An Echo of Death (2 page)
Authors: Mark Richard Zubro
I glanced around the room. Where was Scott? Fear chilled every bone in my spine as I realized the killer might still be in the penthouse.
I whirled around trying to sense any alien smell, sound, or sight. Nothing else in this room seemed out of place, but with the mess from the workmen, it was hard to tell. I tiptoed noiselessly toward the hall down which Scott had disappeared. Five feet before I turned the corner, I eased up against the wall. I listened intently, but even the heaviest footfall would be muffled by the inches thick carpet. I debated which way to sneak through the warren of rooms in the penthouse, but I didn't know from which direction an enemy might appear. Most of all, I wanted to find Scott and make sure he was all right. I drew a silent breath and swung out toward the hallway to the bedroom and almost banged into Scott.
“What the hell's going on?” he asked. “I heard you calling. Glen's not around.”
For a comment I pointed across the room.
Scott looked. “What happened?” he said. “Is he ⦔
“Glen's dead,” I whispered. “The killers could still be in here.”
“We've got to call for help,” he whispered back.
I pushed Scott up against the wall next to me. “We've got to be careful,” I said.
That's when the knocking started on the front door.
Scott turned toward the noise, then glanced back at the body and said, “I'll get the door.”
“No,” I whispered. “How could anybody get up here? Only you and I have keys for this stop on the elevator.”
“Howard has a key,” Scott said.
“He wasn't at his post, and he wouldn't give out his key to a stranger. He'd have called up here first.”
“Who's there?” Scott called out.
The knocking changed to shouts of “Open up! Police!” Then I heard thuds, as if someone was trying to break open the door.
“We're getting out of here!” I said.
“It's the police,” Scott said. “We can't run!” He began to move toward the entryway. I stopped him at the far end of the hall, from which we could see the front door.
“Something is not right,” I said. I grabbed his arm and began pulling him along. “Let's go out the back way. We can talk to the cops when we get downstairs. This is too spooky. Come on!”
Someone started banging repeatedly on the door. Then somebody shouted, “Hold it!” A few moments of silence followed. The doorknob slowly began to turn.
“Let's go!” I said.
Reluctantly, he began to follow.
Suddenly the front door crashed open. Men carrying machine guns and sawed-off shotguns leaped through the opening. That was more firepower than your ordinary beat cop or police detective in Chicago carried.
I shoved Scott out of the line of fire and leaped after him. “Not cops! Run!” I yelled.
Galvanized into action, we tore through the 8,000 square feet of twists and turns of the penthouse.
The elevators rose in the middle. You walked out of them facing east and proceeded to enter the complex down a hallway to a living room. Off this to the right through louvered doors was a den through which you could get to a library, all of which faced north. To the left of the living room was the kitchen area that faced east.
You could make a circuit three-quarters of the way around the outer rim of the penthouse. The bedroom with its matching bathrooms was completely cut off from the circuit and covered most of the western wall looking toward the prairies of Illinois and beyond.
The exterior rooms tended to be long and expansive, with great views of the city or lake. One guest bedroom beyond the den afforded a fantastic panorama of city and sky. The other rooms all branched off an interior corridor.
We tore through the kitchen to the interior hallway. The rehabbers had been busy here, removing one wall to help make the television room and a small bedroom into one large suite for all the electronic paraphernalia I liked to have around. Scott tripped over a stack of two-by-fours. I tumbled into him.
He cried out. I jumped up. His body had cushioned my fall, but my elbow had caught him in the nuts. I helped him up. His hands covered his crotch and he moaned.
I jammed two-by-fours between the wall and the door to construct a barrier between them and us. I heard banging on the door, but the hastily wedged two-by-fours held for the moment. If these guys took a minute, they would find another way through the warren of the penthouse and arrive at us from the opposite direction. We couldn't stay here.
“Let's go,” I said.
Scott breathed deeply several times.
“Can you run?”
He nodded. He staggered for a few feet and then began to move with more confidence.
We rushed to the stairs that led to the floor below where Scott had installed a private gym with a running track around the perimeter and thousands of dollars of the most up-to-date training equipment in the middle.
We crossed quickly, dodging between machines and barbells. At the exit door, I looked back to see the killers just emerging at the far edge of the running track. Quickly through the door, we began descending flights of stairs. The rear entrance existed specifically because of fire-code regulations.
We passed numerous fire doors leading to the floors we hurtled past. We didn't dare try opening one of these emergency doors leading to the inhabited floors we flew by. Who knew whether we'd run into someone willing to help, and we could spend precious seconds banging on doors trying to find someone who was home. Besides, getting into somebody's apartment and holding up until whoever this was bashed down that door didn't seem to make much sense. Or we might wait who-knows-how-long for an elevator and could be trapped in the hallway. So far we had no evidence of enemies coming up from below us.
We flew pell-mell down. Around the fifteenth floor, Scott stumbled.
I grabbed him. “You okay?”
“Yeah. What if they're waiting for us at the bottom?”
“I don't know. Go!”
In the brief pause, I heard the pounding footsteps above us.
It didn't help that we were both still in our dress shoes. The soles made the going more slippery and kept me from hitting top speed.
Gasping great gulps of air into my seared lungs and willing my tired legs to keep going, we ran on, finally arriving at the ground floor with pursuit still far behind us but
coming on quick. We both worked out, and Scott, a professional athlete, was in great shape; so even with the wrong type of shoes, we probably gained in the rush down.
coming on quick. We both worked out, and Scott, a professional athlete, was in great shape; so even with the wrong type of shoes, we probably gained in the rush down.
