The Shaft (31 page)

    'Any ideas about that?' Her expression said dumb question, I'll wager.

    'I thought you'd never ask.'

    'Wait.' She stayed sly. 'Who says I'm done with you yet?'

    He moved his hand up the curve of her flank, caressing the roundness of her ass, cupping one breast to thumb the nipple, and gathered her hand in his, lacing the fingers and bringing it up to his mouth for a kiss. 'That's nice. You can be my reward, so I'll have incentive.'

    He was off the bed and moving. Time again for him to do something, as opposed to his standard operating procedure. In an eyeblink he felt his life hit the groove and accelerate. This was a streak that could alter all that was bad, and it insisted on being played out.

    'So what about the rope?' She beat him to the bathroom.

    He pulled on a pair of layabout fatigue pants. Where the hell had those been when she'd denuded him? He thought of her sitting on the toilet and hoped not all of him went down the drain. 'I need to hop downstairs for that. Is there anything you need while I'm…?'

    'Mmm.' Her voice resonated against the tilework. 'Maybe just you, inside me, again.'

    That dried up his throat in a hurry. It couldn't have been that good for her. 'Give me a break,' he said, warily.

    'Jonathan.' Again that chastizing tone. 'You made me come, babe. Half the men in the world don't even know what a clitoris is, let alone where it is.'

    She knew this would send him off just brimming over with himself. She needed to keep him high-spirited and energized right now… but not merely to play pawn and retrieve Cruz's stash. His friction and pressure had been filling and good. She could feel her pussy throbbing with each heartbeat. Jonathan had been considerate and capable. Her orgasms had been genuine, though distanced and slightly out of true. She could bring herself off harder and more furiously; still, this had been pleasant. The part she liked the best had been a couple of nights ago when they had just snuggled and slept, even though she could feel his erection and sense the discomfort rolling off him in psychic waves. He was in no hurry. With most clients it had been strip now, fuck now, leave now. Jonathan had been willing to wait, so hesitant that she'd finally had to seduce him, now there was a switcheroo. With tutoring, he had the raw chops to become a hurricane of a bed partner. It might be fun to teach him.

    She heard the apartment doors unbolt, open and close in sequence. Another hot bath might be just the tonic now. The bruises she had acquired were on the wane. She was glad Bauhaus had not chosen to punch her around, as he sometimes enjoyed as part of his humiliation scenarios.

    As she got the hot water going, the bathroom door was nudged open behind her. The skinny black cat slinked in, leaving a wandering line of small, bloody footprints.

    

    

    Even before he got to the basement stairwell Jonathan could see his breath in the air as he moved. He suspected that Fergus the super was not a resident of one of Kenilworth's subterranean cubicles, which were probably too clean for him. He did, however, maintain a seedy downstairs office where Jonathan had put his signature to a one-year lease. The commitment made sense in a metaphysical way: If you stayed here for more than a year, you were trapped; if you were smart, you used that year to better yourself, and escape.

    Jonathan noticed the lights still on in 107, the apartment below his. That would be the old guy who was forever railing against the Jews. Maybe he hit the bottle and hurled junk around once he got sufficiently lubricated. The noise, earlier, had been that sort of disturbance. Now the ruckus had run full course and it was time for sleeping off the injustices of the rotten world at large. Jonathan heard no television going as he passed the door, downward-bound.

    On the first floor someone had put masking tape across the nonworking elevator doors, like a low budget movie's version of a police line.

    The steps turned to stone and the wallboard fell away to the crumbling strata of the building's foundations. Down here were inadequate bare bulbs and more sealed doors embalmed in paint. These latter were chipped, gouged and scored as though some clawed monster had attempted forcible entry. Another door that led who knew where was blocked by warped lumber stacked to one side of the corridor. These smells included paint, solvents, wet rug, mold, sewage, all forming a toxic industrial mulch.

