Grace put her elbows on his counter, thrusting out her butt and languidly blowing smoke in his face.
“I is invited, honey.” She had a slightly husky voice.
She could see past Emery’s thick waist to the basement monitor. Runyan opened the loading door and entered boldly. She leaned closer yet, giving Emery the news all the way to her navel. As Runyan walked over to the freight elevator and pushed the button, Grace pointed at the house phone with a very long synthetic purple nail.
“Why don’t you phone up the man and find out? Apartment... two three seven.”
What sort of business would the Rotzels have with this sort of woman at almost two in the morning? The old man was a deacon of the Baptist church, for Pete’s sake.
“This time of night...” Emery began, letting it hang.
Grace moved her cleavage closer; across the lobby, the elevator indicator glowed as the cage descended to Runyan.
“It was a urgent phone call, shugah,” she said. “I swear I think that man was watching a dirty movie, and he’s got his motor running, you know what I mean...”
Emery knew what she meant: he could feel his dork pushing out against the heavy twill uniform pants. Jesus, what would it be like to put the old banana into something like that?
He unconsciously blew out a deep breath and picked up the house phone and tapped out two three seven. On the monitors, the elevator door opened and Runyan stepped through, disappearing from the basement screen to be instantly picked up by the adjacent elevator camera. Grace could hear an angry squawking voice on the phone. Hurry, Runyan, damn you!
Emery said unhappily into the phone, “This is Emery on the lobby desk downstairs. I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but there’s a young lady here who says—” He broke off to listen to more squawks, finally said, “I know what time it is, sir, I surely do, but she says you wanted—”
Grace, watching Runyan spring up and knock open the elevator ceiling trap, reached across the counter to grab the phone out of Emery’s hand.
“Lemme talk to him,” she said, then said into the phone, “Listen, buster, you phone up an say you needs an around the world, bad. Now what’s this shit about—”
“Who is this?” demanded a high scratchy man’s voice. “How dare you use language like that to me? My wife and I are Christian people who—”
“So you got your old lady there; so I takes care of her too,” said Grace, winking at the openmouthed Emery. “All it’ll cost you is an extra fifty—”
“I’m going to call the police and report you!” shrieked the man on the phone. On the monitor, Runyan was tossing his stuff bag up through the ceiling trap. In front of her, Emery was starting to turn toward the monitors. Grace quickly thrust the phone back into his hands.
“Man wanta talk to you.”
On the monitor, Runyan crouched for his leap.
On the phone, the confused Emery said, “I... I’m real sorry, Mr. Rotzel, I didn’t know she was going to—”
“Rotzel?”
Grace reached over and broke the connection in midword. Behind Emery, Runyan leaped up and grabbed the edges of the trap.
“Rotzel ain’t the name of the dude phone up! What’s this here address?”
“Uh... twelve forty-two Bonington—”
“Sheeit, shugah, I got the wrong building!”
Grace winked at Emery and swiveled her way toward the door, her exaggerated hip swing holding his lusting eyes long enough for Runyan to disappear through the trap in the elevator ceiling. As the door closed behind Grace, Emery wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead and whirled belatedly to check the monitors. Everything was serene, nothing moving anywhere.
Standing on the roof of the elevator cage, Runyan took a pair of odd-looking clamplike things called Jumar ascenders from his black nylon stuff bag and fitted them to the cable about eighteen inches apart. They had rope slings that hung about three feet below them. The clock was really running now. Runyan put his feet in the slings and, stuff bag clipped to his belt, began walking himself up the cable.
Under the street two blocks away. Taps Turner was moving cautiously along one of the utility access tunnels by the light of a tiny powerful halogen-bulb flashlight. He set down his electrician’s kit in front of a switch box bolted to one wall and used his pry bar to break the padlock hasp. Inside the hinged cover were rows of engaged knife switches. He began to compare the interior layout of the box with a wiring diagram, humming a Lionel Richie love ballad softly under his breath.
Louise drove the Cougar while, beside her, Grace wiped the makeup off her face with a wad of Kleenex. Both women were laughing at her tale of Emery’s wandering eyes and bulging pants.
In the elevator shaft, Runyan grunted his way upward. The air was close and smelled of hot metal and lubricating oil. Runyan’s movements were crisp, executed without hesitation. He had to be exact because he had no “protection” in place — he was working without a safety line. The strength of his grip on the Jumars and the sureness of his feet in the slings were his only insurance against falling as he practiced this mild form of... what? Masochism? Maybe self-abuse. His body was sure feeling abused as he used the Jumars to climb the cable.
Endlessly.
He rested a moment, panting, tipped his head back to look up into the dimness of the shaft. The big wheels over which the cables ran still seemed a long way up.
He went into the fugue state he had perfected while practicing gymnastics at Q, trying to pass the endless hours of confinement. One of the prison survival skills you never heard about was infinite patience. He had learned it.
What was Louise doing right now? He checked his watch. Still driving around; she wouldn’t park the car near the other condo’s underground-garage entrance until about five minutes before he was scheduled to be coming out.
He shoved a Jumar up the cable, and it rapped against the rim of the grooved wheel over which the cable passed.
He’d made it!
Runyan grabbed the nearest spoke of the wheel, made sure of his grip, then carefully disengaged his feet from the Jumar slings to swing his legs up and hook them around the wheel rim.
Hanging backward under it like a sloth under a branch, he removed the Jumars from the cable with his free hand, clipped them to carabiners threaded on his belt. Then he merely climbed the spokes of the massive wheel so he could step onto the metal grid-work service platform.
The housing door, as on the diagram he had studied, opened out onto the blacktopped roof of the building. He stopped for a few moments, massaging tautness from his arms while gulping fresh night air. Still on time, he negotiated the mini-obstacle course of capped chimneys and vents toward the edge of the building that faced the twin high rise a hundred feet away.
On the inside of the four-foot-high concrete parapet was a sign held to the wall with cement screws: DANGER — HIGH TENSION. He bent across the top of the low wall to look down.
Bingo. A very thick black power cable ran along the outside of the building five feet below, did a right angle through a terminal box, and stretched away into the darkness toward Brother Blood’s building. Right where it was supposed to be.
Runyan checked his watch again, unclipped the stuff bag from his belt, set it on the roof, and took out one of the climbers’ lights known as break-’em-shake-’ems. He bent it into a horseshoe around his neck; it glowed with a soft cool green light like Darth Vader’s sword. Break-’em-shake-’ems left the hands free, a vital factor in rock climbing.