Sinister Heights (27 page)

Before I pressed the down button, I reached up and loosened the bulb recessed into the ceiling, twisting it in quick jerks to avoid burning my fingers. The car went dark and I rode it down, crowded tightly into the far right corner on the theory that anyone waiting at the bottom with a gun would open fire on the center. I braced the Chief's Special for a hip shot.

No one shot at me. There was no door or cage in the basement. I stepped straight out into a corridor lit by recessed fixtures, shedding separate pools onto a linoleum floor with a swirled pattern.

I seemed to be in the middle of the corridor. It stretched out for at least fifty feet in either direction and vanished into darkness. The walls were plaster, painted a warm yellow to offset the subterranean gloom, but it was turning a mustard shade that only contributed to the sensation of interment. There were no pictures on the walls, just doors staggered on both sides. Each had a narrow rectangle of wire-gridded window and a no-frills steel knob with a cylinder lock. None was labeled.

The security offices, including the big one reserved for the director, were supposed to lie to my right, with the emergency living quarters comprising five rooms strung out in the other direction from the elevator. I hoped that hadn't changed. The disappearance of the fire stairs had me rattled. I turned left and crept along close to the wall.

The lights appeared to be on in all the rooms. I flattened against the wall, gripping my gun, and slid an eye past the edge of the first window. There was a twin bed, a camp-size refrigerator with a two-burner hotplate on top, a card table, and two folding chairs. The room was six by eight and I could see the whole thing. The mattress was rolled up at the foot of the bed. No one was inside.

Same story in the next room. The one after that was a community bathroom, with a stool and a sink and a shower stall and frosted glass in the window. I had a heart-stopping moment when I flung open the door and wheeled in fisting the revolver in both hands. I didn't disturb anyone.

Behind the window in the fourth door, Matthew Glendowning was sitting up in bed with his chin resting on his knees and his hands locked around them. His eyes were pink and swollen, but he wasn't crying. He looked bored. He had on the same clothes he'd worn the night before, but he was barefoot. No one was with him.

I juggled out the ring of keys. On a hunch I tried the knob first. It was unlocked. I didn't like that, not by half. But I opened the door and went in.

Matthew was off the bed in one motion, butting me in the stomach with his head of black hair. I jackknifed, emptying my lungs, but when he started around me I got a hand inside the neck of his T-shirt and twisted. He kicked me, and pain shot up from my shin, but he wasn't wearing shoes. I kept my balance and spun him and pushed him into a wall, pinning him by the shoulders with the gun still in my right hand.

“It's me, Matthew,” I said. “Mr. Walker. Remember? I'm a friend of your mother's. I drove the car.”

He stopped struggling then and stared. His mouth opened wide. I hugged him to my chest, to muffle the bawling mainly, then tightened my grip and carried him out.

I turned right toward the elevator and stopped. Connor Thorpe was standing halfway down the corridor. Beside him was a uniformed guard aiming a pistol-grip shotgun at my chest and Matthew's back.

“Steal from my boss, steal from me,” Thorpe said. “Only this time I'm the boss. The gun and the kid, Walker. Put them down in any order you like.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

There was no satisfaction on Thorpe's basset face, no clue in his slumped posture, hands in the pockets of his heavy-duty business suit, that he felt anything at all about bagging an intruder. It wasn't that he had control over his features, which he had to have V had in the beginning or he wouldn't have come this far; he'd just been at it so long, living constantly two minutes ahead of the kind of person he'd been put in place to outwit, that he no longer felt anything at the climax, win or lose. His sad eyes and perpetual scowl meant nothing more than the smile on a sarcophagus.

The guard with him was cut from greener wood. He was young and pale, with the kind of gray eyes that always look as if they're staring through a sheen of tears, and his nostrils twitched. I didn't like that part. His shotgun, a utilitarian twelve-gauge stamped out of sheet metal with a plastic stock, lay at chest height with the hand holding the grip braced against his right pectoral and the other hand cradling the forepiece. The bore was as big around as a shot glass.

“How about we go to parade rest?” I said. “Your boy looks like he spooks easy.”

