slight plosive puff as his lungs let go air.

Chapin released the wire saw, eased the dead man down the front of him to the floor. He had been ready to kill tonight, but hadn't thought it would be necessary. It was the first time for him and it had been a gruesome way, although swift. A saving thing was how impersonal it had been because of the dark. At least he hadn't seen his victim's face.

Chapin decided it was best he settle for as much as he'd accomplished there, get out before someone else came looking. He found an aluminum stepladder, took it out with him. He closed the door, inserted the metal pin into the hasp, went around the shed to its more concealed side. Set up the ladder there and climbed it to gain the roof of the shed.

Now he used his whisper-com.

Reported that he had managed to neutralize the red and the blue circuits, the alarms on the perimeter wall and the roof of the main house. The other alarms were still hot.

Gainer heard.

Gainer was busy with the slides.

Six slides of twelve feet long by two feet wide, and two curved sections. They were molded identically so that they stacked compactly one in the other. They'd been easy to bring along, covered by a tarpaulin on the bed of the hoist truck.

Gainer had tried eight places before he located the slides in Brooklyn on Cleremont Avenue near the old navy yard. At a company called Elite Products. They were part of an order all packed and ready for shipment to a regular customer in Tucson. However, Gainer had gotten across how extremely important they were to him by coming up with five hundred extra around the deal, and Elite had broken them out.

They were swimming pool slides.

The ordinary backyard sort. Not the metal supports, just the plastic slide part. An eighth-inch of fiberglass laminated on both sides by a sixteenth of an inch of PVC, polyvinyl chloride. The slides had raised and rounded edges down each side, and their sliding surface was coated slick with polyurethane, which made them particularly slippery when wet.

Gainer unloaded the slides, laid three of them separately end to end where the ground was most level. He pried open the gallon can of PVC solvent cement he'd bought at the hardware store in Bedford. Using a wide paintbrush he slathered the viscous substance on the ends of two sections of slide. The underside of one, the upperside of the other. Immediately, the special chemical ingredients in the cement, the tetrahydrofuran and the cyclohexanone, caused the surfaces of the PVC to rise in temperature to the point where its chains of polymer molecules were moving about as a solution.

Gainer joined the cement-covered ends of the two sections, overlapped them six inches. Once the surfaces came into contact it was impossible to pull them apart; the adhesive power of the cement was that strong that quickly. Within minutes the solvent base of the cement was completely evaporated, the surfaces of the PVC coiled and hardened, leaving their molecular structure merged. It was as though they had been originally formed into a single piece. The shearing stress of the bonded joint was five thousand pounds per square inch. An elephant could walk on it.

Meanwhile, Vinny folded in the bucket and arms of the hoist-truck and moved the truck out of the way. Drove the gasoline tanker forward into position close alongside the steel mesh-wire fench. With a pair of leveraged two-handed cutters he snipped out a sizable opening in the fence.

Gainer had, by then, cemented three sections of slide, made them into a thirty-six foot length. That much of a length weighed only one hundred and sixty-three pounds but was unwieldy. He lifted one end, propped it up on the side of the tanker. Vinny went up to the top of the tanker and Gainer went through the hole in the fence, climbed to the top of Number 19's wall. He was standing right in the wide-eyeing beam of the photovoltaic alarm that Chapin had neutralized. He peered down from the wall to the darkness of the grounds, knew, according to what Chapin had said, that the subsurface pressure alarm grid was still on. He had to admire Chapin for having dared it. He looked toward the shed, thirty-some feet away where Chapin was supposed to be now. Couldn't make him out in the darkness.

After a moment the directional beam of Chapin's flashlight blinked twice, providing Gainer with a fix.

Vinny pulled the slide up to himself and fed it from the top of the tanker across to Gainer on the wall. Gainer in turn fed it hand-overhand across the wider area to Chapin. He felt when Chapin took hold of it. Chapin laid it on the roof of the shed. Gainer used his whispercom, told Chapin to take two more feet of it if he could. Chapin did, and now Gainer's end was resting precisely on the wall. Vinny handed another section of slide up to him. Gainer attached it to complete the span from shed to wall to tanker. Forty-eight feet overall.

Gainer went up the slide.

Carried along the two curved sections and cement. He didn't allow the idea of falling off to enter his mind, pretended he was just going up a ramp at Madison Square Garden. Step after step, his sneakers never entirely lost contract with the polyurethaned surface. When he reached the roof of the shed Chapin unloaded him.

No time to waste.

They each made several more trips down and back up the slide, bringing what they would need. Then they set to work on creating the final span. They joined two sections of slide. Lifted that twenty-four foot length and held it straight up. Moved it to the edge of the shed's roof, placed it down and wedged their feet against it to keep it from back-slipping. Aimed it, lowered it slowly and finally felt the end of it out there in the dark come down and settle upon the slant of the slate roof of the north wing of the main house. They tested it, gingerly at first, found that it wobbled. A slight shift to the right made it steady.