Reprisal (21 page)

"Are you thinking ...?" He'd ask that several times during the day, bend down and ask it in a loud voice so she could hear. "Are you thinking ...?"

And she'd say "yes," and he'd say, "I am so glad," and take her out next morning in time for the bus, if it was a school day. And at school, a girl sitting behind her once said, "You smell like moth balls."

... Charis ate the last Dorito. And as she passed under a maple's lamp-lit leaf ceiling, murmured one of Joanna Reed's poems.

I wait, and you wait with me, Expecting different visitors. I wait, and you wait with me, But one visitor will not come. I wait, and you wait with me. Who comes, will be unwelcome, So must be greeted with a lie. You are the visitor I wait for. You may go, and return welcome.

Chris Engletree was an idiot.

Joanna, wearing old cotton coveralls and her caving boots, drove down the hill by headlight and moonlight, then turned right on Strand Street, its sidewalks empty to the night. She went three blocks, then took a left down Ropewalk. There was no one in the alley. The only light, filtered green-yellow through sea fog, shone down from a streetlamp on Strand.

Joanna parked the Volvo between two battered pickups at the foot of the alley, by the docks. She got out of the car, and crossed Ropewalk to Manning's. ...

The warehouse and processing plant was a big three-story brick building, half a block wide and a full block long, its bulk backing up from the waterfront to Strand Street. Huge--and old, built in 1870 ... 1880. There were no windows on the alley side except a row of wide glazed window vents beneath the third-floor eaves.

It seemed to Joanna it would have to be here.--The front entrance up on Strand was impossible, with streetlamps, alarm tape on the windows and doors, and people certain to be passing by, even this late at night. The dock entrance, below, was almost as bad--alarms on the windows, office door and loading dock

... and security lights all along the pier.

It would have to be here. ... She leaned against the building's brick, stroked it, ran her fingers along the masonry. Ancient mortar, crumbling from sea air, its dampness and salt. Still, she could bolt between the brick runs, haul herself up from anchor to anchor. But it would be noisy--too noisy--and take too long. So, wall-climb whatever was handy, quietly and quickly, with no driven bolts or aids.

It was a great comfort to have so limited, so familiar a problem.

Joanna walked up the alley along the wall, and saw a drainpipe down the building's side. It ran a straight line from the warehouse's roof gutter to the street.

She tried it, gripped the wet metal and tugged left and right for motion. It was very old and rusty cast iron--would be brittle, easy to crack and break, especially where narrow iron straps, almost weathered through, fastened the pipe to the building's bricks.

An old length of rusted pipe, but a straight run up to the roof ...

thirty-five, forty feet above the cobblestones. Quiet, and quick.

Joanna walked back across and down the alley to the car, checked to see that no one was passing up on Strand Street, then opened the trunk and took out her helmet and lamp, a thirty-yard coil of PMI dynamic rope, a short nylon tape sling of carabiners, and a small belt pack. The fillet knife was in the pack, with a butane lighter, small flashlight, her gloves, and the Leatherman multitool.

Joanna closed the car trunk, checked the street again for any late-night passerby, then rigged up--draped the tape sling and rope coil over her shoulder, belted on the pack, put her helmet on and tightened the chin strap.

Quietly ... and quickly.

She crossed the alley, walked up to the drainpipe, gripped and tested it again, then took a deep breath, reached up on the fog-wet iron as high as she could, jumped off the cobbles and began to climb.

She leaned away from the wall as she went up, frogging--reaching above her with one hand, then both, for a grip on the pipe ... then tucking her knees, digging her boot toes into the brick courses, and straightening her legs to drive herself up.

Easier top-roped, with ascenders. ...

Twenty, twenty-five feet up, she stopped on the wall to rest. Her fingers hurt, cramped from gripping slippery round metal. ... She could loop a nylon tape under the pipe, make a sling to hang from for a rest. Could do that--and if there'd been another fifty or hundred feet of climbing, would have had to.

She hung there, pulled in close to the wall, and looked down into the alley.

No one ... nothing but sea mist drifting in dim lamplight, dampness, and dark.

