Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel (3 page)

Keegan got down on his knees beside the hole. “Getting colder,” he commented, though it wasn’t, and went to work on the opposite side. When that was cut through, he scored a line bridging the cuts at one end, drew the knife down along that line again, and when he did it a third time, the whole section of sheetrock sagged downward.

Parker had been standing across from Keegan, watching. Now he said, “We want to lift it up, if we can.”

Keegan looked up, squinting into darkness after looking into the flashlight’s illumination. “Why not just kick it through?”

“Noise.”

“Who’d hear anything with that racket? That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?” Every time they removed a layer of roof, the music and the crowd noises got louder. Now it was at about the level of a busy country bar on Saturday night, as heard from the driveway.

“We don’t know if there’s a room under this one,” Parker said. “Or if anybody’s in it. They’d hear something that heavy hit the floor.”

“No problem, anyway,” Briley said, squatting down beside the hole. “Here, hold the flash, Keegan.”

Keegan took the flashlight, and Briley took the linoleum knife. He chipped away a little at the stationary part of the end-line, so there’d be room for his fingers, then
put the linoleum knife to one side, reached down to grasp the end of the sagging section of the sheetrock, and pulled it slowly upward. It curved, but wouldn’t split.

Parker stood beside him and took one corner in both hands. “Get a better grip.”

“Thanks.” Briley, still holding the sheetrock, got to his feet and then shifted his hands to the other corner. “When you’re ready.”

They pulled upward, and the sheetrock cracked along the fourth side with a flat sound like two pool balls hitting. They leaned it back at an angle against the edge of the cleared section, like an open trapdoor.

Morris called, “Something happening down below.”

All three went over to look. They were about fifty feet from the ground, the equivalent of a six-story building. There were windows in the top two stories, but below that the wall was blank. Black metal doors led out to the fire escape on the top two landings. By day, the wall was made of grimy gray-tan bricks; by night, it was simply darkness, with an illuminated blacktop alley at the bottom. Down there, near the bottom of the fire escape, a pair of large black metal doors led inside somewhere; all equipment for the shows put on here came through the wrought-iron gates at the sidewalk end of the alley, down across the blacktop and through those metal doors. At the far end, the alley was stopped by a blank brick wall. The opposite side of the alley was the rear wall of the Strand, a shut-down movie theater. The Strand and the Civic Auditorium stood back to back at opposite ends of a long block, all of which would come down, starting Monday. A sixty-eight-story office building covering the whole block was due to go up, starting next year.

Down below now, the wrought-iron gates over by
the sidewalk were standing half-open, and someone was moving around with flashlights. Two of them, with two flashlights.

“Now how the hell did they get onto us?” Keegan said. He didn’t sound surprised.

“They’re not onto us,” Morris said. He was still sitting on the wall, half-twisted around, with his shoulder braced against the curving top rail of the fire escape as he looked down.

“They’re cops, though,” Briley said.

“Looking for groupies,” Morris said.

Keegan turned an exasperated frown on Morris. Things he didn’t understand he liked even less than things he did understand. “Groupies? What the hell’s a groupie?”

“Rock-and-roll fan. Mostly girls.”

Briley laughed and said, “Looking for autographs?”

“Looking to get laid.”

A flashlight beam arched upward in their direction, and they all leaned backward. They waited a few seconds, and then Morris took a look and said, “They’re all done.”

“Just so they don’t come up the fire escape,” Keegan said.

Parker looked over the edge, and the flashlights were moving back toward the wrought-iron gates.

Morris said, “Just an easy check. Now they’ll put a man outside the gates, so nobody climbs over.”

“By God,” said Keegan irritably, “what if they see something on the Strand door?”

They wouldn’t, because there was nothing to see, but nobody bothered to answer him.

