King Maybe

by Timothy Hallinan

  Beneath her, open and facedown, was a book. It was a children’s book, big and brightly colored with a picture on the cover of a young woman in nineteenth-century costume aboard what looked like a pirate ship. The title was Not One Damsel in Distress: World Folktales for Strong Girls. My inward breath caught and felt for a moment like a sob, and I swallowed it, sniffed hard, and thought, Later. First let’s find a way to fuck this guy up.

  I picked up the book and placed it on her chest, straight as I could, then folded the blanket neatly over her. I said, “This won’t be for long, honest,” and then I got to my feet so I could look at the bloodstains. While I was up there, I righted the table and picked up the candlestick.

  There was blood and hair on the base. It was Georgian, massive, sterling, sharp-cornered. Judging from the weight, the base had probably been filled solidly with bronze, which is heavier than iron. He’d grabbed it by the slender upright and used the sharp-cornered base as a club. The top half was clean and bright.

  I took the candlestick and two of the hand towels and ran across the hallway and into a bathroom, where I scrubbed the silver clean and rubbed it dry. Then I soaked the hand towels and wrung them out so they wouldn’t leave a drip pattern and ran back into the drawing room.

  She’d bled only on the dark wood; the carpet was clean. I dropped the wet, folded towels onto the blood pattern and used my feet and my weight to scrub the floor clean, turning and refolding the towels twice. Then I put down a dry towel and rubbed it briskly over the damp part of the floor. When I turned it over, there was only a shade of pink on the white cloth, a blush. I backed up to get a broader view of the floor. I rolled the damp towels in the dry ones, studying the scene.

  Good enough. Obviously, the blood would show up when and if the cops used luminol, but equally obviously, there was no visible reason to use luminol in this room, at least not tonight. By the time they finished with the first floor and got up here, the cops would believe that the whole thing was an alarm malfunction. The room looked as peaceful as Easter except for Suley, folded in her blanket, and a flipped-back corner of the carpet where he’d probably caught a toe on it, coming in . . .

  And there it was in front of me, all of it at the same time, as it had probably happened: her, sitting in that armchair, reading some story about a strong young woman, the chair turned toward the dark fireplace, him coming through the door in stockinged feet and with gloves on, reaching for the candlestick, snagging his toe under the carpet and making a noise, her jumping to her feet, seeing him, knowing beyond any doubt what it meant. Trying to get around him—that was why she was mostly off the carpet—him sidestepping to cut her off, bringing the candlestick down and then down again and, probably, again.

  And then his nerve had failed him slightly, so perhaps he was partly human after all. He’d decided, wishfully, that she was dead and then bolted before making sure.

  I had five minutes and forty-three seconds.

  Where? Three stories, 34,000 square feet, where could I put her? Where could I put myself?

  Big house. Big air-circulating systems. Big intake vents.

  I pulled a couch from the wall and looked behind it, and there it was, just above the baseboard, maybe fourteen inches square, with an old-fashioned metal grate over it. There would be a filter pad about a foot up. I could push the pad up, ease Suley into the vent, then go in myself at the diagonal, feetfirst, shoving myself back until we were out of sight, pray that the duct held, pull the grate into place again, and then flip the filter down, making us invisible. Except—

  Except that the grate didn’t pop out or in. It was secured with a screw at each corner. No way to close it from inside.

  I heard distant sirens. Maybe half a mile, three-quarters of a mile off.

  Jesus, Ronnie. I’d never talked to her again after Anime called.

  I shoved the couch into place and pulled out the phone. Pushed the button to reconnect, and there she was.

  “Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?” she said. “I’m a few minutes from you—”

  “No. Go away, don’t come. I can’t talk. Just go somewhere and wait for my call.”

  “But I—”

  “I know. But goodbye, and don’t get near this place.”

  “I’ll be waiting.” She hung up.

  “Thank you,” I said reflexively, although I knew she was gone. I reached over and centered the candlestick on the table, just to be doing something, and listened to the sirens getting louder.

