All right. Just Savarese, then. In there alone, working tonight because he hadn't worked during the day. All right. Him first, get some answers, and then that other son of a bitch.
I parked near the deserted private boat club, went the rest of the way on foot—walking fast but not running. Dark night, cold, the wind needle-sharp against my face. Foghorns on the bay, their voices rising and falling in monotonous warning even though the mist here was high and thin, drifting like smoke under the higher overcast. Lights from the Bay Bridge and from the shipyards put a dull-bright sheen on the darkness, made the water look thick and oily where it lapped in against the ruined piers. No cars, no pedestrians moved along China Basin Street; out here I had the night to myself.
The gate in the iron fence was closed but not locked. I eased it open, walked quiet across the empty parking area. Overhead lights were on in the front part of the warehouse, and when I stepped inside I could see that the windowed wall along the front part of the ell was also lighted. The back half of the building was inky with shadow.
I paused near the stairwell. The air in there was even chillier, moister, than outside. Random thought: Wouldn't the salt-damp damage stored paper goods after a while? Well, maybe Savarese couldn't afford to heat the place; that was probably it. Before I started up the stairs I listened. Silence. Out on the bay, faintly, the moaning voice of the foghorns. Silence, Scurrying noise somewhere in the back-half darkness: rat on the move. Silence.
I went up on the balls of my feet, to keep the stair risers from creaking and announcing my presence. As I approached the open door to the office I could see that the lights were on in there too. I stopped again, just outside. Didn't hear anything and went on in.
The room was empty.
What the hell? I thought. Then I thought: Maybe he's in the toilet. I started toward his desk at the far wall.
Sounds in the hallway behind me: door hinges creaking, soft shuffling footfalls.
I pulled up short, heeled around—and somebody was moving behind the fire door, arm and shoulder and hip visible at the edge, shoving the door inward fast and hard. I ran that way, heard the clang of metal as it banged shut a second or two before I slammed into it with my shoulder. I bounced off, pain running down my right side, and came back again and fumbled for the knob . . . key scraping in the lock . . . too late again.
Trap, goddamn trap.
And I had blundered right into it, as blindly and stupidly as if I'd been that rat downstairs.
* * * * *
I yanked on the knob, twisted and pulled and shook the door, let go of it after a few seconds and beat on the metal with my fist. Quit that, breathing hard, and leaned against the door to listen. Faint sounds, but not in the hallway—somewhere down below. Then nothing. Savarese? Hadn't looked like him, what little I'd seen of the man behind the door. Blackwell, then. Alone? Or was Savarese here too?
Why?
Why lock me in here like this?
I swung around to face the office again. Telephone on Mabel Butler's desk. I went to it, caught up the receiver. No dial tone. The phone on Savarese's desk was just as dead. Did something to the wires so I couldn't call out. No window in here, no way in or out except the door. Perfect set-up for a snare . . . and it hadn't been arranged by Savarese. Blackwell's work. He knew I'd come looking for him as soon as I found Kerry; knew I had no way to find him except through Savarese; knew I'd show up here tonight sooner or later. Put the lights on, left the gate and front doors unlocked, disabled the phones, sat back and waited.
Why?
He knows where Grady is, I thought. Somehow he found out and he's going after her and he wants me out of commission for a couple of days, give himself plenty of time to find her, get rid of her, get away . . . no, hell, that doesn't add up. Leave me alive and I can tie him to her; he can't be sure of how much I might have found out about him. Why not just shoot me, dump me in the bay? But if he doesn't know where she is, why didn't he brace me the way he braced Kerry? Either way, it doesn't add up. . . .
Back at the door, I bent to look at the lock. Yale lock, one of the best; you'd need to be a locksmith to get it open and even then you'd have to have the proper tools. I ran my finger along the edge of the door where it met the jamb. Tight fit, with what was probably a quarter-inch metal overlap on the outside; that was standard on fire doors of this type. No way I was going to get through it until somebody came with a key.
