Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  The guard with him was cut from greener wood. He was young and pale, with the kind of gray eyes that always look as if they’re staring through a sheen of tears, and his nostrils twitched. I didn’t like that part. His shotgun, a utilitarian twelve-gauge stamped out of sheet metal with a plastic stock, lay at chest height with the hand holding the grip braced against his right pectoral and the other hand cradling the forepiece. The bore was as big around as a shot glass.

  “How about we go to parade rest?” I said. “Your boy looks like he spooks easy.”

  “How about you do what the chief said?” The guard’s voice was high and tight.

  Thorpe said, “You’re right about him, Walker. They shaved the trigger pretty thin.”

  Matthew’s fingers dug into my sides, but I relaxed my grip and leaned over and let him slide to the floor. As soon as his feet touched down he scampered around behind me, arms locked around my left leg with his face peering past my hip. He didn’t know I was no kind of shield against a shot pattern the size of my head. I lowered my gun hand and let the Smith & Wesson fall to the floor.

  I said, “Not bad. Slick but not showy. The frame was to keep me in, not out.”

  “Anybody can get in anyplace.” Thorpe sounded preoccupied. “The men who built this plant knew that. The main power switch is down here. Anyone who wanted to put the place out of commission had to come to the basement. Then all Security had to do was block the fire door, cut the current to the elevator, and starve them out: Getting rid of the fire door was my idea. Call me lazy. It eliminated a step.”

  “Maybe your predecessors were nervous about becoming trapped themselves.”

  “Oh, I rigged a way out in a pinch. One that didn’t make it into a set of blueprints that any voting citizen could wander into city hall and gape at.”

  “Who told you I was coming, Fish or Muriel?”

  His amber teeth showed, but the downturned corners of his mouth didn’t move. It was only a smile if you stood on your head to look at it. “Fish is a wardheeler. You never piss off the money source, that’s the rule. He wouldn’t come to me over a letter of authorization with my signature. And Muriel would watch his own nuts burn before he’d yell fire if Fish didn’t tell him to.”

  “That’s no way to talk about your own property.”

  “This town has been spreading its legs for so long it’s become a habit. I don’t know why I still bother to grease it, unless it’s to watch guys like Cecil Fish clap their flippers and bark. I keep thinking sometime they’ll say no. But they never do.” He swung his long face from side to side slowly, as if at some unrelated memory.

  “You’re expecting too much from guys like Cecil Fish.” I kept my eyes on the guard. His nostrils were the only things moving.

  “Not without effort. When you do what I do for as long as I’ve done it, the easy thing is to think everyone’s out for what he can get. Maybe it’s this underground office. From down here all you see is dirty feet and crotches. It’s why I like to have you around, to freshen the view. It’s why I steered the Rayellen Stutch thing your way.”

  “That’s not why. You knew Mark Proust and I had a history and you could count on him to finish me off when I became inconvenient.”

  “I wondered why I hadn’t heard from him,” Thorpe said. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

  “I couldn’t be sure he had a heart, so I shot him in the knee instead. Why’d you have him grab the boy?” Matthew’s grip tightened around my thigh.

  “I’m looking after him while his mother’s in the hospital. He’s related to my employer, after all.”

  “I guess you got so busy you didn’t get around to telling her.”

  The guard broke in. “You want to call the cops while I hold him here, Chief?”

  Thorpe jingled keys and change in a pocket. It was as close as he came to chewing his lip. “In a minute. Let’s go in the office.”

  The guard stepped to one side and tilted his head up the corridor. The gray eyes stayed on me.

  Matthew didn’t budge when I tried to move my leg. I laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it gently. After a second he unlocked his hands and grasped a fistful of my khakis. I followed Thorpe past the elevator, the boy padding silently behind. The guard brought up the rear.