  Five minutes and seven seconds. Hopeless, except. Except. I pushed speed dial for Anime.

  “It’s really sick,” she said. “What that girl is doing—”

  “Don’t talk. Listen. Granger’s alarm company, Armstrong something—”

  “Hepworth,” she said.

  “Armstrong Hepworth. I need to know what happens when a house goes into lockdown. It must be something they promote on their site, how hard it is to get through it in either direction—”

  “Lilli!” she shouted. “Armstrong Hepworth, lockdown mode, now!”

  “The specific question is, who can get in? How hard is it to get in? Call me when you know.”

  I hung up, ransacking the house in my mind’s eye, both the parts I’d been in and the areas I’d seen only in the builder’s drawings and then the drawings for modifications, beginning with the basement, thinking about going down there to see, maybe there was room in the gravity heater, although if I were a cop I’d check in the gravity heater, but there might be something else down there, and did the elevator go all the way down to the . . .

  The elevator.

  The elevator.

  Sirens louder now. A couple of minutes away.

  The elevator.

  And I was running, leaving Suley behind for the moment, running on nothing but hope because I didn’t have anything else, out of the room and into the hall, barreling down the circular staircase, taking the steps three at a time and keeping away from the spiral of windows, and then I was sprinting down the central hall on the ground floor and through the kitchen into the pantry and down the stairs, losing it a quarter of the way down and landing with all my weight on my right knee on the edge of a stair, feeling an explosion of pain, as if every nerve in my body had gathered there to say hi to the stair, and I knew it was going to be trouble, knew it was going to stiffen up, but that was later, and there wasn’t any time at all for later. There was only right now, about four and a quarter minutes of right now.

  It was where I remembered it, by the painting supplies: the ladder. Narrow, aluminum, lightweight, perfect. I limped to it as fast as I could, realized I’d need to bring the ladder back down here (no time, no time) to avoid giving them a clue, and with a sinking heart grabbed a big coil of clothesline that was hanging from a nail in the wall, hung it around my neck, hoisted the ladder, and went.

  The leg was absolutely going to be a problem. I practically had to drag it up the stairs behind me, feeling like the mad doctor’s troll assistant in some old horror movie, keeping the ladder angled up so it wouldn’t catch on one of the stairs above me and send me racketing all the way back down again, maybe unable to get up this time, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I had two and a half minutes left.

  And the sirens were whoop-whooping away, their tones sliding up the scale in obedience to the Doppler effect, announcing that they were coming toward me, if any further evidence were required.

  I’d left the elevator upstairs, in Granger’s Room of the Rancid Past, so I hauled the ladder and my stiffening leg up the curving staircase and into the stuffy room. I leaned the ladder against the wall and pushed the button and stood there, swearing under my breath, as its doors opened grudgingly, at a rich man’s pace, no problem, the world will wait.

  Two minutes, twelve—

  The sirens peaked in volume and then shut off. They were here. So he’d lied abo
ut the eight minutes, too.

  The question was, could they get in?

  At last the doors yawned widely enough to allow me to shove my way through and hit the stop button. The doors halted, two-thirds open, and to my relief there was no automatic alarm bell.

  Wrestle the ladder to the rear corner of the elevator cab, look up at the ceiling. And see that Laverna, the Roman goddess of thieves, was doing her part. Unlike many elevator passenger cabs, which had a drop-down ceiling to hold the lights, the removal of which ate precious time before you could get to the real ceiling, this one had its lights recessed directly into the ceiling, one in each of three of the ceiling’s four panels. The lack of wiring in the fourth made it clear which panel was the legally mandated emergency escape hatch. It was, as it often is, the one in the left rear corner if you were facing the back of the compartment.

  I could just barely hear police radio chatter and behind it the sirens of a few Johnny-come-latelies, hauling ass to join the fun. I got the ladder into position and started to climb.

  So, naturally, my phone rang. Anime. I punched her in, hanging there, and she said, “It says here, ‘Three levels of absolute security: the account number, a personal PIN number, and a special lockdown code word, which the owner is to guard carefully.’ Hey, have you noticed how no one ever tells you to guard something carelessly—”

  “Great. Any chance you can figure out how to force the system into reset?”