    Jonathan knew Fergus' eyrie to be a crowded junkyard of building maintenance - buckets, tools, boxes of greasy plumbing knicknacks, bags of plaster and patch. He'd had to move a power saw off the desk to sign his papers. The desk was a military job in battle green, all metal and no nonsense. Weighing down the honeycomb of shelves on three sides were cartons of dusty lightbulbs, jars of screws and bolts, a drain snake, paint-clogged trays and rollers, more power tools… and maybe, just maybe something Jonathan could press into service as a climbing line. The weirdest item he had noticed in the office before were two huge twenty-five pound sacks of dog kibble sagging together in one corner. A staple of Fergus' diet, from his aroma.

    The office might also have a secret hatch of some sort, leading to the airshaft. The possibility was enticing but Jonathan was not going to invest too much hope there.

    Far away, but forever ambient, was the noise of Kenilworth. The heartbeat. The ghost. Whatever.

    Jonathan scanned the rest of the corridor, peering around corners as though expecting to be shot at. Nothing.

    He pulled the roll of drafting tape from the pocket of his parka and rapidly smoothed out a crosshatch pattern on the window of Fergus' office door. Then he checked the passage again. More nothing. He planted his elbow sharply into the double-X of tape, dead center. The glass snapped and the tape web sagged quietly into his grasp, laden with trapped fragments. Three more seconds and he was inside.

    Three minutes more, and he was out.

    He took time to stow the taped mass of busted glass in one of the trash dumpsters, which were stationed beyond the laundry room at the far west end of the lot. To get there you used an exterior door that let onto a trench-like breezeway. At about eye-level there was a gap of two feet that permitted a mole's eye view of what Jonathan supposed was a small backyard. Right now the open space between the bottom of the first floor and the excavation of the basement level was plugged up by snow. It was like the inside of a glacier, a frozen tunnel iced solid with leakage and polluted stalactites. It reminded Jonathan of a circular chute in a cave, but of glass, not rock. Light rainbowed off the tessellated, curving veneer of ice. With his shadow blocking one end it would make a great poster for a journey to the center of the earth movie.

    The illusion was spoiled by the crudely lettered sign Fergus had posted on the laundry room door, proclaiming the obvious.

    Jonathan reconsidered all the locked doors down here. No time to jimmy them all in hopes of chancing across a grate or lid leading to the airshaft. Hell, down here he might waste an hour burgling his way into the wrong shaft. Knocking on doors to request neighborly egress had never struck him as an option, let alone an intelligent idea. This was something no one should know about.

    Besides - the climb would impress Jamaica.

    The prize from Fergus' rathole was a pair of figure-eight coils of heavy duty electrical extension cable, 25-footers with grounded plugmold outlets every eight feet. Both were sheathed in groove-textured, bright orange insulation that made the wire more durable and bulked it out to a diameter of half an inch. It had been the strongest, most practical stuff to be stolen from the super's lair.

    The best way to test it would be to unreel it out his window and go outside to hang on it for a moment. This would additionally help him determine whether the lines should be linked end-to-end or braided together. Twenty-five feet, plus his own height, should be the right length unless the shaft was much deeper than the basement floor, which wasn't likely. Some of the length would be used up by knots, anchoring, and play over the bathroom sill. One of these cords were surely adequate to the task of holding his weight.

    

    

    When he re-entered 207 he felt the heat buffet and knew Jamaica had drawn herself a hot bath. He liked the role-reversal. This time, he was clothed and she would be clad in the towel…

    The spoiler he had not foreseen was the amount of blood that would be soaking her towel when he walked in, smiling.

    Blood on her hands.

    When she showed him, the cat on the towel in her lap tried to break, displeased with all this undignified probing and wiping.

    'Jonathan, he walked right into the bathroom; he was just covered in blood…'

    At least one towel was a goner. Jonathan was about to ask if the blood was real; another puerile Jonathan-type question. In such amounts blood looked bogus. A half-tub of hot water steamed, unused. Jamaica would need it; there were even smudges of blood on her face.

    
It ain't my fault. I'm innocent, I tell you.

    'Is he hurt?'

    'Not that I can see. But look here.' She released the animal; at least its paws were clean now. She and Jonathan backtracked along the trail of sticky crimson pawprints to a place four feet from the steam heater.