Joanna took a deep breath, relaxed her shoulders, reached up and began to climb again. The rope coil was cramping her right shoulder; she had to pause and shift it slightly. Right shoulder, right arm--neither quite the same after her surgery. Something cut in the chest muscle or the armpit, limiting just enough to be noticeable. Noticeable during great effort.

She frog-climbed another ten or twelve feet, saw the roof gutter overhang only a little higher, and reached up to the pipe for another grip.

She had it, held it hard--and the pipe made a celery sound, cracked, and the piece broke away.

Joanna swayed back, the chunk of pipe still in her hands--and she might have fallen, felt that sudden urge to disaster, to let go ... let go and fall back and down through darkness.

She refused to fall, let the piece of pipe go instead, so it dropped away--and as if she were in love with the building's wall, slumped into it, curved her belly into it, and let herself relax against its brick as the piece of broken iron rang, then rattled on the cobbles below. Her boot toes, at a mortar line beneath her, supported her for that moment ... and her hands, turned to claws, set their fingernails into the brick.

Only for a moment.--After the moment, if she didn't climb, she would fall.

Joanna bent her knees only slightly, and as if she had a solid ledge beneath her, jumped ... reaching for the section of pipe just above the break.

Her boot toes slipped as she went up. She missed the hold with her left hand, and seized it with her right. She had the jagged end of wet pipe in her grip right-handed, and hung there for less than a second until her left hand could join it.

With both hands holding on, she knew she wouldn't fall. She could hold on forever ... never fall.

She hung from her sure grip, hung in the air against the wall. The darkness below, the waiting cobblestones, no longer called to her. ... She carefully, lightly, stepped stepped stepped, her boot toes found their momentary purchase between brick courses, and she started climbing the pipe again ... gripping as lightly as she could, so as not to break the rusted iron.

The roof, its gutter overhang, was now only a few feet above. Joanna went up, and up ... then stretched to touch the overhang. Old iron--but thick, crusted with layers of crumbling paint. The fat, rough, curved metal edge was a comfort to her fingers, a good hold.

She hung there, brought her other hand up to the gutter, and rested a moment, swinging slightly to ease her shoulders.

The nearest vent window was six or seven feet to her left, and a couple of feet down. She began to swing a little more, side to side--setting up a rhythm to help her hand-over-hand along the gutter's edge to the vent.

There was a sound in the alley beneath her. A soft thud, thud ... thud, thud.

Joanna stopped swinging and hung still, her fingers aching ... then slowly, carefully, turned her head to look down.

Someone was walking down the alley from Strand Street--a man in dark shirt, jeans, and black rubber boots. It was too dark to see more detail, make out his face.

Joanna dangled from the gutter, hanging still as a cave bat, and watched the man walking along the cobbles ... walking beneath her on his way to the docks.

She allowed her fingers to hurt, as long as they kept their grip--and slowly, slowly turned her head to follow him down to the end of Ropewalk ... then a turn right, onto the pier and out of sight.

A fishing-boat crewman with some nighttime chore to do. ...

Joanna shifted her grip from one hand to the other to ease her fingers--the rope coil was weighing heavy on her shoulder--then began to swing left to right and back again, gathering momentum.

On the end rise of her third swing to the left, she went quickly hand-over-hand three or four feet closer to the vent window ... then took a breath, began to swing again, her hands hurting, and went hand-over-hand three feet farther to hang from the gutter just above the vent.

The low, wide window, its thick frame hinged at the top, was crusted with peeling white paint. Its bottom edge was canted open four or five inches.--Joanna, stretching down, was just able to get a toehold on the sill beneath the window frame's outward angle. Not stance enough.

It was very bad practice to fall--even for two or three feet--to a hold. It was a question of acceleration forces. ...

Joanna kicked her foot free of the sill, let go of the gutter's edge, and fell down the wall. ... Almost past the canted window, she reached with both hands, gripped the sill, and caught herself with a grunt. Her wrists wrenched at the leverage; her hips and legs swung hard into the wall.