I laid my ear against the cold metal. Still the same faint noises: somebody moving around, either downstairs or up here at the rear of the ell. The sounds were unidentifiable. Nor could I tell if they were being made by one man or two.
Rising tension set me to prowling the office. There was not much to it, just a big room thirty feet square, on the cluttered side, not too clean. Savarese's desk, Butler's desk, a third desk that looked as though it hadn't been used in a while, nothing on it except a cheap portable copy machine and a FAX machine. Utility table, piled high with product brochures and samples of Taiwanese party supplies. Water bottle upended on a pottery stand. Three-drawer metal filing cabinet. Door in the inner wall, partially open so I could see into a cramped supply closet. Nothing in the closet or anywhere else in the office that I could use as a pry bar or battering ram, except maybe one of the drawers in the filing cabinet; and trying to pound my way through a metal door with a metal file drawer was like trying to knock down a brick house with a single brick.
Back and forth, back and forth, with the tension and the frustration climbing all the while. Rat in a closed-off" maze, hunting for a way out that wasn't there. Cold in here; I could see my breath each time I exhaled. Cold, cramped, the air stale with must and old tobacco smoke and salt-damp. How the hell could they work in an office like this? No windows, no fresh air, it would be like spending eight hours in a goddamn box—
Shrinking now . . . the box seemed to be shrinking around me.
I could feel it start to happen, the sudden shift in perception, the claustrophobic closing in. Then the sweating, the shaking. Dark things skittered in the comers of my mind, little fear-shapes dragging forth scraps of memory.
Interior of that rustic mountain cabin — cold, barren, blank walls, window looking out on empty landscape, cot with its stinking blankets, shelves and boxes and the little bathroom cubicle . . . and the heavy iron shackle around my leg, the attached chain slithering and clanking when I move . . . and the fear . . . and the screaming loneliness . . . and the walls, ceiling, floor all shrinking, squeezing me in. . . .
For a few seconds I couldn't breathe. I stumbled to the Butler woman's desk, leaned on it with my eyes shut tight and my head down, fighting the terror, using all the clever little mental defenses I'd concocted in the cabin and in the months after my escape. A minute, two minutes, and the worst of it was over. Wobbly-legged, I groped around the desk and sat down in the chair that went with it. I was still hyperventilating; I willed myself to take air in slow, deep breaths until my pulse rate slowed. Sweat flowed on me, kept flowing. But when I opened my eyes the walls were no longer contracting and the room was just a room and the images of the Deer Run cabin were buried again in their shallow graves.
I sat quiet, not letting myself think about anything, until my pores closed and the sweat dried on my body. Then, slowly, I got up and returned to the door. This time when I listened there was nothing to hear except the distant grieving of the foghorns.
Turn around, walk. Savarese's desk against the far wall: Would he leave anything incriminating in there? Find out— something to do with your hands and your mind.
Clutter. Every drawer full of a miscellany of papers, stationery supplies, odd items that ranged from cheap cigars to pieces of caramel candy to a well-thumbed deck of pornographic playing cards. I shuffled through the papers. Random business correspondence, dun notices for unpaid bills, business cards, scraps with writing in a crabbed hand I took to be Savarese's. Some of the scraps bore names, addresses, telephone numbers, but none of the names was Blackwell or Kin
g or Jones and none of the addresses was familiar.
No appointment calendar on his desk, but there was one on Mabel Butler's. I opened it, flipped back through the pages to April Fools' Day and then forward again a page at a time. Not many notations, and none that meant anything to me. I pawed through the drawers; nothing there either. Filing drawers next. Bills of lading, invoices paid and unpaid, business correspondence . . . nothing.
I slammed the last drawer shut, went back to Savarese's desk. A big green ink-stained blotter covered a good portion of its surface. I lifted it to see if there was anything underneath.
Dust and some more pieces of paper. I shuffled through the papers, stopped shuffling when I came to a pair of Visa card receipts. One bore the name of Panotti's North Beach restaurant, and the date on it was a week ago Tuesday—the night Savarese and Blackwell had had dinner together there.
