77 Shadow Street (29 page)

At last she clambered to her feet, still holding the poker even though her inflamed knuckles throbbed. She had broken into a sweat. Damp curls of hair hung in her face. She was breathing hard, and her heart hadn’t beat this fast since she had long ago stopped chasing her second husband around the bedroom.

She turned to her sister for corroboration that what she had seen wasn’t a delusion arising from dementia. Both Edna’s expression and posture confirmed the reality of the incident: Her eyes were hoot-owl wide, mouth formed in a perfect O of unvoiced astonishment.

After a silence, Edna said, “Dear, I haven’t seen you spring into action like that since back in the day when a board-of-directors meeting wasn’t going well and you had to whip them into line.”

Mickey Dime

He took the gun belt off Vernon Klick’s corpse and put it aside on the floor. Someday he would use this pistol in a hit because it was registered to the security service and disappeared with Klick the Prick, which is who they would be looking for when they found it at some future crime scene. A little bit of fun.

Later, Mickey would go into the security-video archives and scrub all the recorded feeds from every camera in the building. He would leave no evidence that his brother, Jerry, had come to visit. No clue about what happened to Vernon Klick. He had covered his trail this way on other occasions, in other cities. He knew how to ensure that the digital video could not be recovered.

He dragged Klick behind him, out of the security room, quickly along the main basement hall to the entrance to the HVAC vault. The corpse was wrapped in a moving blanket, tied with furniture straps. It slid easily on the tiled floor.

Mickey enjoyed the exertion. His trapezius muscles contracted into a solid ridge across his shoulders. His deltoids. His triceps so taut. He was in excellent physical shape. A real hardbody.

When he was at his country cottage, sitting nude in the yard in a summer storm, he liked to feel his muscles, up and down his body. Firmly massage them. Lightly caress them. Slick with rain, as if the storm oiled him. He enjoyed a double pleasure: receiving the caresses and giving them, his hands as thrilled as his body.

He unlocked the door to the HVAC vault with a key that he had taken from Klick. Here were the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems, as well as the hot-water heaters and bank after bank of breaker boxes. He switched on the lights. He dragged the dead man across the threshold. He closed the door.

The vault was actually a room, a fortified concrete box maybe seventy feet wide and almost forty feet front to back. Rows of seven-foot-tall chillers to the left. Two different sizes of industrial boilers to the right, the larger ones serving the four-pipe, fan-coil heating system that allowed separate controls for every apartment and every public space, the smaller ones—still large—that provided hot water to the residents. In and around and above it all was a maze of pipes, valves, pumps, monitoring devices, and other equipment that Mickey couldn’t identify.

Tom Tran kept the vault as clean as a hospital surgery. The labyrinthine machinery purred, whined, and thrummed, which was a kind of symphony to Mickey. A symphony of efficiency.

His late mother had said that human beings were just machines engineered by nature, through evolution. You could be either a good
machine or a bad machine, but whichever you were had nothing to do with morality. The only standard was efficiency. Good machines did their chosen work efficiently, reliably.

Mickey judged himself an
excellent
machine. His chosen work was killing other machines of the human kind. Efficient action excited and satisfied him more than sex. Sex involved other people, and they always disappointed him because they were so much less efficient than he was. They were so easily distracted by such nonsense as affection and tenderness. Sex wasn’t about affection and tenderness. The big pumps in this room, laboring ceaselessly, knew more about sex than most people did.

Sparkle Sykes and her daughter intruded vividly in his thoughts again, as that cocktail waitress had done fifteen years earlier. They wouldn’t leave him alone. They came naked into his mind. He banished them, but they were insistent. They had just better back off. They had better stop teasing him.

Dragging Klick, he proceeded to a clear area in the center of the vault. There, inset in the floor, a thick rubber gasket embraced an iron manhole cover. In a few minutes, when Mickey returned with his brother, he would open the manhole and consign both bodies to a final resting place so deep that the remains would never be found. Even graveyard rats would not descend that far for a two-man banquet.

Bailey Hawks

When Bailey threw open the stairwell door on the second floor and crossed the threshold into the hallway, Dr. Kirby Ignis cried out in surprise. His pleasantly rumpled face, no doubt avuncular even in his youth but already grandfatherly at fifty, was pale and damp with a thin film of sweat. Ordinarily, Ignis had about him an air of wisdom and
unflappable confidence, but now he appeared to be alarmed, as if he had expected someone other than Bailey to come out of the stairwell, someone hostile, which until today was not an expectation that made sense in a place as safe as the Pendleton.

Bailey said, “What is it? What have you seen?”

Dr. Ignis was too perceptive to miss the implication in Bailey’s words. “You’ve seen something, too. Something extraordinary. Was it a man in evening clothes, a butler perhaps, tall and white-haired and splattered with blood?”