She had the sill, but not its inside edge. She held with her right hand, scrabbled at brick with her boot toes ... then reached in farther with her left, found the sill's inner edge, and had her hold.

Joanna hauled herself up and against the window, and tried to pull the bottom of the sash frame out and open. It didn't budge. The vent must have been left ajar for years ... been painted open just this far. There was a steady slight draft blowing out, stinking richly of fish.

She was getting tired ... tired of clinging to the wall. She held with her left arm jammed under the window, hand gripping the inner sill--and with her right hand reached behind her for her pack, tugged the Velcro open, and dug into it for the multitool.

Opening the Leatherman with only one hand and her teeth was a chore ... to open it, and fold out the serrated knife blade.--When she had the blade out and locked, Joanna began to work on the paint plastered in brittle layers along the upper side edges of the vent window's frame, where their angles narrowed to the hinged top sash above.

It was hard work, hard to do clinging to the wall almost forty feet up. ...

Difficult to do one-handed, and in darkness only a little relieved by lamplight from Strand Street. If she dared to use her helmet lamp, it would have been so much easier ... so much easier.

She worked and worked the blade along one side of the window, and then the other--sawing, slicing through old paint down the window frame's edges. Then she paused, tucked the tool into her coverall pocket, and tried the window again, heaving at it, trying to force it up and wide enough to crawl through.

Her left hand, deep under the window, was growing numb from holding.

She took the tool out and went to work again ... carving into the painted-over joins, prying thick strips and chips of old paint away. It was becoming very difficult. ... After a while, she stopped and hung at the window, getting her breath. There was no feeling in her left hand and forearm.

She braced her boots against the brick below, tucked the tool into her pocket again, and hauled up on the window's bottom edge, yanked it. She struck the sash frame with her fist, then hauled and heaved again. ... The window moaned softly, and swung up and out two or three inches.

"You son of a bitch," Joanna said, and wrenched at it again. The vent window made another soft noise, then something split or splintered slightly along its frame's left edge, and the window swung up and open all the way.

She reached in with her right hand to relieve her left from holding ... then crawled under the open window frame and inside, to straddle the wide sill and crouch there in darkness, safe from falling.

Joanna rested for a while, head and shoulders bent under the canted window frame. She exercised her fingers, easing their soreness and cramp. ...

Then she leaned out over the well of darkness to her right, reached up and switched on her helmet lamp.

This was the warehouse's main processing space. Wide, deep, and two stories high. She'd seen it before, from the side passage, when she'd come in to talk with Mr. Manning. ... The huge room below her was filled with machines, tubs, and parked forklifts. And there was a complex stepped pavement of wide conveyor belts down the length of the space, supported on series of huge rollers above steel frames, drive chains, and shafts.

Joanna lifted the rope coil off her right shoulder, and passed the working end of the line through the narrow slot between the hinges at the top of the window. She fed a short length of line through, brought it around under the window, tied a bowline and backed it up with an overhand knot. Then she let the rest of the rope fall free down the warehouse's inside wall.

She dug her gloves out of the pack, put them on--bare hands to climb, gloves to rappel--then wound the rope's slack between her legs and around her right thigh ... then up and over her left shoulder and down her back to be held firm in her right hand. She switched off her helmet lamp to keep its beam from the open window, swung off the sill, set her boot soles against the room's wall

... and leaning against her rope, backed slowly down into darkness. ...

More than thirty feet lower, her boot soles hit the floor. She stepped out of the rope ... a trespasser who'd listened to a poor alcoholic's mumbling. If she was caught, the handsome old constable would come down on her, jail her in a minute.

The odor of fish lay like fog along the room. Fish and machine oil. It was a big space, silent, its tons of hulking machinery bearing down on a floor of heavy splintered planking. There was only a dim night-light far across the processing room, a small red bulb above a door to the passage beyond.

Joanna switched on her helmet lamp, ducked under the conveyor belt, and worked her way beneath it, snaking through the complex of gears and rollers. The floor planking was wet under the wide belts, soaked from hosing down and the workday's melting ice. The wood was wet, and slippery with slime the hose had missed.