The other receipt had been issued at the Harborside Inn and the date on that one was last Saturday. The Harborside was a Fisherman's Wharf hotel, on Beach Street—not in the same class as the Broadmoor, but similarly small and quiet and moderately expensive.
Was that where Blackwell had moved after leaving the Broadmoor? The amount on the receipt was eighteen dollars and change, the price of drinks for two people. The Harborside wasn't the kind of place Savarese was likely to take Gloria the bimbo; the bar there, as I recalled, didn't offer entertainment or much of a view and was mainly patronized by paying guests. Savarese and Blackwell again, with their heads together? Cooking up what?
Fisherman's Wharf was only a few miles from here, at the other end of the Embarcadero. If I could just get out of this trap . . .
Back to the door. This time I heard something: not the sounds of movement as before, but a vague murmuring. No, not a murmuring—a kind of crackling, as if somebody were balling up a sheet of cellophane. I kept listening. The crackling remained steady, distant, not gaining in volume. Smell in the air too, now, just as faint. Acrid smell, smoke smell—
Fire?
Jesus—fire?
I shoved back off the door. And the whole thing began to open up in my mind, hazy but complete, like a materializing ghost: the purpose of the trap, the relationship between Savarese and Blackwell, who and what Blackwell was and the reason he was after Grady Haas.
Part of my attention was on that, the rest on a desperate scan for some way out of here, when the explosion hurled everything into chaos.
Cracking, booming concussion, the floor shuddering, buckling under my feet . . . and I was thrown backward with things flying all around me . . . I hit something, went up in the air and over a hard surface and down in a crazy somersault . . . eruption of pain in my head and neck, burst of light, fragments of color . . . and then a heaving darkness filled with a discordant medley of sounds that seemed to go on and on . . . until I went deaf.
Chapter 18
I could not have been out, or partially out, for more than three or four minutes. Then the darkness shimmered, receded, and I could see all right—but at first I didn't know what I was seeing. Confusion, pain . . . and when that eased I was aware of lying twisted up on the floor with a heavy weight pinning my legs, and that there was smoke in the air. I could hear again, too, a far-off noise I knew was the crackle-thrum of fire.
I flailed around with my arms, maneuvered my lower body until I was able to free one leg and then the other. I had been thrown against the far wall and Savarese's chair and one corner of his desk were what had been pinning me. I got up on one knee, shoved the desk out of the way so I could stand.
The office looked the way mine had after the October earthquake, as though it had been shaken by angry hands: furniture knocked askew and overturned, the water bottle and its stand broken, papers strewn around like patches of dirty snow. Smoke-haze gave the upheaval a nightmarish cast. The explosion had buckled the floor in places . . . and sprung the lock on the metal door, by God, so that the door was now cracked open a couple of inches. That was how the smoke, blackish and virulent, was slithering in—not too thick yet but getting thicker.
I groped around Savarese's desk, across to the door. But when I threw my shoulder against it, the crack widened only another inch or so before the warped lower edge bound up and held fast. I hit it again, twice, but it was wedged tight against one of the buckled places in the hallway floor. Panic rose in me. A little wildly I kicked at the bottom of the door, straight on and then with the sole of my shoe. No use either way. I could not get enough leverage to drive it past the obstruction.
The congealing smoke was raw in my lungs, and my eyes were streaming tears. Coughing, working to clear my vision, I came away from the door. When I could see again I looked for the broken water bottle. The bottom hadn't completely shattered; the biggest of the heavy shards lay curved in such a way that it still cradled maybe a cupful of water. I soaked my handkerchief, cleansed my eyes, then tied the wet cloth, bandit-fashion, over my nose and mouth. That let me breathe a little easier.
The beat of the fire was louder, closer. I could feel the heat of it coming through the floor, making steam rise from the wetness under the remains of the water bottle. No flames to see yet—just the smoke curling in through the crack in the door.
