Breakout (16 page)

Williams said, “We won’t know if there’s a mirror on it until we break it.”

“A mirror in a bathroom,” Mackey decided, “this far to the back of the building, isn’t gonna wake anybody up. If it comes
down to it, I’ll volunteer for the bad luck.”

“We’ve all got the bad luck already,” Williams told him. “Parker and me, we already broke out once, and here we are again.”

Picking up a hammer and screwdriver, Parker said, “We’re running out of time,” and went back to work.

T
he others were easier to get at, but still hard work. It was almost three in the morning before they’d removed the six blocks
they needed to get out of their way; the one just above waist height they’d done first, then the two centered below that,
the one below that, and the two below that. Now they had an opening in the wall thirty-two inches high and effectively sixteen
inches wide.

“Shine the light,” Parker said, and went to one knee in front of the opening. The bottom of it was just about at knee height;
Parker reached in with the hammer and rapped a tile just above the next lower concrete block. He had to hit it twice, but
then it cracked and fell backward, taking parts of two other tiles with it.

They looked through the new small hole into the darkness beyond, the flash gleaming on something glass, near to them, pebbled
to bounce and refract the light. Mackey said, “What the hell is that?”

“A shower stall,” Parker said. “That’s the door.”

“A nice door,” Williams said. “At last.”

Now that they knew there was nothing except the tile in their way, they quickly hammered it out of there, then clawed the
one furring strip in their space with a hammer, weakening it so they could snap it in the middle and break the pieces off
at top and bottom. Now they had a new doorway.

Mackey went through first, with the flash. The other two followed, as Mackey opened the shower door and stepped out to the
bathroom. He switched on the lights there, and Williams said, “I think we oughta turn out the light behind us. No need to
attract attention before we have to.”

“Good,” Parker said.

They waited while Williams went back to switch off the gym lights, then came back through the new opening to join them in
what turned out to be an apartment connected to the dance studio.

“All these people,” Mackey said, “they build themselves little nests at work, and then don’t use them.”

Williams said, “Better for us if they don’t.”

Once out of the bathroom, they limited themselves to the flashlight, moving through the rest of the dance studio area. They
were out of the jeweler’s now, but they were still inside the Armory, and the problem of getting out was still the same. The
exterior walls on all sides were impregnable, windows too narrow to be useful, and a twenty-four-hour doorman at the only
exit. And time running out.

Moving through the dance studio, they went first through the small neat apartment, then the offices, then the studios themselves.
They saw the long mirror Brenda had told Mackey about, and Mackey laughed at it: “We coulda called attention with
that
thing.”

The receptionist’s room at the front was faintly illuminated by streetlights. A mesh barrier was closed over the front window
and door; not impossible to get through but impossible to get through immediately and without noise.

As they turned away from that useless exit, Williams said, “We gotta get next door, into that lobby.”

Mackey said, “Not another wall. Don’t give me another wall.”

“Maybe there’s a door,” Parker said.

There was. It took them twenty minutes to find it, but then there it was, a spring-locked door on the far wall of the main
office, toward the readjust in front of the apartment. The door opened inward; Parker pulled it ajar, just enough to look
through, and saw the lobby, dim-lit, with elevators nearby to the left and the front entrance far away at the other end of
the low-ceilinged space.

Parker stepped back, letting the door shut. “That’s the lobby,” he said. “But I can’t see the doorman from here, and you know
he’s going to have video monitors.”

“Lemme look,” Williams said. “I’m pretty good at finding those things.”

He hunched in the doorway, peering through the narrow space, then leaned back, shut the door, and said, “Two. One over the
doorway this side of the desk, aimed at the elevators, and one over the elevators, aimed at the front.”

Parker said, “And the stairwell door, that’s just this side of the elevators.”

“He’ll see it,” Williams said, “on his monitor.”

Parker shook his head, angry at the obstacles. “If we try to just go straight through the front, deal with him along the way…”

“He’ll be on the phone,” Williams said, “before we can get to him. We could
get
to him, but the cops would be on the way.”

