And all with extreme care. There was only one bullet left in the Beretta, and that only .25 caliber and a very short-barrelled gun.
The amateur might jump, if he was terrified enough. Or fall, because of stupidity.
Noises again, six or seven flights up. Parker, at the fourteenth storey, stopped to listen. Scrapings, thump-ings, heavy sounds. But nothing coming down the stairwell, nothing immediate.
The noises went on and on as Parker kept climbing, and stopped as he was rounding the landing above the eighteenth story. He went two more flights and saw above him what the amateur had done.
A barricade. Strips of metal, bundles of wire, planks of wood, tools of all kinds, even a wheelbarrow, all piled and jumbled together at the head of the stairs to keep him down.
And was the barricade defended? Was this where the amateur would make his last stand?
No. Waiting on the landing below, just out of range if the amateur were armed and manning the barricade, Parker listened and once again heard the mouse noises farther up. The amateur was still running.
Parker went on up and brushed through the barricade with impatient arms. Tools and planks and bundles went crashing away, some clattering down the stairs, and up above the amateur cried out at the noise.
Above the twenty-first floor, there weren’t even external walls any more, only the flat white outlines of the poured concrete foundation. Floor and ceiling were rudimentary here: a thick flat slab of concrete swarming underneath with rods and cables and wires and other projections growing out like hair. Going forward from floor to landing, there was nothing beyond the left edge of each stair but emptiness and the setting sun and the dead plain far below. No banister, no railing, nothing. Going the other half, from landing to floor, there was nothing to the right of each stair but that other half of staircase hanging out over emptiness.
The amateur was only one flight away, creeping upward, trembling, making more and more noise. He was gasping for breath and groaning from a thousand terrors. Parker followed, keeping to the middle of each stair, looking only at the stairs and his own feet, moving Upward.
The twenty-third floor was the top. The flooring here was planks, covering only parts of the area and leaving other parts open. Wooden forms for the concrete foundation jutted up here and there like Renaissance smoke stacks. Olive drab tarpaulins were thrown over mounds of material.
Across the way, the framework of the construction elevator stood like a model of the Eiffel Tower. The elevator itself, a mesh cage, hung within it at the level of this floor. The amateur was making for it, hobbling, running crouched like a wounded bear. He wore a dirty cream-colored raincoat, the back all stained and darkened by blood. He was torso-hit, just above the waist on the left side of the back.
Exerting himself the way he was, hit like that with the bullet certainly still in him, he was done anyway. He was big and strong - Parker remembered how the sword had been thrust entirely through Ellie and into the wall behind - and if he’d had only a normal share of strength he’d be finished already. The end was coming soon. If it weren’t for the money, Parker could just go away and leave him up here to rot.
But there was the money. Parker walked across the echoing planks.
The amateur wrenched open the two gates and stumbled into the elevator. Turning, he saw Parker and cried out again as he had before. He pushed the gates shut and tried to work the lever to send the elevator down to the ground, but of course there wasn’t any power. The construction company people had sent the elevator to the top of the shaft before leaving so stray kids wouldn’t damage it and then had turned the power off and gone away.
The amateur had caged himself.
Parker walked across the planks toward him.
The amateur wrenched open the two gates.
The amateur shouted, ‘Don’t shoot at me! Please don’t shoot at me!’
There was an open space at the top of the double gate’ across the front of the elevator. The amateur with a sudden motion threw something over this, something that landed hard on the planks, and bounced: a stubby black pistol.
‘I lost the other one!’ he shouted. Parker was close to him now, but he kept shouting anyway, as though he thought there was some sort of wall between himself and Parker. ‘I’m not armed now!’ he shouted. ‘There’s my gun! There’s my gun!’
Parker walked up to the front of the cage. He had the Beretta in his right hand, but at the last second he changed his mind. He went back and picked up the gun the amateur had thrown away; it was a Smith & Wesson .32 revolver. Parker frowned at it. The last one like this he’d seen, Pete Rudd was carrying it. Was this Rudd’s pistol? Was that how the amateur knew to come to Vimorama?
But he wasn’t particularly interested in the answer, because it made no difference anymore. He turned back to the man in the cage.
‘Don’t shoot at me, please. She did deserve that; you knew her, you must have known she deserved it, and I never meant to cause you any trouble, it all just happened one thing after the other, all I wanted to do was give her what she —’
Parker used one bullet from Pete Rudd’s gun.
He pulled open the gates and went in and rolled the amateur over on his back and went through his pockets.
Left trouser pocket, sixty-three twenties. Right trouser pocket, thirty-nine twenties and twenty-five tens. Left hip pocket, fifty-two tens and ten fifties. Right hip pocket, forty-seven twenties and nine tens and eight fifties. Right shirt pocket, forty-two twenties and lour hundreds. Nothing in the left shirt pocket; that must have been where the eight hundred eighty bucks had come from.
Still more. Left jacket pocket, fifty twenties and nine fifties. Right jacket pocket, fifty-three twenties and seven fifties. Inside jacket pocket, ninety-five twenties and three hundreds.
The amateur had bulged with cash, bloated with cash, overflowed with cash.
Left raincoat pocket, ninety-three twenties and seventeen tens. Right raincoat pocket, eighty twenties and fifteen fifties.
All together, seven hundreds and forty-nine fifties and six hundred two twenties and one hundred eleven tens, including the money left on the stairs.
Sixteen thousand three hundred dollars.
Parker got to his feet and looked at the bills in stacks on the elevator floor. Sixteen thousand three hundred dollars. He laughed out loud.
It was his seventh.
The end.
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