Beyond the window, darkened buildings dwindled down the long hill for two blocks, perhaps three, but lights glistered in the rain-swept lower regions of the city and on the other storm-lashed hills. The power outrage was confined to the neighborhood serviced by whatever transformer vault or other facility had been struck by lightning.
The initial sting of the wound, like a razor slash, had become a more tolerable throbbing ache.
As she clicked a fresh magazine into each pistol and holstered one weapon, Jane stood in the watery light admitted by the thick glass, gazing out at the metropolis as it shimmered in the wet. She felt as if she were balanced upon a treacherous escarpment between two creations—the one that had been forever and the one that was being born in these times of utopian change. She could not help but think of Edgar Allan Poe again, the melancholy waters of his city in the sea, where “the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.” After the coming tide of change had passed, there would be no rest in the new world, only the peace of submission or death, only the quiet dread that keeps the mouse mute in the presence of the fanged and searching cat. Many in this city had gone to their rest throughout its history, and many more would go, perhaps many of them sooner than they imagined. But right now the worst of the worst remained alive one floor above her, a wrong that needed to be set right.
Carrying a pistol in one hand and a penlight in the other, she made her way among the strewn carcasses to the apartment where the four rayshaws had resided in pitiable privation. Bare mattresses on the floor were their only beds. No kitchen other than a refrigerator and a microwave. A shower stall, a toilet, a sink of the cheapest quality in a building otherwise elegantly appointed. No armchairs or sofas. No television. A simple table and four chairs, where they might have eaten or played the interminable card games with which they passed the time like engines idling until pressure might be applied to their accelerators. No one had lived here. The brain of each of the four men had been a multifoliate splendor that had been ruthlessly defoliated, reduced to but a few leaves of cognition, so that they existed here not as men but as programmed killing machines of flesh and bone.
She took off her sport coat and hung it on one of the game-table chairs and pulled her blood-sodden shirt out of her jeans to examine her left side by the beam of the penlight. No entry hole. The bullet scored her side exactly where a love handle would have been if she’d had love handles. A three- or four-inch gouge, half an inch deep. No arterial bleeding. A steady but acceptable flow from torn capillaries. The heat of the bullet could have cauterized part of the wound. She might lose a pint of blood before she was done. She wasn’t going to die from this. The bigger problem was the risk of infection, but she did not have to think about that until later.
She tucked in her shirt because it applied at least some pressure to the wound, and she put on the sport coat once more.
With his cameras blind, D.J. would likely assume she had been killed. But he might not wait for confirmation until the power came on. He might call someone to come to the eighth floor and check. If she hadn’t already run out of time, she didn’t have much left.
In one corner of the apartment, she set the penlight on the floor so that the beam reflected off a white wall, providing meager but adequate light. She holstered the .45, took a sheath from the Velcro-attachment system on her gun belt, and withdrew a drywall knife from the sheath.
Wilson Faucheur had identified a passageway from the eighth floor to the ninth, allowing her to bypass the vaultlike door to D. J. Michael’s apartment. Using the knife, she cut out a two-foot-wide, four-foot-high slab of drywall and put it on the floor. She picked up the penlight and examined what had been exposed: a four-foot-deep seven-foot-wide chase formed of poured-in-place concrete on three sides, in which were bundled a stack of inflowing water pipes and outflowing drains that served the top two floors, plus a separate bundle of PVC pipes containing electric cables, audio-system fiber-optics, and whatnot.
Four feet of the seven-foot width were reserved for future service pipes, leaving plenty of room for a determined intruder to ascend from the eighth story of the building to the ninth.
After clipping the penlight to her coat, Jane slipped between the wall studs to which the drywall was attached. She turned to face the room that she’d just departed, and she used the cats—horizontal pieces of lumber that connected the wall studs for reinforcement—as ladder rungs to climb up through the chase, behind the wall.
By now she was not hampered by the pain so much as motivated by it, in a contest to prove that with willpower she could override the distress of the body.
Inevitably, cutting the drywall caused some noise, and making her way upward caused less, but she doubted that D. J. Michael would hear anything quieter than a flash-bang grenade. The thick concrete between stories damped most sound, and the storm provided screening noise. Besides, when she arrived at her destination, she would come out into a service closet full of panels of circuit breakers and phone-service electronics, in the corner of the apartment farthest from his main living areas.
If the billionaire, his cameras blinded by the power outage, nevertheless intuited that she survived, he wouldn’t risk leaving by the hidden stairwell for fear of encountering her. He’d hunker down behind his vault door, as supremely confident as he had ever been.
At the thick concrete stratum that served as the ceiling of the eighth story and the floor of the ninth, tributaries of the drain and water pipes disappeared therein. She passed through the open chase into the ninth level, where branch lines of the other utility pipes angled away through the drywall.
Braced between studs and sawing with some difficulty, she used the drywall knife to cut an opening into the service closet. There she played the penlight over the electrical panels and phone-company boxes.
Thank you, Wilson Faucheur.
From a pouch on her gun belt, she withdrew one of the toys she had bought in Reseda, a PatrolEyes body camera used by many police departments, which she’d fixed to a lanyard. She hung it around her neck. The device weighed only about six ounces. With its wide-angle lens, it could capture hours of high-definition footage and quality audio.
She drew one of the Hecklers, switched off and pocketed the penlight, and opened the service-closet door.
The power company could not already have replaced a lightning-struck transformer; but there was light in D. J. Michael’s enormous apartment. Evidently he enjoyed a dedicated generator to provide power in such emergencies.
She went after him.