King Maybe (27 page)

“Great. Any chance you can figure out how to force the system into reset?”

“No. Not unless . . . I mean, unless they were dumb enough to send him the PIN number and the password by email and if he was dumb enough to keep them in his in-box, and if we had his email address—”

“Try ‘Jeremy' or ‘Granger' or both at Farscope.com,” I said.

“—and if we could slip into the email system,” she said, “then maybe.”

“Do what you can.” I disconnected.

I listened. Still heard police radio noise, but no closer than before. They were out at the gate, and they hadn't come in yet.

My fingers found a little recessed latch above me, and I turned it to the right, got resistance, turned it to the left, and pushed up. I had assumed that the escape hatch would be hinged along the rear wall, but instead the hinges were on the right, and it was unexpected enough to make me lose my balance and flail wildly at the sides of the ladder for what felt like a long heart-attack minute until I got hold of it and hung there, the bad leg dangling, sucking huge breaths into my lungs and waiting until a firefly swarm of bright spots had dispersed and I could see again.

My internal clock went
ding-ding-ding
, and my watch blinked at me. Eight minutes.

The radio noise from outside was augmented by the
whack-whack-whack
of a copter, and it actually relaxed me. If they were going with overhead surveillance, it probably meant they couldn't get through the gate without the lockdown code, and in the meantime they wanted to keep an eye on the property and the walls between Granger's house and the three that bordered it.

And Granger, I thought, as I pulled myself the rest of the way up the ladder and onto the cab's roof, wouldn't be back until midnight.

That thought comforted me as I hauled the ladder up through the trapdoor, anchored it securely on the top of the elevator, and wiggled it a couple of times to see how steady it was. The comfort lasted as I put my hand in my pocket, located the little flashlight, turned it on, and saw what might have been exactly what I needed, right up above me. Within easy reach of the top of the ladder.

The space between floors.

In this case between the third floor and the second.

I'd seen it on a set of plans submitted to the city for approval. When the Thud put in his recording studio, he was married. The Thuds were neither a subtle nor a musically adventurous band; they described their music as “death thrash” and said in interviews that the group had only two settings,
faster
and
louder
,
and in fact the band had split up when two of its members lost their hearing. But during the brief period when the Thuds were hot, the lead singer wanted to cut records at home without giving his wife grounds for divorce, so he created a huge sound baffle between the studio and the rooms below it by raising the third floor by four feet, opening up a dead-air space between it and the second-floor ceilings and then pouring some sort of sound-absorbing material into it.

And the space, God bless it, was accessible via the elevator shaft.

I said
“Gratias tibi ago,”
which is Latin for “Thank you,” because I don't assume that Laverna, who's got her hands full being a goddess, has bothered to learn English. I hauled myself up the ladder, not putting weight on the injured knee, until I was up there, and then I said
“Gratias tibi ago”
again. It was perfect.

It was dark and ugly, and it smelled like wet newspaper, but it might as well have been the Stable in Bethlehem, as far as I was concerned. It had been half filled with sound-absorbing blown cellulose, just repurposed scrap paper, mostly newsprint, formed into pellets and shot from a huge forced-air pipe. I reached over and probed the drift directly in front of
me: the bottom of the space was formed by two-by-twelve wood joists, edge up, with about a foot or fourteen inches between each pair of joists. The cellulose covered the tops of the beams by a couple of inches, meaning that if I could get Suley up here, I could squeeze
the two of us
in between the beams and cover us with several inches of blown cellulose, as invisible as we'd have been in a snowdrift. Getting around in it was going to be a squeeze, since the joists supporting the third floor were no more than two feet above the lower joists into which the cellulose had been blown. I could navigate it on my elbows. I tossed the big coil of clothesline into the opening and actually sighed with something that I mistook for relief.

Because, of course, at the precise moment I relaxed the tiniest bit, the cold, wet hand of reality wrapped its fingers around my throat.

28

The New Knot

I didn't have until midnight.
Granger had lied about everything. He hadn't taken his wife anywhere, he hadn't taken a plane anywhere. He was probably ten or fifteen minutes from here, whiling away the time with some people who constituted his alibi and waiting for a call from the police or the alarm service to say that his house was in lockdown.

And that call had certainly already been made.