They had gotten here through the Strand. At four-thirty
this afternoon they’d driven up to the entrance of the Strand in a gray-and-white Union Electric Company truck, all four of them wearing gray one-piece coveralls with the company name in white on the back. It had been simple to get through the lobby doors of the Strand, carrying three toolkits, the third containing sandwiches and a Thermos container of coffee. Briley and Keegan and Morris had played blackjack to pass the time, betting the expected proceeds from this job, but Parker had slept for a while, walked around the dusty-smelling empty theater for a while, and sat for a while in darkness in the manager’s office, looking out at the city. He’d watched the crowds form for the early show, all the bright colors after the gray centuries of Reason, and then the traffic. Then he’d left the office to walk some more.

He had a woman, named Claire, that he found himself thinking about while waiting. She was somewhere in the Northeast now, buying a house; the thought of having a woman who owned a house was a strange one. He’d been married once, to a woman named Lynn, but they’d lived in hotels; his life, and she’d adapted to it. She was dead now; she’d been hard, but pressure had come to her, and she’d broken. The new one, Claire, was not hard, but Parker thought she wouldn’t break.

Morris said, “There they go,” and the wrought-iron gates closed, and there was no longer any light down there except the one yellow globe suspended from a metal pipe jutting out of the Civic Auditorium wall. “I doubt they’ll be back.”

Parker said, “Watch. Just in case.”

“Oh, I will.”

Parker and Briley and Keegan went back to the hole they’d made and squatted down on their haunches,
and Briley shone the flashlight down into the room below.

So far, the map they’d bought had been absolutely right. Right about the Strand, the alley, the fire escape, the roof. And now, right about the room. They’d chopped where the map said to chop, and it had led them to an empty office. “Public Relations,” the map had told them; “already moved to temporary offices in another building.”

Sometimes jobs were done this way, from a map—a package, really, like a do-it-yourself radio kit—bought from a middleman who had bought it from someone on the inside, a non-professional who simply laid out the particulars of the case. Years before, most of John Dillinger’s jobs had been done that way, bought as a packet from a middleman, and it was still sometimes the best way to get set up.

The office below was just as the map had described: medium size, two desks, four chairs, a short brown Naugahyde sofa, several gray-metal filing cabinets. One of the desks, empty except for a green blotter, black telephone and one wrinkled legal-sized envelope, was directly beneath the hole.

“Hold this,” Briley said. Parker took the flashlight from him, and Briley put both hands on one of the lower-level joists and dropped down into the room. He swung forward once, backward once, and dropped two feet to the desk top. He grinned up toward the flashlight and dropped lithely down to the gray carpet.

Behind each of the desks was a swivel chair; beside each desk was a straight armless wooden chair. Briley now picked up the nearest wooden chair and put it on top of the desk. “Join me.”

Keegan went next, more awkwardly than Briley, having trouble at first finding his footing on the chair. Briley held the chair steady, but didn’t touch Keegan, who
got his balance, released the joist over his head, held the chair back instead, and stepped down onto the desk. He sat down on the desk, put his feet over the side, and stood up on the floor, dusting white sheetrock powder from the seat of his pants.

Parker called to Morris, “Going down now.”

“Have a good time.”

Parker dropped the flashlight to Briley, who lit his way. He dropped to the chair, jumped to the desk, then to the floor.

“This is the worst time,” Keegan said. “Right now. What would we do if that door opened and a lot of cops came in?”

Neither of the other two said anything. Keegan had lost over four hundred dollars he didn’t have yet in the blackjack game: two hundred fifty to Briley, the rest to Morris. It had made him more pessimistic and irritable than usual.

This room had a window, but it opened on a narrow airshaft that came up the middle of the building. The top of the airshaft had been their landmark on the roof. Since the door was solid wood, there was no reason not to turn the light on. Briley went over and flicked the wall switch by the door, and put away the flashlight. He said, “Now we make our stairway. To paradise, huh?”

“Listen to that music,” Keegan said peevishly. “What the hell ever happened to jazz?”

“It’s still there,” Briley said, going over to the filing cabinets, “in the same gin mills it always was. When did jazz ever play a joint like this?”

“Jazz at the Phil,” Keegan said. “I used to have all those records, before that time I got sent up.”

“Jazz at the Phil,” Briley said scornfully. “Fake.”
He opened a file drawer. “Empty! There’s a break.”