  “No. Not unless . . . I mean, unless they were dumb enough to send him the PIN number and the password by email and if he was dumb enough to keep them in his in-box, and if we had his email address—”

  “Try ‘Jeremy’ or ‘Granger’ or both at Farscope.com,” I said.

  “—and if we could slip into the email system,” she said, “then maybe.”

  “Do what you can.” I disconnected.

  I listened. Still heard police radio noise, but no closer than before. They were out at the gate, and they hadn’t come in yet.

  My fingers found a little recessed latch above me, and I turned it to the right, got resistance, turned it to the left, and pushed up. I had assumed that the escape hatch would be hinged along the rear wall, but instead the hinges were on the right, and it was unexpected enough to make me lose my balance and flail wildly at the sides of the ladder for what felt like a long heart-attack minute until I got hold of it and hung there, the bad leg dangling, sucking huge breaths into my lungs and waiting until a firefly swarm of bright spots had dispersed and I could see again.

  My internal clock went ding-ding-ding, and my watch blinked at me. Eight minutes.

  The radio noise from outside was augmented by the whack-whack-whack of a copter, and it actually relaxed me. If they were going with overhead surveillance, it probably meant they couldn’t get through the gate without the lockdown code, and in the meantime they wanted to keep an eye on the property and the walls between Granger’s house and the three that bordered it.

  And Granger, I thought, as I pulled myself the rest of the way up the ladder and onto the cab’s roof, wouldn’t be back until midnight.

  That thought comforted me as I hauled the ladder up through the trapdoor, anchored it securely on the top of the elevator, and wiggled it a couple of times to see how steady it was. The comfort lasted as I put my hand in my pocket, located the little flashlight, turned it on, and saw what might have been exactly what I needed, right up above me. Within easy reach of the top of the ladder.

  The space between floors.

  In this case between the third floor and the second.

  I’d seen it on a set of plans submitted to the city for approval. When the Thud put in his recording studio, he was married. The Thuds were neither a subtle nor a musically adventurous band; they described their music as “death thrash” and said in interviews that the group had only two settings, faster and louder, and in fact the band had split up when two of its members lost their hearing. But during the brief period when the Thuds were hot, the lead singer wanted to cut records at home without giving his wife grounds for divorce, so he created a huge sound baffle between the studio and the rooms below it by raising the third floor by four feet, opening up a dead-air space between it and the second-floor ceilings and then pouring some sort of sound-absorbing material into it.

  And the space, God bless it, was accessible via the elevator shaft.

  I said “Gratias tibi ago,” which is Latin for “Thank you,” because I don’t assume that Laverna, who’s got her hands full being a goddess, has bothered to learn English. I hauled myself up the ladder, not putting weight on the injured knee, until I was up there, and then I said “Gratias tibi ago” again. It was perfect.

  It was dark and ugly, and it smelled like wet newspaper, but it might as well have been the Stable in Bethlehem, as far as I was concerned. It had been half filled with sound-absorbing blown cellulose, just repurposed scrap paper, mostly newsprint, formed into pellets and shot from a huge forced-air pipe. I reached over and probed the drift directly in front of me: the bottom of the space was formed by two-by-twelve wood joists, edge up, with about a foot or fourteen inches between each pair of joists. The cellulose covered the tops of the beams by a couple of inches, meaning that if I could get Suley up here, I could squeeze the two of us in between the beams and cover us with several inches of blown cellulose, as invisible as we’d have been in a snowdrift. Getting around in it was going to be a squeeze, since the joists supporting the third floor were no more than two feet above the lower joists into which the cellulose had been blown. I could navigate it on my elbows. I tossed the big coil of clothesline into the opening and actually sighed with something that I mistook for relief.

  Because, of course, at the precise moment I relaxed the tiniest bit, the cold, wet hand of reality wrapped its fingers around my throat.