In my haste to get down the ladder, I accidentally put weight on the bad knee, and when I yanked my foot up, my body weight went off center to the right, taking the ladder with it. In a frantic scramble to keep from falling all the way down the ladder and through the open hatch into the elevator, I swung myself even farther right, and the ladder followed me, tilting onto one leg and then falling, tipping four or five feet to the right until it hit the right side of the elevator shaft with a bang. When it did, the ladder leg that was in the air pivoted around, just missing the hatch, and came to a stop on top of the elevator's roof, leaving me dangling at arm's length, like an afterthought, from the underside of the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by the ladder, the shaft, and the roof. It took me a long moment of disbelief to confirm that I was still holding on. I managed to hang one-handed onto the rung I was clinging to and to stretch the other hand to the next-lower one and then swing to the one below that, until—coughing and choking like Camille as I fought for breath and with my heart beating kettledrums in my ears—I had both feet on the solid, unyielding top of the cab. I stood there unmoving for several heartbeats, letting time slide by until my knees stopped trembling and I'd waved away the remaining fumes of the terror I'd experienced when it had seemed inevitable that I was going to take a fall of about sixteen feet, through a small door made up of sharp metal corners, to the floor of the elevator. It took no imagination at all to see myself crumpled down there with at least a broken leg and a blown-out knee. Just waiting, in pain, to be arrested for murder.

Lots of radio noise from outside. Lots of helicopter racket. Cops above, cops below, forever and ever amen.

I eased the ladder through the hatch into the elevator car and went down it carefully. Then, standing on the carpet, I gave myself another thirty seconds to gather my wits, and as I did so, several ideas barged in and waved at me. The big one was,
Bewilder Granger further
.

Suley had been wearing pink canvas slip-ons. One was still on her foot—the right, it seemed to me—and the other was on the carpet. Bright pink, hard to miss. What we needed was another ten minutes to create a massive “does not compute” for Granger, something that would make him eager, even desperate, to get the cops out of there. I couldn't do anything about the ten minutes except to wish for them, but the memory of the shoe had given me an idea about the does-not-compute.

But first I needed some ribbon. I weighed it for a moment and decided that the elevator would be faster and less risky than navigating the circular staircase on my bad knee, so I pulled out the
stop
button and punched the one for the first floor and stood there, cursing the gods of time as the machine dawdled its way down, one long aristocratic yawn. I shoved through the opening doors and limp-sprinted out of the office, Quasimodo running the hundred, and back down the first-floor corridor to the gift room.

Blinking red and white lights tattooed the outside of the window. The sounds were louder and more urgent here. I found a big spool of crimson ribbon about two inches wide, unwound ten or twelve feet of it, snipped it, and then cut off a shorter piece, about two feet long. I was headed back out when I saw the big flat gift boxes, which I belatedly realized were for coats. I tucked three of them under one arm and hobbled back to the elevator, trailing red ribbon, which I barely managed to reel inside before the doors closed on it.

Riding up, I decided arbitrarily that I had about seven minutes to get everything squared away. I added a minute to it for the bad leg and started the timer. Sheer force of habit. Before leaving the elevator, I carried the flat boxes up the ladder and put them on top of the cab; I was sure I couldn't carry both them and Suley at the same time. That ate forty seconds. In the upstairs drawing room, I unfolded Suley's blanket and laid her on her back, then raised her arms above her head and tied her wrists together with the shorter length of ribbon. I repositioned her book on her chest, eased the pink shoe off her foot, and put it on the carpet. She had tiny feet. I avoided looking at the hopelessly young face. Then I rolled her tightly in the blanket, silently apologizing for the indignity, until all that protruded were her arms and her beautiful, harmless-looking hands, secured by the big red bow.

Two minutes down, six to go.

I laid out the long piece of ribbon on the floor and rolled her over it until it wound around the blanket multiple times in a spiral, like the red stripe on a barber pole, and then I pulled it as taut as I could and secured the ends, tightly enough that I didn't think she'd slip out of the blanket. I grabbed the shoe I'd removed from her foot, paired it with the one on the carpet, and put them, side by side, very neatly in the hallway, just outside the entrance to the drawing room, where I figured they'd give Granger a heart attack. In pursuit of heart attack number two for dear Jeremy, I gimped as fast as I could down to her bedroom and pulled open some drawers at random, assembling a couple of blouses and two pairs of jeans, laying them out on the bed as someone would who was packing. I left the drawers open and also slid aside two of the doors to her enormous closet and took a last squint.
Persuasive
, I thought. The shoes in the hall, the clothes on the bed.

All laid out by a dead woman.

Seeing a big purse on a table by the door, I grabbed it and hung the strap over my shoulder. Of my arbitrary eight minutes, a little less than five remained. He had to be on his way, had to be arriving soon. It suddenly made sense: he was a control freak on the scale of Caligula, and he'd want to be in charge when the cops poured in.