  The office, behind another unlabeled door, this one window-less, was twice the size of the bed cells, which didn’t make it big. The walls had been painted recently in shades of sherbet, to relieve the bunker atmosphere. It wasn’t a success. The low ceiling and the presence of a gray steel desk, five matching file cabinets, and the dank smell of cellars everywhere contributed to the sensation of having been buried alive. Behind the desk, in a slanted console that had been built into the wall, was a row of brightly colored pressure-pads, including a large red one to the right, isolated from the others. These would control the electrical power throughout the plant, including the security floods outside. The red one had to be the main. It was a refinement of the old-fashioned knife switch but no less effective.

  Thorpe settled himself into the oak swivel behind the desk with a little sigh. There was nothing on the desk but a telephone and a steel-jacketed microphone on a stand with a toggle switch in the base. He would summon his people over loudspeakers installed throughout the building. From a drawer he drew a homely black automatic with composition grips, a .38 Special, and laid it on top. “If you’d leave us alone, Andy?”

  The guard hesitated in the doorway, then withdrew, pulling the door shut behind him. The latch clicked in the steel frame.

  “Tell the boy to sit down,” Thorpe said. “Children make me nervous.”

  I squeezed Matthew’s shoulder again. He didn’t want to let go of me, but he didn’t struggle when I picked him up under the arms and sat him on a wooden upright chair that looked as if it had been there since the room was furnished. He fidgeted and bounced his legs, but he stayed put, scowling fiercely. He was as scared as scared gets. There were no other chairs, but I wouldn’t have used one if one were available. You can’t move as quickly from a sitting position.

  “I’d offer you a drink, but I quit. Bad stomach.”

  I said I’d pick something up on the way home. He showed his teeth again. Then he got out his worn leather case and lit one of his thick black cigars. He flipped the spent match onto the linoleum, where it had company. The room smelled of generations of cheap cigars.

  I got what I needed from his sad smile. “Am I going to make a break for it, or try for the gun? I don’t guess Andy needs it to be any more complicated than that. He isn’t in the game or you’d have let him finish it up out in the hall.”

  “Not necessarily. Have you ever heard a shotgun go off indoors? Some of us care about our eardrums.” He tipped a cylinder of gray ash onto the desk. “Trespassing and illegal entry, Walker. A little bit of industrial espionage sprinkled on top, for the boys in the press. I can say Toyota hired you, give the nosebleeds in the State Department something to do with my tax dollars. It’ll play. Tokyo’s been jumpy ever since the Krauts bought Chrysler.”

  “Glad to see you’re enjoying yourself. You weren’t too thrilled about the project at the start.” I shifted my weight on to my good ankle. I still needed Olympics sponsorship to make the leap across the desk.

  “I thought Rayellen was borrowing trouble. The old man took care of the Cecilia Willard situation a long time ago. But I’m a company man, like you said. I follow orders.”

  “Who gave the order to snatch the boy?”

  That stung him. He took the cigar out of his mouth and aimed a scowl at it as if the tobacco had been sprayed with an inferior grade of insecticide. “When the ball takes a bad hop, you go after it. Nobody was supposed to come out of that wreck. Proust let me down.”

  “Says who, Mrs. Stutch? You’re saying she wanted the heirs found so she could take them out of the family album.”

  “You ought to improve your reading. The Hound of the Baskervilles is okay when you’re ten. And I stopped workin
g for her right after I handed you the baton. That’s when I started preparing for retirement. You want to live? Go back and tell her she can have the boy for ten million.”

  “So a kidnap’s all it is. Why not twenty?”

  “Ten’s all I need. I’m getting to be an old man. Anyway she wouldn’t pay twenty. She gets thirteen a year. She can scrape by on three through Christmas: clip coupons, go to Aruba in the spring when the rates are better.”

  “When I leave the boy goes with me.”

  “I figured you’d say that. I had to ask.” He picked up the automatic. He looked genuinely sad.

  I said, “You’re forgetting Proust. Prison’s no fun for cops. He’ll deal you like an ace.”

  “I’ll buy him a good lawyer.”

  Matthew said, “I gotta pee.”

  “Go in your pants!”