“How about you do what the chief said?” The guard's voice was high and tight.

Thorpe said, “You're right about him, Walker. They shaved the trigger pretty thin.”

Matthew's fingers dug into my sides, but I relaxed my grip and leaned over and let him slide to the floor. As soon as his feet touched down he scampered around behind me, arms locked around my left leg with his face peering past my hip. He didn't know I was no kind of shield against a shot pattern the size of my head. I lowered my gun hand and let the Smith & Wesson fall to the floor.

I said, “Not bad. Slick but not showy. The frame was to keep me in, not out.”

“Anybody can get
in
anyplace.” Thorpe sounded preoccupied. “The men who built this plant knew that. The main power switch is down here. Anyone who wanted to put the place out of commission had to come to the basement. Then all Security had to do was block the fire door, cut the current to the elevator, and starve them out: Getting rid of the fire door was my idea. Call me lazy. It eliminated a step.”

“Maybe your predecessors were nervous about becoming trapped themselves.”

“Oh, I rigged a way out in a pinch. One that didn't make it into a set of blueprints that any voting citizen could wander into city hall and gape at.”

“Who told you I was coming, Fish or Muriel?”

His amber teeth showed, but the downturned corners of his mouth didn't move. It was only a smile if you stood on your head to look at it. “Fish is a wardheeler. You never piss off the money source, that's the rule. He wouldn't come to me over a letter of authorization with my signature. And Muriel would watch his own nuts burn before he'd yell fire if Fish didn't tell him to.”

“That's no way to talk about your own property.”

“This town has been spreading its legs for so long it's become a habit. I don't know why I still bother to grease it, unless it's to watch guys like Cecil Fish clap their flippers and bark. I keep thinking sometime they'll say no. But they never do.” He swung his long face from side to side slowly, as if at some unrelated memory.

“You're expecting too much from guys like Cecil Fish.” I kept my eyes on the guard. His nostrils were the only things moving.

“Not without effort. When you do what I do for as long as I've done it, the easy thing is to think everyone's out for what he can get. Maybe it's this underground office. From down here all you see is dirty feet and crotches. It's why I like to have you around, to freshen the view. It's why I steered the Rayellen Stutch thing your way.”

“That's not why. You knew Mark Proust and I had a history and you could count on him to finish me off when I became inconvenient.”

“I wondered why I hadn't heard from him,” Thorpe said. “You didn't kill him, did you?”

“I couldn't be sure he had a heart, so I shot him in the knee instead. Why'd you have him grab the boy?” Matthew's grip tightened around my thigh.

“I'm looking after him while his mother's in the hospital. He's related to my employer, after all.”

“I guess you got so busy you didn't get around to telling her.”

The guard broke in. “You want to call the cops while I hold him here, Chief?”

Thorpe jingled keys and change in a pocket. It was as close as he came to chewing his lip. “In a minute. Let's go in the office.”

The guard stepped to one side and tilted his head up the corridor. The gray eyes stayed on me.

Matthew didn't budge when I tried to move my leg. I laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it gently. After a second he unlocked his hands and grasped a fistful of my khakis. I followed Thorpe past the elevator, the boy padding silently behind. The guard brought up the rear.

The office, behind another unlabeled door, this one window-less, was twice the size of the bed cells, which didn't make it big. The walls had been painted recently in shades of sherbet, to relieve the bunker atmosphere. It wasn't a success. The low ceiling and the presence of a gray steel desk, five matching file cabinets, and the dank smell of cellars everywhere contributed to the sensation of having been buried alive. Behind the desk, in a slanted console that had been built into the wall, was a row of brightly colored pressure-pads, including a large red one to the right, isolated from the others. These would control the electrical power throughout the plant, including the security floods outside. The red one had to be the main. It was a refinement of the old-fashioned knife switch but no less effective.

Thorpe settled himself into the oak swivel behind the desk with a little sigh. There was nothing on the desk but a telephone and a steel-jacketed microphone on a stand with a toggle switch in the base. He would summon his people over loudspeakers installed throughout the building. From a drawer he drew a homely black automatic with composition grips, a .38 Special, and laid it on top. “If you'd leave us alone, Andy?”