In the drawing room, I replaced and smoothed the corner flap of carpet that Granger had kicked up. Then, with an explosion of pain in my knee, I knelt beside Suley, put my arms around her, and almost gasped when I lifted her from the floor: she weighed practically nothing. Carrying her in both arms, one beneath her shoulders and the other under her knees, the way I'd carried Kathy over the threshold of our house all those years ago, I limped her down the hall, the big purse slapping against my left side. Once in the elevator, I looped her arms, her wrists still secured by the ribbon, over my head and around my neck and started very carefully up the ladder, climbing only with the good leg and then putting my weight on the bad one just long enough for me to get the stronger leg secure on the next rung. From time to time, I had to put one arm around Suley to prevent her from swaying back and forth and pulling me off balance. It was a slow, painful climb, but eventually we were both on top of the elevator car, and I brought the ladder up, hand over hand, and propped it against the elevator shaft for the second half of the climb. I laid her down gently on top of the elevator and went up the ladder with the flat boxes, which I set in the entrance to the crawl space with the purse beside them, and then, breathing hard, went back down again to get her. This time it was even harder. Once I was up there, I hauled both of us into the space, onto the spongy cellulose, and positioned her on her back on the flattened boxes. On my hands and knees and keeping my head down, I used the boxes as a sort of sled, towing her around to the back of the elevator shaft, where there were only a couple of feet between the back of the shaft and the exterior wall. Putting my weight on the knee was enough to make me groan. If Granger did somehow know of this space and sent the police up to check it out, which I doubted he would, they wouldn't be able to see this area without actually coming in and crawling all the way around, as I had. I scooped cellulose from between two of the two-by-twelve ceiling joists until I could ease Suley into the space I'd made, and then I placed the boxes on top of her to create a flat surface and covered them evenly with the insulation. I backed off a little bit and shone the penlight on it. It looked good.

I had less than a minute left of my imposed time limit, and what remained was the impossible part.

Sitting with my legs dangling into the shaft to ease the strain on the knee, I unlooped the long coil of clothesline and tied a knot every three or four feet as fast as I could, trying to drown out the laughter of the Cub Scouts who'd left me behind all those years ago as they scaled the rope and the ranks, and the barely concealed displeasure of my father every time I came home with the same solitary badge I'd had when I left. With my minute long gone, I looped one end of the rope over an upright two-by-four that looked sturdy, gave it a test yank, and dangled the free end down the elevator shaft and through the open hatch. Then I went back down the ladder.

Ninety seconds later I was hurrying, as fast as my stiff leg would permit, along the first-floor corridor to the kitchen and counting as a miracle every passing second that the house remained locked. I toted the ladder into the pantry, opened the door at the end, and slung it down the stairs, the first shortcut I'd taken. I hobbled after it, leaned it back against the wall near the painting supplies, and, for what I hoped would be the last time in my life, went up those cellar stairs and along that corridor and through Granger's smug, buttery office, into the elevator. We were almost home, I thought, and the house was still in lockdown. I might get out of this yet.

And then I looked up and realized that the rope, which was still dangling through the open escape hatch, was out of reach by almost two feet. I'd underestimated how far the elevator had to descend to get to the ground floor. The rope was too short.

And at that moment, the house shuddered and went
whunk
.

Lockdown had been lifted.

How fast could they get inside? I punched the button for the second floor, grabbing for the rope as I rose,
sooooo
slowly, toward it, and the moment we stopped on two, I hit 1 again to send it back to the first floor, where it had originally been, and started trying to climb the rope. I managed to pull myself up one knot and then another, my hands slick with sweat and slipping with each try, until my head and shoulders had almost cleared the frame of the escape hatch, and at that moment the elevator decided to start its downward journey. I swung my legs up, completely forgetting the knee, and yanked the rest of the rope out of the cab, and as the elevator sank, I reached below me and slammed the escape door shut. Then I grabbed the rope for dear life as my floor fell away beneath me in the dark, on its stately descent.

I hung there from a small, slippery knot, swaying back and forth like the pendulum on a clock in the pitch-blackness of the elevator shaft, and considered the long,
long
slow-motion practical joke that had put me here—almost thirty years after my first major failure in life—with my entire future depending on my ability to climb a rope.

And the house was no longer in lockdown.

Which would come first? Would they enter through the front door in time to hear the elevator going down—or not? And, I suddenly wondered, had the wind stopped?

I tightened my right hand around the knot in the rope, wrapped my feet around another one farther down, not even feeling the knee in my anxiety, and blindly reached up. And reached up.

And reached—

Up.

And got my hand around the next knot.

I hung there, grabbing huge lungfuls of air. Said to the darkness, “And fuck you, Dad,” and pulled myself up again, wrapping the rope around my feet as I went, straining up for the next knot and the one after that, and the door into the entrance hall opened down below and banged against the wall, and the elevator shaft was full of echoing voices.

But the elevator had already stopped moving.

I heard yelling, people calling for whoever they thought it was to come out, hands clasped over his head, to make it easy on himself, and then the door to the office opened almost directly beneath me, and I knew they'd have guns in their hands, that they'd be looking in the space under the desk, that there'd be a lot of pulses racing and adrenaline as they opened the doors to the closet and the secretary's office, drama that would be repeated a hundred times as they searched the enormous house, and I turned it all off and reached for the next knot and the next knot and the next knot, and the higher I went, the easier it got.