Parker was the first into the hall, looking to the right and left. Doors on both sides of the hall in both directions, mostly closed, a few standing open. No lights burning up at this level at all. Far down to the right a stairwell, with light shining up, reflecting off the pale green corridor walls, giving light to see by down here.
Parker turned right, and the other two followed, Briley turning the doorknob to be sure the lock wasn’t on, then shutting the door behind them. Keegan carried the one toolkit they still needed.
The flooring was some sort of composition, similar to linoleum; the sneakers they wore made no sounds against it. They walked slowly, leaning slightly forward, their right hands holding the automatics ahead of them and out away from their bodies.
If Morris saw trouble coming now, they were past the point where they could retrace their steps. Morris’s job would be to come in after them and let them know their primary exit was blocked; they had a second exit route planned for, and a third.
The noise was coming up the stairwell almost un diluted by distance. Standing at the top, looking over the rail and down at six flights of brightly lit empty silent metal stairs, hearing the rush of sound coming up there and yet not seeing any living person, you could begin to stop hearing the music as music, but simply as noise. Then it became the workings of some gigantic machine in a pit in the earth, and men who went down into it were chewed and ground and mangled.
“Jesus,” Keegan said. Looking out the eyeholes of the mask, his eyes looked frightened; not by the job they were here to do, but by the noise that was supposed to cover them while they did it.
Parker started down the stairs. Briley came second, and Keegan third.
The walls were plaster, and painted pale green. The stairs had a landing and a U-turn halfway down every flight. At the top floor the stairs had been open, but at the next level down there was a wall, with a green metal fire door. A darker green than the walls. The door was closed.
Parker put his hand on the knob and waited for the other two to come down to him. Then, quickly, he opened the door and stepped through.
One of the notes with the map had said: “One private guard in the hall—armed—always watches show.” He was there, he was watching the show, he never saw Parker and the other two come in at all.
On this floor, there were offices along one side of the corridor only, opposite the stairwell entrance. The other side of the corridor had sections of plate glass at intervals, through which could be seen the main soup bowl of the auditorium. The ceiling of the auditorium, barnacled with lighting equipment, was just above these plate-glass windows, giving the impression that one was viewing from above the auditorium rather than from within it—for the Caesar effect.
It was at one of these windows that the guard was standing. A thin and potbellied man in his fifties, wearing a gray uniform with a gold circular patch on the sleeve, a wood-handled revolver in a holster high up toward the waist on his right side, he was standing there with his hands clasped behind him, head bent forward and down, face in a relaxed expression of blank attention, as though he were daydreaming under cover of the noise. With only space and the one sheet of glass in the way, the sound volume here was very loud, much louder even than in the stairwell.
Parker walked down the corridor toward the guard, Keegan to his left and Briley to his right, forming a triangle shape that filled the width of the hall. They were halfway from the stairwell entrance before their movement attracted the guard’s attention; then he made a startled automatic move toward his revolver. But it was too high on his waist—he’d put it there for the comfort of his potbelly, no doubt—and a leather strap was snapped in place over the top of the holster to keep the revolver from falling out, and the three faceless men walking toward him all had guns already in their hands. And there was no furniture, no handy open doorway, no place to run, no cover to hide behind; nothing but the empty hallway. The guard, looking bitter and angry and disgusted, straightened from the half-crouch he’d naturally moved into, and slowly lifted his hands over his head.
“Put them down,” Parker said. The guard didn’t make out the words through the noise, so Parker went closer and said again, “Put your hands down. Leave them at your sides. Now walk toward us.” When the guard was no longer in front of the glass, Parker said, “Now stop. Turn left. Put your hands on the wall in front of you at head-height. Lean forward. Touch your forehead to the wall.”
The guard managed as far as touching his hatbrim to the wall. Briley came forward and took the revolver out of the holster, having to use two hands to unsnap the leather strap. He put the revolver away in his hip pocket, and took his own automatic out again, then stepped back a pace.
Parker said, “All right. Straighten up. Turn around. Good.”
Briley took the two-way radio from the guard’s left shirt pocket and backed up next to Parker again. The guard was looking more disgusted by the second.
Parker said, “What’s your name?”
The guard frowned at him, not understanding the reason for the question, but he answered it: “Dockery.”
“First name.”
“Patrick.”
“Do they call you Patrick or Pat?”
“When it’s bums like you,” the guard said bitterly, “they call me Mr. Dockery.”
Briley, grinning, said, “Ah, Paddy Dockery, you talk mighty big when it’s three against one. You know you’re safe from us. I’d like to see you in a fair fight.”
Dockery gave him a brooding look. “You’ll laugh out of the other side of your face,” he said.
“All right, Dockery,” Parker said. “Turn around. . Walk slowly to the men’s room.”
The four of them made a small silent procession, out of phase with the beat of the music surrounding them. Dockery passed four doors on his left side, and turned toward the fifth, reaching his hand out to the knob.
Parker said, “If you open that door, I’ll kill you and everybody the other side of it. I said the men’s room.”
Dockery’s hand hesitated, an inch from the knob. His shoulders were tensed to reject the bullet, but in the end he leaned back from the door and his hand dropped to his side. Not turning to look at Parker, he said, “It’s not my own life I was thinking of.”
“I know that,” Parker said. This was one of his specialties, as electricity was one of Keegan’s specialties and driving was one of Morris’s. Rare is the high-number robbery that isn’t cluttered up with people—bank customers or armored-car guards or store clerks or whatever. One of Parker’s specialties was handling the people, which meant keeping them quiet, making sure none of them got killed, making sure none of them loused up the routine. The last was the most important, and the others would be sacrificed to it, if necessary, though a neat job was always better.
Parker was now handling the person called Patrick Dockery. Dockery was a proud and prickly man, and what he would be feeling now was mostly humiliation. He was the kind who would take almost any sort of damn-fool risk, would even throw his life away, to erase humiliation. He would open the wrong door, he might even turn and attack three armed men. He had to be handled until he’d been successfully maneuvered into the privacy of the men’s room, where he could be physically restrained. Out here in the hall, it meant giving him his respect back, easing his sense of humiliation. By letting him wise off, and by acknowledging that it really had been other people’s lives he’d been thinking of when he’d moved his hand back from that doorknob. Parker was treating his foolhardiness as though it were worthy of respect; if he had judged his man right, Dockery would respond by being good and doing what he was told.
As he did. He led them now to the right room, and all four trooped inside, around the green metal wall divider just inside the door and into the main open green-tiled square of the room itself, where Parker said, “Take off the uniform.”