  28

  The New Knot

  I didn’t have until midnight. Granger had lied about everything. He hadn’t taken his wife anywhere, he hadn’t taken a plane anywhere. He was probably ten or fifteen minutes from here, whiling away the time with some people who constituted his alibi and waiting for a call from the police or the alarm service to say that his house was in lockdown.

  And that call had certainly already been made.

  In my haste to get down the ladder, I accidentally put weight on the bad knee, and when I yanked my foot up, my body weight went off center to the right, taking the ladder with it. In a frantic scramble to keep from falling all the way down the ladder and through the open hatch into the elevator, I swung myself even farther right, and the ladder followed me, tilting onto one leg and then falling, tipping four or five feet to the right until it hit the right side of the elevator shaft with a bang. When it did, the ladder leg that was in the air pivoted around, just missing the hatch, and came to a stop on top of the elevator’s roof, leaving me dangling at arm’s length, like an afterthought, from the underside of the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by the ladder, the shaft, and the roof. It took me a long moment of disbelief to confirm that I was still holding on. I managed to hang one-handed onto the rung I was clinging to and to stretch the other hand to the next-lower one and then swing to the one below that, until—coughing and choking like Camille as I fought for breath and with my heart beating kettledrums in my ears—I had both feet on the solid, unyielding top of the cab. I stood there unmoving for several heartbeats, letting time slide by until my knees stopped trembling and I’d waved away the remaining fumes of the terror I’d experienced when it had seemed inevitable that I was going to take a fall of about sixteen feet, through a small door made up of sharp metal corners, to the floor of the elevator. It took no imagination at all to see myself crumpled down there with at least a broken leg and a blown-out knee. Just waiting, in pain, to be arrested for murder.

  Lots of radio noise from outside. Lots of helicopter racket. Cops above, cops below, forever and ever amen.

&n
bsp; I eased the ladder through the hatch into the elevator car and went down it carefully. Then, standing on the carpet, I gave myself another thirty seconds to gather my wits, and as I did so, several ideas barged in and waved at me. The big one was, Bewilder Granger further.

  Suley had been wearing pink canvas slip-ons. One was still on her foot—the right, it seemed to me—and the other was on the carpet. Bright pink, hard to miss. What we needed was another ten minutes to create a massive “does not compute” for Granger, something that would make him eager, even desperate, to get the cops out of there. I couldn’t do anything about the ten minutes except to wish for them, but the memory of the shoe had given me an idea about the does-not-compute.

  But first I needed some ribbon. I weighed it for a moment and decided that the elevator would be faster and less risky than navigating the circular staircase on my bad knee, so I pulled out the stop button and punched the one for the first floor and stood there, cursing the gods of time as the machine dawdled its way down, one long aristocratic yawn. I shoved through the opening doors and limp-sprinted out of the office, Quasimodo running the hundred, and back down the first-floor corridor to the gift room.

  Blinking red and white lights tattooed the outside of the window. The sounds were louder and more urgent here. I found a big spool of crimson ribbon about two inches wide, unwound ten or twelve feet of it, snipped it, and then cut off a shorter piece, about two feet long. I was headed back out when I saw the big flat gift boxes, which I belatedly realized were for coats. I tucked three of them under one arm and hobbled back to the elevator, trailing red ribbon, which I barely managed to reel inside before the doors closed on it.

  Riding up, I decided arbitrarily that I had about seven minutes to get everything squared away. I added a minute to it for the bad leg and started the timer. Sheer force of habit. Before leaving the elevator, I carried the flat boxes up the ladder and put them on top of the cab; I was sure I couldn’t carry both them and Suley at the same time. That ate forty seconds. In the upstairs drawing room, I unfolded Suley’s blanket and laid her on her back, then raised her arms above her head and tied her wrists together with the shorter length of ribbon. I repositioned her book on her chest, eased the pink shoe off her foot, and put it on the carpet. She had tiny feet. I avoided looking at the hopelessly young face. Then I rolled her tightly in the blanket, silently apologizing for the indignity, until all that protruded were her arms and her beautiful, harmless-looking hands, secured by the big red bow.