  Thorpe glanced away to say it. I scooped the heavy microphone off the desk and slammed it against the side of his head. The impact jarred the switch into the on position; feedback squealed through the building. The gun went off. I looked at Matthew. He wasn’t hit, but when I looked back the muzzle was swinging around toward me; with one bad ankle I hadn’t been able to put all my weight into the blow. I slashed down with the microphone and broke his wrist. His howl joined the electronic squeal and the gun fell to the desk. I missed it on the bounce and it went over the edge and clattered to the floor. I thought it went off again when it hit, but that was Andy banging on the other side of the steel door. In another second or two he’d use the shotgun to blow off the lock. I bent to scoop up the automatic and kicked it under the desk instead.

  “Attention! This is Connor Thorpe! Security to the basement! Atten—”

  Thorpe’s voice rang everywhere. He’d reclaimed the microphone with his good hand and was shouting into it. I smashed my fist into his face. He stopped.

  “On the floor, Mr. Thorpe! Stay clear of the door!” Andy’s high-pitched voice was muffled by the door.

  I lunged, snatched Matthew by one arm, and threw him to the floor. He started screaming. I dived headfirst over the desk, no time to go around it, and mashed both palms on the electronic console, hoping the main power control was among the pressure pads underneath them. I hadn’t time to look.

  The room went as black as any cave on the dark side of the moon; but not for long. A great concussion flattened the air, followed by another, less loud, but only because the first had deafened me. Orange light blasted the darkness, as bright as the hot steel in the furnace at ground level. The sulfur stink of spent powder ate up all the oxygen in the room. Hornets stung me in several places; I was on my way to the floor, but I couldn’t fall fast enough to avoid all the pellets. I struck hard on one shoulder and scrambled toward where I thought Matthew was, to throw myself across him, but I’d lost all sense of direction. A wall stopped me. Under the ringing in my ears I tried to separate the boy’s screams from Andy’s shouting, in order to orient myself. Crawling, I put a hand down on a mass of leaking meat: Connor Thorpe’s smashed face. He’d slid out of his chair and landed on his back. I recoiled, adjusted my course ninety degrees, and this time my hand closed on the automatic. But it didn’t happen fast enough.

  The room filled with light. Andy had found his way to the main switch. I pivoted on my knees, raising the pistol. I was outgunned. The bore of the shotgun was two inches from my face. It was as big as a water tumbler now.

  Something exploded. I flinched—and wondered how I knew I was flinching when my face had been blown away. But this one was louder than the shotgun, loud enough to drown out all the shotguns in the world. Another came hard on it, a reverberating crash that went on twice as long, or that had joined with a third one just behind it. Something pattered on my head and went down under my collar, granulated dust that until a second ago had been plaster in the basement ceiling. I was bleeding in several places under my shirt and it made a grating mud when it mixed with the blood. The shotgun swung away from my face. The world was shaking apart; I wasn’t important anymore. Andy turned, staring up toward the source of the explosions.

  I shot him in the groin. He gasped and dropped the shotgun. I grabbed for it, mad to have it before he fell on top of it; but just then another blow shook the building and I lost my balance and toppled off my knees just in time to take all of Andy’s dead weight across my body.

  More explosions then, and with them the rumbling vibration of big motors and heavy wheels rolling through the smashed bricks littering the foundry floor above. Ray Montana’s army of eighteen-wheelers had begun its assault on the Stutch plant.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  Matthew had run out of lung power for screaming, and took in his breath in sobs in the little silence between battering blows twenty feet above our heads. At those times the only other sound in the room was the sifting of plaster and old dirt from the ceiling joists. If Thorpe and Andy were breathing, they were being quiet about it, conserving their strength.

  The hell with them. I worked my way out from under Andy and crawled around the desk, still gripping Thorpe’s automatic. Matthew lay face down where I had flung him, his shoulders working. When I laid a hand on his back he jerked, turned his head my way, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. It was the same deep shock I’d left Mark Proust in after I’d shot him in the knee. I ran my hand over the boy’s body, but couldn’t find any place where he was bleeding. Both shotgun blasts had come in at doorknob level.

