have been in shape for this.
He had given his leg more punishment tonight than it ordinarily received
in a year. Now he was paying in pain for five years of inactivity.
“Don’t slow down,” Connie said. “Trying not to.”
“Use the rail as much as you can. Pull yourself along.
“How r are we going?”
“One more floor.”
“Eternity.
“After that we’ll switch back to the elevator shaft.”
He liked the ladder in the shaft better than he did the stairs.
On the ladder he could use his good leg and pull with both hands to keep
nearly all of his weight off the other leg. But on the stairs, if he
didn’t use the lame leg at all, he would have to hop from one step to
the other; and that was too slow.
“One more flight,” she said encouragingly.
Trying to surprise himself, trying to cover a lot of ground before the
pain transmitted itself from leg to brain, he put on a burst of speed,
staggered up ten steps as fast as he could. That transformed the pain
into agony. He had to slow down, but he kept moving.
Bollinger stood on the landing, listening for sound in the south
stairwell.
Nothing.
He looked over the railing. Squinting, he tried to see through the
layers of darkness that filled the spaces between the landing.
Nothing.
He went back into the hall and ran toward the north stairs.
Billy drove into the alley. His car made the first tracks in the new
snow.
A forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-deep service courtyard lay at the back of
the Bowerton Building. Four doors opened onto it. One of these was a
big green garage door, where delivery could be taken on office furniture
and other items too large to fit through the public entrance.
A sodium vapor lamp glowed above the green door, casting a harsh light
on the stone walls, on the rows of trash bins awaiting pickup in the
morning, and on the snow; the shadows were sharply drawn.
There was no sign of Bollinger.
Prepared to leave at the first indication of trouble, Billy backed the
car into the courtyard. H’e switched off the headlights but not the
engine. He rolled down his window, just an inch, to keep the glass from
steaming up.
iss When Bollinger didn’t come out to meet him, Billy looked at his
watch. .
Clouds of dry snow swirled down the alley in front of him. In the
courtyard, out of the worst of the wind, the snow was relatively
undisturbed.
Most nights, squad cars conducted random patrols of poorly lighted back
streets like this one, always on the lookout for business-district
burglars with half-filled vans, muggers with half-robbed victims, and
rapists with half-subdued women. But not tonight. Not in this weather.
The city’s uniformed patrolmen would be occupied elsewhere. The
majority of them would be busy cleaning up after the usual foul-weather
automobile accidents, but as much as a third of the evening shift would
be squirreled away in favorite hideouts, on a side street or in a park;
they would be drinking coffee-in a few cases, something stronger-and
talking about sports and women, ready to go to work only if the radio
dispatcher insisted upon it.
Billy looked at his watch again. 10:04.
He would wait exactly twenty-six minutes. Not one minute less, and
certainly not one more. That was what he had promised Dwight.
Once again, Bollinger reached the elevator shaft just as it was filled
with the sound of another door closing on it.
He bent over the railing, looked down. NOthing but other railings,
other platforms, other emergency light bulbs, and a lot of darkness.
Harris and the woman had gone.
I” He was tired of playing hide-and-seek with them, of dashing from
stairwell to stairwell to shaft. He was sweating profusely.
Under his overcoat, his shirt clung to him wetly. He left the platform,
went to the elevator, activated it with a key, pushed the button marked
“Lobby.”
On the ground level, he took off his heavy overcoat and dropped it
beside the elevator doors. Sweat trickled down his neck, down the
center of his chest. He didn’t remove his gloves. With the back of his