“Where did you see him?”

Ignis indicated spots of blood on the carpet runner. “He told me he killed them all—the children, too. What children? What apartment? And then he …” The doctor frowned at the wall beside Bailey’s front door. “Well, I don’t know.… I don’t know where he went then.…”

Silas Kinsley

On the ground floor, Silas turned away from the south elevator, from the threatening voices that echoed behind the sliding doors. They were like mob voices in certain dreams, demanding, threatening yet incoherent, no word clear, the eager chanting of pursuing legions whose motivation he could not fathom but whose grim purpose was his destruction. He recalled awakening earlier in the day and listening to a terrible slithering within the wall behind his bed. These voices in the shaft were nothing like that sound, yet he knew their provenance must be the same. He went to the nearby stairs and hurried down to the basement.

Too old and too in need of his lost Nora to worry about losing his life, Silas was nevertheless fearful for his neighbors, anxious to warn them to evacuate the building. At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the door cautiously, quietly, worried that the hulking monstrosity
Perry Kyser had seen in 1973, the thing that evidently had killed one of his workers, might be waiting there to attack. If Andrew Pendleton could be alive here on this night long after his suicide, then anyone—and anything—might walk this building from any period of its history.

The south corridor appeared deserted, leading past the storage units to the freight elevator at the back of the building, and the only presence in the long west corridor was a man who stepped out of the HVAC room. He closed that door and strode briskly away toward the distant north elevator.

Silas couldn’t see the guy well enough to positively identify him, but he felt pretty sure it was Mr. Mickey Dime. As a member of the homeowners’-association board of directors, Silas knew every resident, though he didn’t know all of them equally well. Dime was largely just a name to him, because the man kept to himself.

When Dime disappeared into the far elevator, Silas left the south stairs and hurried past the superintendent’s apartment. At the security room, he knocked lightly. When no one responded, he rapped somewhat louder. Finally he opened the door and went inside.

The security console wasn’t manned. No one was at the coffeemaker in the kitchenette alcove. The door stood open to the little bathroom, which offered a toilet and sink, and no one was in there, either.

According to security protocols, the guard on duty would leave his post only if called to an emergency elsewhere in the building or for fifteen minutes, at random, twice on the evening and the late-night shifts, to make the rounds of the basement, ground floor, and courtyard. But the earliest such tour never occurred before eight or nine o’clock, still hours from now.

Silas spotted a wet red exclamation point on the floor near one of the console chairs. He knelt to examine it. An inch-long line of blood.
At the end of it, a punctuating dot of the same. So recently spilled that the air had not yet begun to crust it around the edges or lay a film upon it. Also on the floor, in the kneehole under the workstation, lay the guard’s utility belt with holster and pistol.

Silas’s mouth had gone dry. He realized he was breathing through it, rapidly and shallowly and perhaps ever since he stood listening to voices in the elevator shaft. He could hear a drum, the jungle drum of his heart, quick but not yet panicked, thumping in the wild deep darkness of his chest.

Either the smoke detectors in every room and every hallway or the security guard using this computer could trigger a strident fire alarm throughout the building. As a fail-safe precaution, the computer was tied to the emergency generator in case the city power went out before an alarm could be sounded.

Silas didn’t know how to use the computer for that purpose, but he was sure that Tom Tran could do it. He went next door to the superintendent’s apartment and rang the doorbell. He heard the seven-note chimes echoing through those rooms, but though he rang three times, no one answered.

The basement corridor looked no different from the way it had always looked, but it
felt
different. Wrong. The ceiling didn’t sag or the walls bow, but Silas sensed a tremendous burden on the building, as if the storm and the sky beyond the storm and the universe that was the sky were all pressing on the Pendleton, a weight so terrible that the structure would collapse into rubble, the rubble into dust.

Although he was many years removed from that period of his legal practice when he’d specialized in criminal defense, Silas hadn’t lost his intuitive recognition of deception and evil intention. Mr. Dime had not appeared furtive, in fact had proceeded with the air of a man openly going about legitimate business, but Silas couldn’t think of a reason why any resident would ever need to visit the HVAC vault.

Increasingly certain not that time was running out but that some incomprehensible calamity of time was about to befall the Pendleton, Silas needed to return to the ground floor, ask Padmini Bahrati if she knew where Tom Tran was or if she could trigger a fire alarm.

But first he felt compelled to return to the security room and take the guard’s abandoned pistol. He hadn’t been to a shooting range in ten years. He didn’t want to use a gun, but things didn’t always work out the way you preferred. From the utility belt he also took the canister of pepper spray and the flashlight. He stepped into the hallway and hurried to the next door on the left. It was unlocked. He stepped into the HVAC vault.