“What do you mean, fake? All the greats were on
Jazz at the Phil.”

“Okay,” Briley said. “Give us a hand here, will you?”

Keegan went over to help him move the filing cabinet. “I don’t know how you can call them a fake. My God! Lester Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Hodges—”

“I guess you’re right,” Briley said, grinning. “I must of been thinking of something else.”

Parker had taken the chair down off the desk, and now stood at one end of it. Briley and Keegan put the filing cabinet down, picked up the other end of the desk, and the three of them moved it over till it was no longer directly beneath the hole. Then Briley and Keegan moved the filing cabinet to abut against the edge of the desk closest to the hole, while Parker put the chair back up on top of the desk again. They kept moving furniture, and when they were done they had a complicated stairway leading up toward the hole, and facing the doorway. A man coming in the doorway would have two or three strides into the room, then a foot-high step to an upended metal wastebasket, then a step a foot and a half high to the desk, another foot and a half up to the wooden chair, a foot to the top of three filing cabinets lined up in a row, and finally a foot and a half to the second wooden chair, on top of the filing cabinets. This put one six and a half feet above the floor, where the top of the roof came to about waist-level; an easy climb. This kind of stairway was better in two ways than any kind of rope ladder or anything of that sort they might have brought with them; first, because it meant one less thing they had to carry to the job, and second,
because it could be gone up faster than any kind of portable ladder.

Briley now went up their staircase and out onto the roof, and Parker went partway up after him. Briley handed down the toolkits one at a time to Parker, who handed them down to Keegan. Briley said something to Morris, waved, and came back down into the room.

Keegan had already opened the other toolkit. The three masks he removed from it were made of black cotton and covered the entire head, with openings for eyes and mouth. The three handguns were all Smith & Wesson Model .39’s, a 9mm Luger automatic with an eight-shot clip. There were also three small blue packets: blue plastic laundry bags, costing a nickel each from a laundromat vending machine.

They put on the masks and checked their guns and stowed the little laundry-bag packages in their pockets. Then Parker nodded to Briley, who flicked off the light switch and in darkness opened the door.

There was some light in the hall outside, not much. But much more noise. Whenever the music ended, the crowd noise increased to a kind of ecstatic scream, fading as the music started up again, but gradually building through the next number till music and crowd seemed about equally matched by the end of the tune, when there would be another concerted scream.

It was five past one; they’d been working fifty-five minutes since Parker first swung the ax into the roof.

Parker was the first into the hall, looking to the right and left. Doors on both sides of the hall in both directions, mostly closed, a few standing open. No lights burning up at this level at all. Far down to the right a stairwell, with light shining up, reflecting off the pale
green corridor walls, giving light to see by down here.

Parker turned right, and the other two followed, Briley turning the doorknob to be sure the lock wasn’t on, then shutting the door behind them. Keegan carried the one toolkit they still needed.

The flooring was some sort of composition, similar to linoleum; the sneakers they wore made no sounds against it. They walked slowly, leaning slightly forward, their right hands holding the automatics ahead of them and out away from their bodies.

If Morris saw trouble coming now, they were past the point where they could retrace their steps. Morris’s job would be to come in after them and let them know their primary exit was blocked; they had a second exit route planned for, and a third.

The noise was coming up the stairwell almost undiluted by distance. Standing at the top, looking over the rail and down at six flights of brightly lit empty silent metal stairs, hearing the rush of sound coming up there and yet not seeing any living person, you could begin to stop hearing the music as music, but simply as noise. Then it became the workings of some gigantic machine in a pit in the earth, and men who went down into it were chewed and ground and mangled.

“Jesus,” Keegan said. Looking out the eyeholes of the mask, his eyes looked frightened; not by the job they were here to do, but by the noise that was supposed to cover them while they did it.

Parker started down the stairs. Briley came second, and Keegan third.

The walls were plaster, and painted pale green. The stairs had a landing and a U-turn halfway down every flight. At the top floor the stairs had been open, but at the
next level down there was a wall, with a green metal fire door. A darker green than the walls. The door was closed.