  I got to my feet and took his hand. He rose and tried to climb into my arms, but I told him to stay behind me and take hold of my coat. The leather tightened across my back when he tugged on the tail and I stung in three or four places where lead pellets had lodged beneath my skin. I dragged my sprained, stiff, and shot-up body toward the corridor with the boy hanging on.

  I paused at the doorway, holding the automatic, and looked in both directions. Chunks of mustard-colored plaster strung together with horsehair lay on the floor like jigsaw pieces, and one of the recessed ceiling lights had blown out; a fog of smoke was still drifting out of the brass canister. There was no one in the corridor. They were all busy running for cover upstairs. Now I hoisted Matthew onto my left hip, told him to hang on, and headed for the elevator. I was ten feet from it when the building shuddered and eight square feet of plaster, insulation, and pieces of lath dumped onto the floor in front of me, followed by half a ton of coarse sand and red clay. Matthew let out a wail and buried his face in my side. I coughed out a lungful of dust, dragged my sleeve across my eyes, and swung back the way I’d come.

  Connor Thorpe looked dead. His nose was all over his face, the lower half of which was all crusted blood, and his skin was gray-green, like his suit. I set Matthew down on his feet and let him cling to my thigh while I bent and slapped Thorpe’s cheeks. The little bit of color that came into them after thirty seconds seemed hardly worth it. His eyes opened, all at once without a flutter. He looked right at me.

  “Where’s the way out?” I asked. “You said you had another way rigged besides the elevator.”

  “Go to hell.” It took him two tries to say it. He had to spit out a mouthful of blood and mucus.

  I stuck the automatic in his face and eased back the hammer.

  “Go to hell,” he said again.

  “He’s just a little kid, Thorpe.”

  “He’s a pain in the ass. I told her he would be.”

  “Told who?” Another blow shook the building. A section of ceiling bellied in and fell on top of Andy. He didn’t stir. “Forget it. Where’s the way out?”

  “Go to hell.”

  I looked at him. I was as numb as a tire. “Tell Iris I’m not a Republican.” My finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Who?”

  Just then the steel door came free of the wall, frame and all, and hit the floor with a crash. Matthew screamed. I elevated the barrel of the pistol and let the hammer down gently.

  The best place for the boss’s escape hatch was in the boss’s office. T
here were no traps in the floor or ceiling and the walls were seamless. I told Matthew to stand clear, stuck the automatic in the waistband of my pants, pulled the nearest file cabinet away from the wall. There was nothing behind it except feathery dust and a yellowed file, that had been lost since V-J Day. I moved two more cabinets and found a seam in the wall.

  I pulled away the fourth, breaking loose a scab between my shoulder blades and releasing a trickle down my spine, and there was a recessed hand-pull at waist level. When I tugged on it, the entire panel came out of the frame. I leaned it against the cabinets and took a step forward to investigate what lay beyond. A fresh explosion jarred the telephone off the desk. Its bell rang when it struck the linoleum. I hoisted Matthew, pulled out the pistol, and stepped through the hole in the wall.

  Beyond the trapezoid of light from the office the place was as black as deep space and filled with the potatoey smell of moist earth. The passage could have gone on forever or stopped ten feet in. Matthew whimpered; I wanted to join in. I groped my way forward, poking the automatic out in front to measure the depth. After a little while I could tell I was heading upward. The packed dirt under my feet graded gently. Another impact from above shook loose a stream of dirt onto my head. I stuck my hand up out of instinct and barked my knuckles against a four-by-four. The passage was shored up like a mineshaft.

  Probing farther, I had to stoop to avoid hitting my head. The ceiling slanted at a shallower angle. Finally I had to let Matthew down. He moved behind me and took hold of my coat without having to be told; he was becoming an old pro. When another bang spilled more dirt down inside my collar I picked up the pace. My heart thudded in my ears and in all the places where I hurt. Of all my many nightmares the worst was being buried alive.

  We went on for what seemed like miles. I wanted to light a match, but I thought I smelled gas. Ray Montana had said something about submerged gas lines. The racket from above was louder. A bell was clanging; either someone had activated a fire alarm or it had jarred into action all by itself. The sour smell of my own sweat joined with the dank subterranean stench.