Mackey said, “We don’t want that kind of footrace.”

“There has to be a way past him,” Parker said. “If we can get into the stairwell, get down to the parking area,
that’s
not gonna have security as tough as everything else around here.”

Williams said, “He’ll have a monitor shows him the garage.”

“If we don’t take a car,” Parker said, “if we just walk out, walk along the side wall and out, we won’t give him a reason
to get excited. But first we’ve gotta get down there.”

“Somebody switch on the lights in here,” Mackey said, “I got an idea.”

Parker had the flashlight. He shone it across the room, found the light switch by the opposite door, and crossed to turn it
on. Two lamps on side tables made a warm glow, showing walls filled with prints of various kinds of dancers, in performance.

Mackey went to the desk, sat at it, lit a lamp there, and looked in drawers until he found a phone book. He leafed through
it, read, and gave the open page a satisfied slap. “That’s what we like,” he said. “Twenty-four-hour service.”

Parker and Williams sat in comfortable chairs in front of the desk while Mackey pulled the phone toward himself, dialed a
number, waited, and then said, ’Yeah, you still delivering? Great. The name’s O’Toole, I’m in the Armory Apartments, apartment
C-3. I want a pepperoni pizza. Oh, the eight-inch. And a liter of Diet Pepsi, you got that? Great. How long, do you figure?
Twenty minutes, that’s perfect.”

He hung up and grinned at them. “By the time they work it out, we’re in the stairwell, and this goddam place’s history.”

It was twenty-five minutes. They had the office lights switched off again, and took turns watching through the narrow crack
of the open door, and at last they heard the building’s front doorbell ring and heard the sound of the chair as the doorman
got to his feet.

The delays were grinding them down. They had to get out of here before it was morning and the world was awake and in motion,
but every time they moved they were forced to stop again. Stop and wait. All three of them had nerves jumping, held in check.

Five seconds since the doorbell rang. They stepped out of the office, single file, moving on the balls of their feet. They
angled across the dim lobby and through the door into the stairwell.

Where the stairs only went up.

P
arker said, “It’s the goddam security in this place. They don’t want anybody in or out except past that doorman.”

“Well,” Mackey said, “that’s what people want nowadays, that sense of safety.”

Williams said, “Bullshit. There’s no such thing as safety.”

“You’re right,” Mackey told him. “But they don’t know that.”

Parker said, “That
can’t
be the only way in or out, because garbage has to go out, and they’re not gonna send it out the front door. And deliveries
have to come in.”

Mackey said, “It seems that way.”

“The fire code,” Williams said. “They can’t have a building this big, full of people living here, and only one staircase.”

Parker said, “So there has to be service stairs, leading to a service entrance. We go up one flight here, we look in the halls,
we find that other way.”

Williams said, “What if there’s video cameras in the halls, too?”

“Can’t be,” Mackey said. “It’s too big a building, and one lone doorman. He can’t look at fifty monitors.”

“We’ll check it out,” Parker said, and started up the stairs.

This first flight was double in length, with three landings, to bring them higher than the ceiling of the former parade field
next door. When they reached the first door, it had a brass 2 on it.

Stepping past Parker, Williams said, “Let me look for cameras.”

They waited, while Williams cautiously pulled the door open and looked out, moving his head from side to side rather than
stretch out into the hall. Then he opened it wider, leaned out, looking, and shook his head back at Parker and Mackey. “Nothing.”

“Like I said,” Mackey reminded them.

They went out to a crossing of hallways, all quietly illuminated. The elevator bank was to their right, a hall extended to
their left, and another hall ran both forward and back. A plaque on the wall facing the elevators read
RENTAL OFFICE
, with
a bent arrow to show the office would be at the end of the hall to the front.

Without speaking, they went the other way, because the service stairs, if they existed, would be at the rear of the building.
They moved silently, on pale-green carpeting, past apartment doors with identifying numbers and peepholes.