Mabel Butler's desk was the smallest of the three in there and the closest to the door. Made of metal, with sturdy legs on casters. I got around behind it, maneuvered it into a direct line with the door. One of the casters had come off and it moved awkwardly, but there was no time to go hunting the thing. I threw all my weight against the desk, legs driving hard, and sent it rolling and wobbling and then clanging into the door. The impact jarred me, almost knocked me down. But the door didn't break free. Yielded another inch, maybe, that was all. The gap was still too narrow for me to squeeze through.
I dragged the desk backward, repositioned it. Even with the wet handkerchief, each breath was painful and I was coughing fitfully again. There was a chemical stench to the smoke that made my head pound, built nausea in the back of my throat. Dizzy, light-headed . . . move! I ran the desk forward again, metal hammering against metal, and the door held, and I dragged the desk back and ran it forward, and the door held, and gasping now I dragged the desk back and ran it forward—
And the door gave. Not much, not so that I could get it all the way open, but enough to widen the gap to more than a foot.
More smoke poured in, set me to gagging as I clawed the desk out of the way, squeezed my body into the opening. Then I was out into the hallway, bent double, blind in a cocoon of churning, stinking smoke. My stomach convulsed; vomit came boiling up out of me. The spasms were brief but they left me weak and clinging to the near wall.
I was aware then of the rising sound of sirens. Somebody must have heard the explosion or seen the fire right away and turned in the alarm. There was a fire station on the Embarcadero not far away, housing the 35 Engine company and the city's fireboat; and the S.F.F.D. has one of the best response times in the country. Men and equipment would be here any minute—
—but they'd find me dead if I didn't get off this ell. Move, move!
I got the wet handkerchief back in place, pulled myself along the wall with outstretched hands. The hallway floor was littered with broken glass; shards crunched each time I put my foot down. The windows had all burst inward from the force of the blast and the smoke was churning up through the openings from below. Here and there I could see flames where little jagged holes had been blown open in the floorboards. The heat was already intense.
All the long way from the office to the stairwell I managed to avoid the holes, keep from plunging through the weakened boards. But the stairs were no way out: fire was on them, eating upward from riser to riser, pulsing demonically in the hazed dark. Only a minute or two and the fire would be up here . . . if it hadn't already completed its climb at the rear of the ell.
I plowed past the stairwell, stumbling on the uneven floor, leaning against the wall again to maintain my balance. There didn't seem to be any tears in the boards
down here, but the footing was still uncertain. Blind, groping movements brought me to the end of the wall, where the hallway opened up into the ell's short arm. Then I could see again because the smoke was thinner back there. The panic cut at me, sharp-edged. Flames were crawling up the dry-rotted far wall, running across the floor and just beginning to lick at stacks of boxes and drums.
No choice: I lumbered ahead to the left, away from the fire. Looking frantically for another way down.
The smoke was too dense, the firelight too weak, the storage area too crowded: I couldn't make out anything except hazy shapes. I tripped over something, staggered, righted myself. There was a dull shattering noise, the clink and splatter of falling glass—heat, or some fire-flung object, fragmenting one of the windows in the back wall. The incoming surge of wind fanned the flames, threw some of them my way; let in the banshee shriek of sirens. Through the opening I had a glimpse of the light-shimmer from Mission Rock Terminal. Then the dirty glass in one of the unbroken windows went bloodred— the pulsars on arriving fire trucks.
Get to the nearest window, break the glass, go out that way. But I didn't do it. Last resort. If I tried jumping without a net, the drop to the cement pier was enough to break bones, maybe break my head. And I couldn't just stand there yelling and waiting for the firemen to spot me and set up a net; there was no time, not the way that blaze was soaring now.
Another window burst; more inrushing wind, more noise from outside—shouts, the grind and throb of heavy equipment being maneuvered into place. The entire far wall was an inferno. Flames ran along the girders under the roof, heating them and the sheet metal above like iron in a forge. But now the fire gave off enough glittering light for me to distinguish most of what lay around me and at the back wall. No staircase, no freight elevator . . . but there had to be one or the other; where the hell was it?
Quarry Page 14
