Five seconds too late, I was all about movement. I threw myself at the door, calling Amy’s name.
“Can’t you open it? Pick the lock?” Fisher had gone straight to the bookcase and started pulling books off the shelves.
“It’s padlocked on the other side.”
Gary leafed through another book, dropped it to the floor. “They’re all just law manuals.”
“It’s a lawyer’s office.”
“Lytton works out of here. Zimmerman. Whatever his name really is.”
I kicked the door, uselessly. “So either they’ve got the sense not to keep anything in an obvious place or maybe there’s just nothing to be found.”
“Jesus, Jack. What does it take?”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Two armed guards plus your wife,” Fisher said. “Heavy backup for just some lawyer, don’t you think?”
For either a lawyer or an ex–history professor, and I couldn’t begin to understand what Amy had been doing here. My only chance of finding out lay in catching up with her. I headed into the portion of the room that led to the back of the building. The doors in this section were as thick and heavy and locked as the first one.
“Why replace the doors up here?” Gary insisted. “Why make them so tough? What are they protecting?”
“I don’t give a shit, Gary. I have to get to Amy. Anything else is your problem.”
The window at the back had been secured with a sheet of plywood. I wedged my fingers under the bottom and tugged. It didn’t feel like it was going to move easily. I took a step back and slammed my heel into it. After a couple more kicks, it began to splinter.
Fisher continued to pull books down at random, flicking through them, throwing them away. He was getting more and more frustrated.
Finally a crack split across the bottom third of the wood. I gave it one more kick and then took it in my hands and gave a hard yank inward. The bottom pulled away. Fresh, cold air flooded in, along with the sound of traffic from far below. I hooked my fingers under the higher portion. With a couple tugs, it started to come away, revealing a few square feet of open space.
I stuck my head out the gap. It was totally dark now. We were four stories above the parking lot. A handful of overnighted cars, a chain across the entrance. No light in the attendant’s hut. But right in front of me was the fire escape. I hadn’t liked the look of it before. I did now. “We’re out of here,” I said.
Fisher came over to see. “The hell we are.”
“We can get down to the next level.”
“Yeah—or straight to the parking lot, fast.”
I stuck my head out and shouted. There were a couple of people walking along the street at the end of the lot. Neither of them even glanced up. We were too high up, the lot too deep, couldn’t compete against traffic sounds.
I vaulted onto the sill. Reached out and grabbed the sloping ironwork of the escape. Gave it a push. It moved ponderously. Hanging on to the window frame with my left hand, I lowered my right foot onto the level patch of the metalwork. Gradually moved my weight onto the foot on the platform. It made an unreassuring sound. I lifted my other foot off the sill, then slowly lowered that, too.
“We may not have a lot of time on this,” I said. “Be ready to move fast.”
I went down the stairs, watching the wall brackets. All were rusty. A couple were missing. I disturbed a large bird as I reached the platform below. It took off, and I felt the whole structure move. The window on the next level down was boarded up from the inside.
The floor below was boarded, too, however, and the supports looked even worse down there. So I stayed where I was. The panes in this window were mainly broken, jagged remains of glass studded into the wood frames. I smacked my elbow against the point where the cross-joins met, then again.
The join in the window splintered. I tore off the pieces of frame around it until there was a big enough hole. Went back a couple of steps up the ladder, then swung my foot and kicked. The first impact told me the board was damp and wouldn’t hold for long. A grinding sound said the escape brackets wouldn’t either.
“Get ready!” I shouted. The area of board directly in front of my boot split, breaking inward. I moved down a step, started kicking again. The fire escape above me gave out a loud, grinding sound, and for an instant I felt weightless.
Fisher’s head jerked out of the window above. His face was white. I was now very aware of how far I was above the ground. “Jack…”
“Wait until I get in,” I said. “This isn’t going to take both of us at once.”
I shoved the broken board with my hand, holding the frame to minimize the stress on the brackets. The board started to push away from the wall, and a chunk bent inward, wide enough for me to get my head and an arm in. I knocked away the bigger pieces of glass left around the sill and levered the upper half of my body through.
Couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t get to the flashlight, stuck in my pocket. So I kept shoving against the plywood, pulling myself over the sill until I toppled forward to the floor inside, making ringing contact with an iron radiator under the sill.
I got up quickly and stuck my head back out the hole, yanking more of the board away. “Come on. Now.”
Fisher’s feet emerged from the window above. The escape made a grinding noise again, and this time it was longer, like an old door opening. There was a thunk, too, and a small fragment of metal dropped past my face.
“Shit,” Fisher said. “One of the supports just—”
He took the last three steps in one. I grabbed his hands and started pulling, but he’d given himself a good push with both legs and came through fast enough to knock me over onto my back.
“If we can’t get out of this room, I’m going to kill you,” Fisher said, wiping the blood off his palms.
The flashlight showed a room cluttered with upturned furniture, boxes, and inky shadows, filled up almost to the door. We made our way across quickly, shuffling our feet against obstructions on the floor.
We got to the door and threw our shoulders against it together. Banged them hard and fast and with something approaching panic. In the end I pushed Fisher to one side and forced myself to go at it the right way, ducking low and hitting it where it would make the lock casement splinter fastest. When it started to go, I switched to kicking.
Fisher joined me again, and finally the door blew open and we crashed out onto the landing. We ran down to the second floor, around the landing there.
I was heading straight for the stairs to get down to the next but Fisher grabbed my arm.
“What’s that?” he whispered.
I heard something, too. A sound from below.
I went to the top of the stairs. From there I could make out hard breathing, someone moaning softly.
We had no other way to go. I kept my back to the wall. Fisher followed two steps behind. When I hit the half landing, I shone the light directly below.
There was a man lying on the floor. A dark pool around him said he was bleeding to death. He slowly wrenched his head up as we came down to reach him.
It was Todd Crane.