    There was a vertical slit in the wall near floor level. Semi-coagulated droplets oozed from it.

    'Ho… lee…'

    'Shit. That's what I said.'

    It was as though a careless butcher had carved an arm-sized hole in a side of beef with a dull cleaver. The edges of the cut folded inward. Layers of paint had broken to reveal deeper layers still flexible enough to cling to the folds, curving with them back into darkness.

    Jamaica extended a hand.

    'Don't touch it!' She recoiled before he could smack her hand away. From his drafting box Jonathan got a steel ruler, a cork-backed job that would make a nasty offensive weapon if correctly brandished. He poked the outer edges of the slit. They flinched, shrinking back, splitting new hairlines in the paint and liberating fresher, redder drops of blood.

    The anodized steel sank eight inches before he withdrew it, red now.

    They interrupted each other with assorted biblical and scatological expletives. The hole stayed. The cat rejoined them. Warmer with the humans. It poked its snubbed triangular nose forward to sniff the bloodstuff.

    Jonathan batted it away, angry. Control had been his until this ugliness had reared. He had to say something, mark this anomaly with commentary, to reassure both himself and Jamaica that they weren't hallucinating.

    'Cat showed up bloody the other night, too. Just as bewildered.' He said this in an outpouring of breath more like the admission of some guilty secret. 'I couldn't figure out how he got into the room. The doors were closed. You sure he wasn't in here when I left?'

    'No idea.' Her voice was a whisper. She unwound the towel from her waist, tried to find a clean spot, and blotted her face. 'I just… you know, assumed he was napping in a box or something.'

    'Same here. But what if this was how he got in?'

    All eyes sought the bleeding gash in the wall.
Of course this was not happening. Sure. No way
.

    Her logic circuits still would not accept it. 'No, Jonathan, just look - it's all bloody and moist and confining. No cat would just walk into something like that. They're fussy. They hate getting mussed or wet.'

    'Yeah. But what if it isn't this way on the end where he goes in?'

    'I don't get it.' She looked again.
Uh-uh, no way
.

    ' Jamaica, this isn't a tunnel behind a secret panel. You may not have noticed, but this is an exterior wall we're looking at.'

    He was right. 'Oh. Shit.'

    Now that the offending towel was not manhandling him so fiercely, the cat felt like jabbing at it with one paw. Then he wanted to curl up and snooze on it.

    'Little fuck. Wish he could talk.'

    
No way, Bubs - not with your nude lady friend here.

    He unlatched the for-show brass catch top of the nearest casement and slid the window up. Crumbly sill wood creaked and aged caulking fell loose. The cold hurried greedily in. Pellets of hard snow shot in to sting Jonathan's hands and melt on contact, leaving freezing water to trickle back along his wrists, driven by lashes of wind.

    'Jonathan, for fuck's sake!' Jamaica sprang away and hugged herself as if suffering a bad cramp. She was still unclothed, and not so eager to embrace the elements in all their pissed off Earth Matriach splendor.

    'Yow. Sorry. Listen - you still want to fetch Cruz's little package, then throw on your sweatshirt and help me with this. Please?'

    She knew there was little time, stayed practical and decided not to make a mad, though the power welling up in her alluring green eyes told him it would be easy. 'Okay. What do I do?'

    He was leaning out the window. The storm was incredible. 'First come here and take a look.' His hair was thickly spiced with snow.

    She saw there was no bloody hole on the outside of Kenilwroth Arms, two stories up. The bricks were cold and uniform, braced for future assaults of weather and pollution.

    'I know for a fact the wallboard can't be more than an inch thick, because I knocked out a chunk while I was moving in. The insulation is shit - prewar, and I don't mean Vietnam or Korea. Fire hazards galore in this dump.'

    'I believe it.' Her teeth chattered. Thirty minutes ago she had been so hot on the outside, so warm on the inside, so frisky and wet and eager. Right now was like waking up in a frigid shower. Jonathan closed the window and she let out a gasp of thanks. Sometimes your whole body could goosebump to the point of dermal pain, a core chill that might never burn off.