Richard Stark
(Donald E Westlake)
Deadly Edge (1971)
PART ONE
Up here, the music was just a throbbing under the feet, a distant pulse. Down below, down through the roof, through and beneath the offices, down in the amphitheater shaped like a soup bowl, the crowd was roaring and pounding and yelling down at the four musicians in the bottom of the bowl. The musicians scooped up the roars coming in at them, pushed them through electric guitars and amplifiers, and sent back howls of sound that dwarfed the noise of the crowd, till the roaring was like a blast of heat on the face. But up here it was no more than a continuing throb in the gravelly surface of the roof.
Parker raised the ax over his head and swung it hard down into the tarred surface of the roof. Thop went the ax. Parker and the two men beside him heard clearly the sound of the ax, but even as close by as the man on lookout at the fire escape, the sound was lost.
“That’ll take all night,” Keegan said, but Keegan was a nay-sayer and no one ever listened to him.
Parker lifted the ax again, swung it again, twisted it slightly as it struck, and this time a touch of more amber color showed through the tar and graveclass="underline" wood.
Parker moved to the left, so his next slice would be across the first two, and lifted the ax again. He was a big man, blocky and wide, with heavy hands roped across the backs with veins. His head was square, ears flat to the skull, hair thin and black. His face had a bony rough-cut look, as though the sculptor hadn’t come back to do the final detail work. He was wearing black sneakers, black permanent-press slacks, and a black zippered nylon jacket; the jacket was reversible, light blue on the other side, and under it he was wearing a white shirt and a blue-and-gold tie. Cheap brown cotton work gloves were on his hands, and on the hands of the other three.
It was spring, a dry but cloudy night, the temperature in the low fifties. It was ten minutes past midnight; down below, the Saturday midnight show was building toward crescendo. The final show at the old Civic Auditorium. Monday the wreckers would arrive. From up here on the roof, the poured-concrete flying-saucer shape of the new auditorium could be seen on Urban Renewal-cleared land half a dozen blocks away.
Keegan said, “I don’t like it up here.” A stocky man, just under average height, Keegan had thick dry brown hair and the outraged expression of a barroom arguer. He, too, was dressed in dark clothing; he kept forgetting about the gloves on his hands, starting to put his hands in his pockets—each time he would suddenly remember, look startled, and then shake his head in irritation with himself.
Each time Parker swung the ax now, more wood showed. There was over an inch of tarpaper and tar and stones on top of the wood, and the ax blade was getting streaked black with tar. After half a dozen swings with the ax, Parker had exposed a chopped-up section of wood about the size and shape of a footprint. After his seventh swing, Briley said, “Let me have a whack at it,” and Parker handed over the ax and stepped back out of the way.
Briley was tall, but lean, and spoke with the hill accent of Tennessee. His face was deeply lined, more than it should have been in a man his age, and the lines were black, as though they’d been drawn on with charcoal. Briley had been two things earlier in his life—fat and a miner —but since the nine days he’d spent underground after a cave-in, he’d been neither. He swung the ax now hard and mean, as though it were Appalachia he was chopping.
Parker stood and watched, his hands dangling loose at his sides. When in motion, he looked tough and determined and fast, but when waiting, when at rest, he looked inert and lifeless.
Keegan went over to talk to Morris, the man sitting on the low wall at the edge of the roof, his arm carelessly draped over the curving top rail of the fire escape. Parker could hear the querulous sound of Keegan’s voice, but not the words. Morris, a young, soft-looking man with slumped shoulders, was also their driver. His quiet nondescript voice filled the small spaces left by Keegan’s. Morris had the calm and even temper of a man who doesn’t care about anything. He was a pothead, and he’d dabbled in the harder drugs, but not while working; Parker had made sure of that ahead of time.
Briley made a dozen fast mean slashes at the roof with the ax, extending the area of the chopped-up exposed wood to about the size of a mess-hall tin, and then Parker called, “Keegan, come take your turn.”
“I’m coming.” Even that sounded querulous.
Morris sat up straighten on the wall and called, “You want me to take a turn?”
“You just keep an eye down below.”
“Somebody else could watch for me.”
“It’s better to keep one man on watch,” Parker said, and turned his back so Morris wouldn’t argue any more. He’d learned long ago that in dealing with men, it was always best to curb impatience and give them explanations, but he’d also learned that explanations could go on forever if they weren’t cut off.
Briley took one more hack at the roof, then reluctantly turned over the ax to Keegan. Stepping back, grinning, wiping his forehead with the back of one hand, Briley said, “That’s a good workout.”
Keegan hesitated a minute, holding the ax across his body at thigh-height with both hands, making sure he had his feet set right. But he swung hard and clean, and he knew to twist the handle as the blade went in.
After the first stroke, he said, “We’ll be at this till morning.” The next swing, the ax blade sank on through the wood and almost knocked him off-balance.
“Hold it,” Parker said. Keegan pulled the ax out and stood back watching, and Parker went down on one knee beside the hole. He took off his right glove and picked away some splinters of wood, then felt around underneath with the tips of his fingers. Nodding, he got to his feet again and said, “There’s a space under. Chop the hole a little bigger, but don’t go straight down. We don’t know about wiring.”
Keegan bent over the hole, gripping the ax near the blade with his right hand and halfway down the handle with his left. Using short chops, he sliced away at the gouged wood, opening a hole the size of a coffee-container lid, then stopping.
“Bigger than that,” Parker said. “We’ve got to be able to see in there.”
“I think I’m hitting a two-by-twelve here on the right. I’ll go the other way.”
The other three watched him, and Keegan bent low over his work, chopping six inches from his feet. He opened a hole as big around as a guard’s hat, and then stepped back again.
“I’ll get the flashlight,” Briley said. There were two metal toolkits on the roof out of the way, and Briley went to them and opened the one on the left.
Parker went down on one knee again, picked away the splinters from around the edge of the hole, and when Briley brought him the flashlight he bent low over the hole to shield the light while he looked inside.
The tar had been laid down on tarpaper, which had been tacked to wooden planks. The planks, Parker now saw, had been laid across two-by-twelve joists sixteen inches apart. A ceiling of planks was fastened across the underpart of the joists, closing this space off. There was neither electric wiring nor insulation anywhere to be seen.
Parker switched off the flashlight and got to his feet. “I think we’ve got an extra level to go through.”
“There’s always some damn thing,” Keegan said.
“I can use the workout,” Briley said.
Parker took the ax and took full swings, clearing the tar out of a wider area, bounded by the joists underneath. Keegan went back over to complain to Morris some more, but Briley stood impatiently waiting for Parker to be finished with his turn at the ax.
Briley ended the job at this level, swiping the ax down sideways, as though playing golf, stripping wood away even with the joist-edge on both sides. Then he and Parker pulled all the shards and splinters out of the hole.