The amateur might be in there. He might be anywhere inside that pile of brick and glass, or he might be gone from this area entirely.
Parker wanted him. He wanted that bastard the way Negli had wanted Parker. Not because there was any sense in it anymore, but only because the amateur, alive, was a loose end.
It was the amateur who had soured the sweet job, bringing in his own extraneous problems, killing for no sensible reason, taking money that should have been safe, running around wild and causing trouble with everybody, attracting the attention of the law.
There was no profit in killing him, but Parker was going to kill him anyway. He was going to kill him because he couldn’t possibly just walk away and leave the bastard alive.
But that didn’t mean he had to get like Negli, stupid and careless.
It would be full night soon, and that was bad. Night was the amateur’s ally, covering his blunders, obstructing Parker’s movements. If the thing was to be done, it should be done now.
He moved out across the dead plain, moving light and fast on the balls of his feet, watching the building, ready to jump in any direction. If the amateur was in there, and watching, and waiting for a good shot, that was all right. Parker would give him one shot to find out exactly where he was. He could count on the bastard to miss the first time.
But there was no shot. He came all the way across the plain and up to the building itself and there, was no sound, no movement.
This was the back of the building. Windows stretched away to left and right, reflecting with distortions the plain and the forest and the red circle of the sun beginning now to sink behind the western horizon. A few gray metal doors we’re snugly in place here and there along the rear wall, implying basements, furnaces, all the utilities needed for a bulging building like this one.
No sound, no movement.
But over to the right a window was smashed in. These were all permanent windows, fixed in place without any way to open them, meaning the building would be centrally the. Over to the right, one of these windows had been smashed in, and every last piece of glass knocked out of the aluminum frame.
So a man could crawl through without cutting himself.
A sound, a tiny scratch, made him look up.
Glinting like a phantom airship, slender, square, fast and murderous, a sheet of plate glass knifed down through the air at him, whistling. Highlights sparkled from the edges like reflections of ice.
Parker jumped away. With a sound like dry wood breaking, only much much louder, the sheet of glass destroyed itself into the ground, spraying shards and slivers in all directions. Silver triangles tinkled against the ground floor windows. Tiny pyramids of glass embedded themselves in Parker’s shin and cheek and the back of his right hand.
He looked up; the wall loomed up featureless and blank, the glass blood-red in the windows on the lower floors, reflecting the sun. The yellow bricks of the wall were tinged with rose color.
The amateur was up there, on a high storey, above the levels where the glass had already been fixed in place.
As Parker looked, a dusky shimmer extruded from high up the wall like the phantom of a slender tongue. It bent, it arched, it broke free of the wall and sliced downward; another heavy sheet of glass, three feet wide and four feet long and half an inch thick, slicing through the air like an invisible sword.
Parker dove through the hole in the building where the amateur had already smashed a window in. Behind him, the second glass torpedo sprayed itself into oblivion, musically.
He was in what would be a basement storage room, the interior walls made of concrete block and painted a dull blue gray. A metal door stood open onto a concrete block corridor.
Parker moved cautiously, the Beretta insignificant in his hand. The corridor led him to the left to gaping holes in the wall where some day the elevators would hang. Opposite, another metal door led him to a stairway, the rough plaster walls painted an unfortunate yellow. He took the stairs up to the first floor.
He was now in what would be a lobby or entrance hall of some kind, a broad, dim, white painted echoing cavern with a low-hung free form ceiling, shaped like a swimming-pool. Light fixtures sprouted all over this ceiling like the faceted eyes of flies.
From here on, every part of the building was incomplete. A metal staircase, without the walls that would enclose it, stood off to the left, leading upward. Parker went that way, sliding his feet noiselessly across a floor that seemed to he, but was not, marble.
Beside the staircase a white bag fell and exploded, puffing whiteness out everywhere. A bag of cement, dropped too early. Parker ran through it, a white mist like a smokescreen in wartime, and started up the stairs. The stairs went forward to a landing, backward to the second floor. Forward again to another landing, backward to the third floor. And so on, and so on. And between the stairway halves was an empty space running down the middle’ of the stairwell, down which, like down some’ madman’s oubliette, the amateur hurled whatever he could get his hands on. Long warped one by-twelve planks went bumping and thumping by, bouncing from metal railing to metal tailing. More cement bags dropped by like torsos to make soft white explosions on the lobby floor. Hammers and wrenches fell by, rattling and clanking.
Parker kept to the far edge of the stairs, and kept moving upward. The windows had been glassed in completely up to the eighth floor. More than two or three floors above that there probably wasn’t even any glass in readiness yet, lying around to be used as weapons. On floor nine, then, or floor ten or floor eleven he would find the amateur.
As he passed the sixth-floor level the rain of stupidity stopped from above. The amateur had been throwing out of fear, out of panic, and now either his panic had abated or he had run out of things to throw.
Why hadn’t he used his gun? Was he out of bullets, or had he lost the gun somewhere, or was he just too panic-struck to remember he had it?
The silence after the crash and clatter seemed to hum with emptiness. Parker moved more slowly, listening, listening through the silence, and wasn’t surprised after a minute to hear the hurried stealthy scuffing of feet on stairs. The amateur was climbing higher.
Parker was in no hurry. After the fifth floor, there were hardly any interior partitions up at all, and he could see there was no other way to go up or down but this stairwell. As long as he was below the amateur, and controlled the stairwell, there was no hurry.
Except the press of darkness. Half the sun had now disappeared below the horizon, and the top half glowered winter-red, tinging glass and plaster and metal with rose and saffron.
The sounds that came from above were like the sounds of mice in walls, but they were made by the amateur creeping up the metal stairs on hands and knees, wincing and grimacing, trying desperately and vainly to be silent. Parker could visualize him from the sounds and moved more openly himself now, not worrying so much about noise.
At the landing between the tenth and eleventh floors, set carefully and symmetrically in the middle of the floor, there was a little mound of money.
Parker stared at it. It was an offering, a sacrifice, like some South Sea Islander giving his virgin daughter to a volcano. The little mound of money left on the landing like an offertory on an altar.
Parker picked it up and counted it. There were forty twenty-dollar bills and eight ten-dollar bills: eight hundred eighty dollars.
He had some of the money!
Parker looked upward. The bastard hadn’t left all the money in the suitcases; he’d taken some of it with him, he had it on his person. And not just this much, just eight hundred eighty dollars. There’d be more of it.
Parker stuffed the sacrifice in his pocket and went more quickly up the stairs. It was now necessary to keep the amateur from falling or jumping, to keep him in a condition where his pockets could be searched.