Graham's blue eyes were not as wide with fear as they had been; they had
narrowed with calculation. In spite of himself, the will to survive was
flowering in him; the first signs of the old Graham Harris were becoming
visible, pushing through his shell of fear.
He said, "Eventually, he'll realize what we've done. It'll buy us only
fifteen minutes or so."
"Time to think of another way out," she said. "Come on, Graham.
We're wasting too much time. He'll be on this floor any second now."
Less reluctantly than the first time, but still without enthusiasm, he
followed her into the elevator shaft.
On the platform he said, "You go first. I'll bring up the rear, so I
won't knock you off the ladder if I fall."
For the same reason, he had insisted on going first when they descended.
She put her arms around him, kissed him, then turned and started to
climb.
As soon as he got off the elevator on the twentyseventh floor, Bollinger
investigated the stairs at the north end of the building.
They were deserted ' He ran the length of the corridor and opened the
door to the south stairs. He stood on the landing for almost a minute,
listening intently for movement. He heard none.
In the corridor again, he searched for an unlocked office door until he
realized they might have gone back into the elevator shaft.
He located the maintenance supply room; the red door was ajar.
He approached it cautiously, as before. He was opening the door all the
way when the shaft beyond was filled with the sound of another door
closing on it.
On the platform, he bent over the railing. He stared down into the
vertiginous depths, wondering which one of the doors they had used.
How many floors had they gained on him?
Dammit!
Cursing aloud, overcoat flapping around his legs, Bollinger went back to
the south stairs to listen for them.
By the time they had climbed two flights on the north stairs, Graham was
wincing with each step. From sole to hip, pain coruscated through his
bad leg. In anticipation of each jolt, he tensed his stomach. Now his
entire abdomen ached. If he had continued to work out and climb after
his fall on Mount Everest, as the doctors had urged him to do, he would
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
left hand and then with his shirt sleeve he wiped his dripping forehead.
Out of sight of anyone who might come to the street doors, he leaned
against the marble wall at the end of the offset that contained the four
banks of elevators. From that position, he could see two white doors
with black stenciled letters on them, one at the north end and one at
the south end of the lobby. These were the exits from the stairwells.
When Harris and the woman came through one of them, he would blow their
goddamned brains out. Oh, yes. With pleasure.
Hobbling along the fortieth-floor corridor toward the light that came
from the open reception-room door of the Harris Publications suite,
Harris saw the fire-alarm box. It was approximately nine inches on a
side, set flush with the wall. The metal rim was painted red, and the
face of it was glass.
He couldn't imagine why he hadn't thought of this before.
ILS7 Ahead of him, Connie realized that he had stopped.
"What's the matter?"
"Look here."
She came back.
"If we set it off," Graham said, "it'll bring the security guards up
from downstairs."
"If they aren't dead."
"Even if they are dead, it'll bring the fire department on the double.
Bollinger will have the crimps put to him.