The guard hesitated in the doorway, then withdrew, pulling the door shut behind him. The latch clicked in the steel frame.

“Tell the boy to sit down,” Thorpe said. “Children make me nervous.”

I squeezed Matthew's shoulder again. He didn't want to let go of me, but he didn't struggle when I picked him up under the arms and sat him on a wooden upright chair that looked as if it had been there since the room was furnished. He fidgeted and bounced his legs, but he stayed put, scowling fiercely. He was as scared as scared gets. There were no other chairs, but I wouldn't have used one if one were available. You can't move as quickly from a sitting position.

“I'd offer you a drink, but I quit. Bad stomach.”

I said I'd pick something up on the way home. He showed his teeth again. Then he got out his worn leather case and lit one of his thick black cigars. He flipped the spent match onto the linoleum, where it had company. The room smelled of generations of cheap cigars.

I got what I needed from his sad smile. “Am I going to make a break for it, or try for the gun? I don't guess Andy needs it to be any more complicated than that. He isn't in the game or you'd have let him finish it up out in the hall.”

“Not necessarily. Have you ever heard a shotgun go off indoors? Some of us care about our eardrums.” He tipped a cylinder of gray ash onto the desk. “Trespassing and illegal entry, Walker. A little bit of industrial espionage sprinkled on top, for the boys in the press. I can say Toyota hired you, give the nosebleeds in the State Department something to do with my tax dollars. It'll play. Tokyo's been jumpy ever since the Krauts bought Chrysler.”

“Glad to see you're enjoying yourself. You weren't too thrilled about the project at the start.” I shifted my weight on to my good ankle. I still needed Olympics sponsorship to make the leap across the desk.

“I thought Rayellen was borrowing trouble. The old man took care of the Cecilia Willard situation a long time ago. But I'm a company man, like you said. I follow orders.”

“Who gave the order to snatch the boy?”

That stung him. He took the cigar out of his mouth and aimed a scowl at it as if the tobacco had been sprayed with an inferior grade of insecticide. “When the ball takes a bad hop, you go after it. Nobody was supposed to come out of that wreck. Proust let me down.”

“Says who, Mrs. Stutch? You're saying she wanted the heirs found so she could take them out of the family album.”

“You ought to improve your reading.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
is okay when you're ten. And I stopped working for her right after I handed you the baton. That's when I started preparing for retirement. You want to live? Go back and tell her she can have the boy for ten million.”

“So a kidnap's all it is. Why not twenty?”

“Ten's all I need. I'm getting to be an old man. Anyway she wouldn't pay twenty. She gets thirteen a year. She can scrape by on three through Christmas: clip coupons, go to Aruba in the spring when the rates are better.”

“When I leave the boy goes with me.”

“I figured you'd say that. I had to ask.” He picked up the automatic. He looked genuinely sad.

I said, “You're forgetting Proust. Prison's no fun for cops. He'll deal you like an ace.”

“I'll buy him a good lawyer.”

Matthew said, “I gotta pee.”

“Go in your pants!”

Thorpe glanced away to say it. I scooped the heavy microphone off the desk and slammed it against the side of his head. The impact jarred the switch into the
on
position; feedback squealed through the building. The gun went off. I looked at Matthew. He wasn't hit, but when I looked back the muzzle was swinging around toward me; with one bad ankle I hadn't been able to put all my weight into the blow. I slashed down with the microphone and broke his wrist. His howl joined the electronic squeal and the gun fell to the desk. I missed it on the bounce and it went over the edge and clattered to the floor. I thought it went off again when it hit, but that was Andy banging on the other side of the steel door. In another second or two he'd use the shotgun to blow off the lock. I bent to scoop up the automatic and kicked it under the desk instead.

“Attention! This is Connor Thorpe! Security to the basement! Atten—”

Thorpe's voice rang everywhere. He'd reclaimed the microphone with his good hand and was shouting into it. I smashed my fist into his face. He stopped.