The door at the end of the hall had neither; instead, in small black letters, it said
EMERGENCY EXIT
. They went through into
a barer, more utilitarian stairwell, all concrete and iron. At the bottom was a concrete landing with a broad metal door beside
another of those tall narrow windows. The door had a bar across its middle to push it open, but the bar was bright red, with
its message in block white letters:
WARNING. WHEN DOOR OPENED, ALARM WILL SOUND
.

Williams said, “Well? Do we push and run?”

Parker shook his head. “With no place to go to ground? Look out there, that street’s empty.”

Williams frowned out at the late-night emptiness, the closed stores across the street, this being a narrower street than the
one in front. “Everywhere we go,” he said, “there’s something to stop us.”

They were all silent a minute, looking out at the empty dark street, then Mackey, sounding reluctant, said, “What if I call
Brenda?”

Parker said, “To come pick us up, you mean.”

“I don’t like her in these things,” Mackey told them, “but maybe this time we gotta. She drives over, we see the car, go out,
let the alarm do what it wants to do, Brenda drives us
away
from here.”

Williams said, “I can’t think of any other way.”

“Neither can I,” Mackey said.

Parker looked out. No traffic. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said.

P
arker hated going back, but there was no choice. Turn around, go up the stairs, the other way along that hall, toward the
rental office. Instead of getting out of the maze, turn around and go back into the maze. And less time than ever.

The rental office door was locked, but not seriously. They went through it, and found a suite of offices illuminated by a
few pale narrow strips of light. The tall thin windows continued up here, though not in the apartments farther up, and these
windows were just above the level of the streetlights outside. It was their glow, coming through the deep-set narrow windows,
that made the stripes of light across ceiling and desks and walls.

Mackey sat at the nearest desk, just outside a band of light, and opened drawers until he found the local phone book, then
called the place where Brenda was staying. He spoke with the clerk there, then hung up, shook his head, and said, “She’s got
a no-disturb until her wake-up call at eight.”

“We need a car,” Parker said. “We need somebody with a car.”

“Shit,” Williams said.

They looked at him. Mackey said, “You got something?”

“I hate to think I do,” Williams said. “I called my sister, you know, I went—”

“No,” Parker said. “We didn’t know.”

“It wasn’t dangerous,” Williams promised him. “I left that beer company place where we were staying, late at night, I walked
maybe five blocks, found a phone booth, called from there, came back. Nobody saw me, no sweat.”

Parker said, “The law is listening to your sister’s phone.”

“I know that,” Williams said. “I was just calling to say goodbye, because I gotta get away from here.” He looked around at
the rental office. Disgusted, he said, “If I ever get away from
here
, I mean, then I gotta get away from this town.”

Mackey said, “You can’t call your sister again. She would
definitely
bring the cops down on us. Not meaning to; they’d just come along.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Williams told him. “I wouldn’t do a thing to mess up her life. But the thing is, when I called her,
she told me, there’s this guy we both know, his name is Goody, or everybody calls him Goody, he already been in touch with
her, soon as he heard I busted out, said to her she couldn’t help me because of the cops but he could, give me money, whatever,
I should call him, he’d help out.”

Mackey said, “This is a good guy? Friend of yours?”

Williams shook his head. “This is a scumbag,” he said. “He’s a dealer, street dealer, works for some big-deal drug guy.”

Parker said, “So he told your sister, have Brandon get in touch with me, I wanna help him, but what he means is, he’ll turn
you in.”

“Sure,” Williams said. “I knew that from the first second. I wasn’t gonna call Goody at all. But now, maybe so.”

Mackey said, “If you call this guy, tell him where we are, he just calls the cops, tells
them
where we are, goes back to bed, goes downtown tomorrow to collect the reward.”

Williams said, “Well, I’m the only local guy in this room, and he’s all I got.”

Parker said, “Then we’ll work with him.”