At the foyer level we were now on, the stairs ended at the rear of a room that once had been a lounge for guests and tenants to meet. It hadn't been used as such since the seventies, when the new marble-and-glass front of the building had replaced an art deco eyesore or treasure, depending on whose side of the fight over the change you'd been on. I could see old couches, table lamps, and oil paintings by deservedly unknown artists. Huge canvas cloths covered nearly half of the relics of a lost golden age. With all this debris, the thirty-by-forty-foot space was tough to maneuver through. Near the front were a row of buckets, carpet cleaners, mops, brooms, and cardboard boxes labeled: INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SEE INSTRUCTIONS ON CONTAINER.
An exit to our immediate left led I knew not where. A door twenty or thirty feet straight ahead of us led to the foyer. Through its square of glass, I could see the front desk. Howard wasn't present, but I saw the top half of a bald man with a blond mustache speaking into a portable phone. He clicked it shut and motioned toward the door I was looking through.
“They're coming this way,” I said. “No choice.” I led us to the door on the left.
As I pulled on the handle, the door to the foyer banged open.
“Get them!” the bald man yelled.
I yanked on the door. It was stuck or locked. I glanced over my shoulder. Two guys had joined Baldy. One was pulling a gun. Scott leaned down, and we both yanked on the handle. It burst open.
It was a straight flight down maybe twenty stairs with one bulb overhead illuminating cinder blocks painted white. Down we rushed. I wrenched open the door at the bottom. Scott leaped through and I darted after him.
I wondered why they didn't shoot. They wouldn't get the best shot, but all the way down the endless flights from the penthouse, that threat had flashed through my mind.
We arrived at the underground parking garage. The lighted security area loomed fifty feet on the other side of the car-filled underground barn. Two hefty looking guys in gray suits glared at the surrounding cars from within the glow of the neon of the glassed-in enclosure. They looked very much like the guys upstairs and definitely not like the blue-jean-clad casual guys who parked the cars and were our supposed security. These two guys held their hands inside their vests, maybe pretending they were Napoleon, or maybe ready to reach for their guns. They were between us and my pickup truck or Scott's Porsche; but, even more important, between us and the ramp leading out.
A car started up on our left and moved toward us. I decided not to wait around to see if it was someone barreling down on us trying to run us over or simply somebody on their way out.
“We can't get past them,” Scott said. “Now what?”
I pointed to the ramp leading to the bottom level. “That way,” I whispered.
“Can we get out that way?” Scott whispered back.
“I hope so,” I said. “The only other way is blocked.”
For some reason, I desperately wanted to say, “Walk this way,” and a brief vision of old comedies flashed in my mind. You think of the goofiest stuff at scary times.
Forcing my tired legs to move, I started jogging toward the car-sized opening that led down. The door we just exited banged open behind us.
“Where are they?” someone shouted.
I glanced behind and saw the guys at the security desk running over to join the newly emerged guys from the stairs.
As we rushed around the corner leading to the next level, I heard a set of brakes squeal, a male voice swore, and someone shouted, “There they are!”
We flew down the ramp and entered another flat parking expanse jammed with cars. This area was darker because there was no illumination from a security area. Neon lights gave off their impersonal emanations at regular intervals. No people or cars moved at this level.
I raked my eyes over the gray walls searching for an opening. On the opposite wall away from the ramp leading up, an exit sign glowed redly. No time for indecision. I had no idea where this new doorway led, but we couldn't go back.
We hunched behind cars and ran bent over. They would see the one exit sign, too, but they couldn't be sure which way we were taking to get there. Maybe they'd split up to hunt for us among the cars. I'd have preferred a vast suburban mall parking lot for them to spread out and search.
My muscles were long since past aching from the race down the stairs, but I urged them to further efforts. I'd seen the results of these guys' ministrations on Glen Proctor, and I didn't imagine gaping red holes in various parts of my anatomy would improve my appearance.
Scott trotted ahead of me. I could hear his rasping breaths. Ten feet away from the new opening, I saw Scott glance back. “At the end of the ramp,” he gasped.
I didn't bother to look back. I leaped forward. I shoved on the safety bar on the door. We emerged onto a five-foot-by-five-foot landing with stairs leading down to the left, with a single bulb enmeshed in a wire screen providing illumination. The air smelled dank and unused. Down the stairs we rushed to another landing which contained two gray doors perpendicular to each other, one in front of us and one on our left. Both had large gothic lettering saying “Do Not Enter.”
Scott banged open the one in front. Over his shoulder, I saw it was crammed with buckets, mops, brooms, pails, and cleansers. I pulled open the door on the left.
We paced slowly for a few seconds down the narrow center aisle of a room lit by widely spaced bare bulbs
encased as the one on the landing had been. To our immediate right was a freight elevator whose gaping maw was enclosed by a row of wooden picket teeth, joined in the middle. The cage wasn't on this level. We could see into a mass of cables that seemed to end in the depths about ten feet below where we were.
encased as the one on the landing had been. To our immediate right was a freight elevator whose gaping maw was enclosed by a row of wooden picket teeth, joined in the middle. The cage wasn't on this level. We could see into a mass of cables that seemed to end in the depths about ten feet below where we were.
Beyond this on the right and to our left the room spread out, but I couldn't see how far the walls extended because cardboard boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling barred any vision in those directions. The boxes had labels such as “light bulbs,” “plumbing fixtures.”
The path stretched for another hundred feet and ended in a row of boxes. No indentation led off to right or left. We hurried toward the far end hoping for some way out. I began to lose hope as we passed between the looming walls of brown.
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