Mallon took off his jacket and pressed it against a windowpane near the latch to muffle the sound while he broke the glass with the butt of one of his pistols. Then he raised the window and climbed inside. He collected a lantern and a box of matches from the table, and went outside.
The walk to the second building was at least two hundred yards. Beside it was a wooden tower that he had mistaken for a big tree from a distance in the dark. It was on a ridge overlooking a dry riverbed that had been outfitted as a firing range. There were barrows of earth bulldozed up some distance away, where he could just make out a row of posts with white squares that were probably targets on them, and at one side, a wind sock. He knew what that was for. When he had been a boy shooting on the family farm, he had put one up himself, because the targets were far enough away so that on some days it had been necessary to adjust for the wind.
He stepped up to the garage-like building and examined it. The walls were painted the same color as the others, but now he could see that they were made of cinder blocks. He had a suspicion, a hope that he was right about what this building might be. He quickly walked around the building, looking for windows. The fact that there were none raised his hopes higher. When he reached the door and touched it, he was almost sure: the door was steel. This was the logical place to store the things they needed for the range: paper targets, the machinery for the pop-up combat targets, bench rests, spotting scopes. But maybe, just maybe, there would be other things inside that he could use.
Mallon examined the door closely. It opened inward so the hinges were not accessible, and there were three dead bolts set about a foot apart, so the door would be impossible for one man to batter in. The only way he could imagine opening it was with a cutting torch or a concrete saw. The cinder-block-and-mortar walls were impervious to anything he could do without tools.
He looked up and judged the distance between the spotting tower and the building. It was about eight feet, but the tower was a bit higher than the building’s roof. He climbed the ladder to the tower platform and looked again. It seemed a bit farther than it had from the ground, but he reminded himself that he had made his judgment before fear had added a few feet. He climbed up to the rail, bending to stay under the roof of the tower, and held on to one of its supports. He took a breath, and jumped.
He hit the roof of the building about halfway up, then dug hard with his toes and scrambled with his hands to keep from sliding off. After a moment he was able to stop himself, then lie on his belly with his toes holding him there. He took out his pocketknife.
Amateurs who wanted to make a building secure often overlooked a single design problem, and he was lying on it now. A composition shingle roof was designed to keep out the rain, not intruders. He used his knife to help him pry up short roofing nails so he could pull shingles from the roof. He went at it patiently, tugging off shingles and leaving the tarpaper beneath until he could feel the long line where two sheets of plywood met. He stripped the tarpaper off to expose the nails.
He dug into the wood around each of the nail heads with a cutting blade, just deep enough to get a purchase with the bottle-opener blade, then pry the nail up a bit. He went to his knees, put both hands under the sheet, and lifted. There was a creak, and the sheet of plywood came up. It acted as a lever to bend and partially extract the nails on the other edge, so he didn’t need to remove them. He held the sheet up like an open door and looked down into the building. It was too dark to see anything in the windowless space below.
Mallon took out the box of matches he had taken from the other building, struck one, and lowered it into the space as far as his arm would reach. The bare concrete floor was about twelve feet below him. He was fairly confident that he could drop straight down and not hurt himself, but even more certain that he would not be able to get back out. The match burned close to his fingers. He turned its head upward so that it would not burn him, then in a few seconds had to let it drop. Just before it went out, he saw the distinctive color of fresh pine board.
He lit a second match and stared at the spot to be sure he had not imagined it. He dropped that match too, lowered himself into the hole in the roof until he was hanging by both hands from the lowest edge, then let go. He fell longer than he had expected to, but managed to land on his toes, bend his knees, and fall sideways to break the impact.
Mallon collected himself, stood, and lit a third match. There was another lantern on the shelf in front of him, so he lifted the chimney, lit it, and blew out his match. He raised the lantern and looked around him. First he studied the inner side of the door: the dead bolts required a key.
Shelves along the near wall held the things he had expected to see: paper targets of various sizes with black bull’s-eyes, a pile of cutouts in human shape that had been shot through many times and patched and painted, more glue and patches, a few spotting scopes and binoculars in leather cases, a bore-sighting kit, a whole shelf of cleaning kits with rods, rags, solvent, and gun oil. He moved closer to the shelf that held the binoculars. There was one set that seemed to have a single eyepiece, but not like a spotting scope. He took it off the hook where it hung, and removed the leather case. It was a night-vision scope. He turned it on and looked through the eyepiece, but it didn’t work, so he opened the battery compartment and saw that the batteries had been removed. After a short search of the shelves, he found some batteries, inserted them, and tried the scope again. The eyepiece shone with a bright green glow. He hung the scope around his neck and held the lantern up toward the opposite wall.
In the light he saw a wooden rack that held five bolt-action hunting rifles. He came closer. They looked like the Remington Model 70 rifles he and his father had used at home when he’d been a boy, but these had polymer stocks and three-to-nine-power scopes attached. When he examined the receiver of the nearest one, it said MODEL 710. They must be what the shooting instructors used to teach the clients marksmanship. He looked to his right along a long, narrow workbench. There were two boxes of. 30-06 ammunition. He nodded to himself as he looked around him at his discoveries. The room was an arsenal, a workshop, a storehouse. But it contained nothing that would convict anybody of anything.
He thought about the people behind the lighted windows in the building on the other side of the hill. They had corrupted and destroyed Catherine and Diane. They had murdered Lydia. They had trained killers, then sent them after Mallon too. They were staying up late tonight, undoubtedly discussing other ways of isolating Robert Mallon far from here and killing him cleverly and entertainingly. After they finished with Mallon, they would train other killers to go after other victims. He could not let them do that. He had to keep looking.
CHAPTER 32
As soon as Mallon found the tool box, he set to work. Getting a way out of this building was his first task. He sorted through the pile of lumber, selected the few pieces he needed, and laid them out on the floor. He did not want to risk doing any hammering, so he used a hand drill and some screws to attach eight short pieces to one board and construct a crude ladder that was long enough to reach from the floor to the hole in the roof. He leaned it there to keep it out of his way, then examined the row of rifles.
There was a chain that had been run through the trigger guards to the metal rack and attached with a padlock, but the padlock was too small to present much resistance. He set a big screwdriver at the end of the loop, hit it once with the hammer, and popped it open. Mallon took two of the rifles out of the rack, then poured the boxes of bullets into his trouser pockets. He took the last three rifles from the gun rack, removed each of the bolts, hid them on a shelf behind some paint cans, extinguished his lantern, and carried it with his two rifles up onto the roof. He pulled his ladder up after him, ran it down the outside of the building, and climbed down to the grass with his finds.