He crawled to a spot paralleling the next building in line.
Lifted his head quickly.
Saw a door painted green.
Ducked his head.
Waited.
Lifted it again. Saw numerals over the door, nothing else, no sign, no anything. An apartment building. Meaning steps going up to the roof. He hoped.
Ducked again.
Waited.
He crawled several buildings down the street, staying close to the snowbank, and then he took a deep breath, counted to three, and scrambled over the side of the bank as if it were a suspect hill in Vietnam except that over there he’d have had a hand grenade in his fist. He landed on his feet and on the run, sprinting for the green door, which he now saw was slightly ajar, flattening himself against the side of the building to the right of the door. He shot a quick, almost unconscious glance upward toward the roof, saw nothing in the moonlight, and shoved the door fully open.
The entrance vestibule was dark and cold.
He closed the door behind him.
Or, at least, tried to close it. There was something wrong with the hinge, the door would not fully seat itself in the jamb. He gave it up for a lost cause, went to the closed inner door just past the doorbells and mailboxes, and tried the knob.
The door was locked. He backed away from it at once, raised his knee, and kicked out flatfooted at a point just above the knob.
“Ow!” he yelled. “You son of a bitch!”
The door hadn’t budged an inch.
Still swearing, he moved over to where the doorbells were set under the mailboxes. At random, he selected the doorbell for apartment 2A, rang the doorbell, waited, waited, waited and got nothing. The sole of his foot was sending out flashing signals of pain. He wondered if it was possible to break the sole of your foot. He rang another doorbell. A voice came instantly from a speaker on the wall. The voice said something in Chinese. Michael said, “Police, open the door, please.” An answering buzz sounded at once.
Pleased with himself, Michael opened the door and was starting toward the steps when another door opened at the end of the little cul de sac to the right of the staircase. A short, very fat Chinese man wearing a tank-top undershirt, black trousers, and black slippers, stepped out into the hallway, squinted toward where Michael was standing, and yelled, “Wassa motta?”
“Nothing,” Michael said.
“You police?” the man yelled.
“Yes.”
“Me supahtennin.”
“Go back to sleep,” Michael said. “This is routine.”
“Where you badge?”
“I’m undercover,” Michael said.
The man blinked.
“Wah you wann here?” he asked.
“There’s a sniper on the roof,” Michael said.
“I go get key,” the man said, nodding.
“What key?”
“For loof,” the man said, and went back into his apartment.
Michael waited. He did not want a partner. On the other hand, his foot still hurt and he didn’t want to have to try kicking in another door. He suddenly wondered if in real life it was possible to kick in a door the way detectives did in the movies and on television. He knew it wasn’t possible in real life to slam a car into another car and just go on your merry way. Teenagers saw a car chase in a movie, they thought, Hey terrific, I can run into el pillars and concrete mixers and I’ll just bounce right off them like a rubber ball, that should be great fun. That same teenager got a drink or two in him, he decided he was a big-city detective in a car chase. He rammed his car into a bus, expecting either the bus would roll over on its back or else his car would bounce off it like in the movies and the next thing you knew a real-life steering wheel was crushing his chest or his head was going through a real-life windshield. Michael suddenly wondered if Sylvester Stallone had ever been to Vietnam.
“Okay, I gotta key,” the man said, and came out into the hallway, and pulled the door to his apartment shut behind him. To Michael’s dismay, the man had taken off his slippers and put on socks and high-topped boots that looked like combat boots. He had also put on a shirt and a heavy Mackinaw and a woolen stocking cap.
They climbed the steps to the fourth floor and then up another short flight of steps to a metal door. Nodding, flapping his hands, turning the key on the air, shaping his other hand into a gun, Michael’s guide and new partner indicated that this was indeed the door to the roof and that he was now going to open the door to the roof, so if Michael was a real cop and there was a real sniper out there maybe he should take out a gun or something. Obligingly, Michael took out a gun. The one he had taken from Crandall, which upon inspection had turned out to be a .32 caliber Harrington and Richardson Model 4, double-action revolver.
“Ahhhhhh,” the man said, and nodded. He liked the gun. He showed Michael the key again, and then inserted it into the padlock that hung from a hinge and hasp on the metal door, and as if performing a magic trick, he turned the key and opened the padlock, and grinned and nodded at Michael. Michael nodded back. The Chinese man took the padlock off the hasp, and then moved aside. If there really was a sniper out there, he wasn’t going to be the first one to step out onto the roof. He almost bowed Michael out ahead of him.
“You stay here,” Michael said.
“More cops,” the man said, and nodded. “I call more cops.”
“No!” Michael said. “No more cops. This is undercover.”
The man looked at him.
“What’s your name?” Michael asked.
“Peter Chen,” the man said.
“Mr. Chen, thank you very much,” Michael said, “the city is proud of you. But you can go back down, thank you,” Michael said. “Good-bye, Mr. Chen, thank you.”
“I come with you,” Chen said.
Michael looked at him.
Chen smiled.
Michael sighed in resignation, opened the door, and stepped quickly out onto the roof. He paused for a moment, getting his new bearings, trying to work out where he was in relationship to Connie’s building, where the sniper was. Because once he did that, the rest would be simple. The buildings here were all joined side by side, there were no airshafts to leap, it would merely be a matter of climbing the parapets that separated one rooftop from the next. So if the cross street was here, then Connie’s street was there, and he’d have to go over this rooftop and then the next one to the corner—
“What you do?” Chen asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“Ahhhhh.”
—and then make a left turn and continue on over the rooftops till he came to the middle of the block somewhere. Long before then, on a clear moonlit night like tonight, he’d have seen the sniper. The trick was to make sure the sniper didn’t see him. Or his new friend, Chen, who was now behind him and staying very close as he made his way across the roof toward—
“I see nobody,” Chen said.
“Give it time,” Michael whispered. “And keep it down.”
The snow had drifted some four feet high in places. It was almost impossible to tell where one rooftop ended and the next began. He discovered the first parapet only by banging into it. He climbed over it, Chen close behind him, and was working his way laboriously through the snow toward the corner where the buildings joined at a right angle when he saw up ahead—
He signaled with his hand, palm down and patting the air.
Chen got the meaning at once, and dropped immediately flat to the snow.
Michael raised his head.
There.
He squinted into the distance. Someone in black. Crouching behind the parapet facing the street. Rifle in his hands.
“Stay here,” he whispered to Chen.
Chen nodded.
Michael began creeping forward.