Two vehicles passed in the street, but neither of them slowed. As far as he could tell, no one thought he and Tilton were sinister.
They could have skulked through backyards, dodging from tree to tree, over fence after fence, but in Drackman’s view, that was riskier than walking straight to the front door. Even at that hour, you never knew who might be looking out a window. If they saw you lurking about and trying to blend with the shadows, they knew you were up to no good. A bold approach appeared less suspicious.
According to Fiona, telephone service in the neighborhood came above ground at the front right corner of each residence. When she got out of her car, not having bothered with a jacket, as wild as the storm itself, she walked directly to the Bledsoe place, lashed by rain and buffeted by a sudden wind that seemed to spring up just to welcome her. At the house, she squatted to find and cut the phone-service line. As Drackman and Tilton climbed the porch steps, Fiona rose, her task completed, and rounded the porch to join them.
As hard as the rain had fallen, it fell now harder still, in thick tropical skeins, and Drackman thanked whatever unknown mystic had devised the Tarot deck as far back as at least the thirteenth century. The Tarot, juju, countless disciplines of magic, fate, the stars, the weight of history, and the power of progress—all were behind his crew this night, and there would be no stopping them.
100
Mr. Smaller, who actually was ten pounds smaller than when he had walked out of the superintendent’s job forever, drove past the apartment building, scanning for stakeout vehicles, pretty sure he would recognize one, keenly suspicious, not to say paranoid, but he didn’t see anything that alarmed him.
He turned left at the corner, left again at the alleyway, and cruised behind the place. Nothing there got his hackles up, either. After parking on a side street a block from the building, he returned to the alley on foot, shoulders hunched, head held low, grumbling to himself about the intensity of the storm that pummeled him and the wind that dashed rain under his hood and into his face.
Before leaving his position as building superintendent, he had made a copy of the passkey that operated every lock in the building, and he had no doubt that it still worked. The swine who owned this empire of tenements and the black-hearted company men who licked their boots and did their vile work for them would have rather slit their wrists than hire a smith to reconfigure every lock in that moldering pile of masonry.
At the rear of the building, at the door to the back stairs, as the key turned smoothly and as he felt the deadbolt retracting from the striker plate in the jamb, Mr. Smaller grinned and said, “Cheap bastards.”
Inside, he closed the door quietly. He stood there dripping and listening. He heard a TV in the distance. Faint. Water racing through the old pipes as someone took a late shower.
The trick now was to get up to the fifth floor unseen, do the deed, waste the sneaky little creep, pull a little Pearl Harbor on him, and then get out without encountering anyone. After the bank and the heist, he was already wanted for murder; it hardly mattered if they hung one more capital charge around his neck. If he was seen by a tenant, however, they would surely recognize him in spite of his shaved head and mustache and weight loss, and then he would have to kill again, just to ensure that he would have time to get out of the city before the police knew he’d been there.
He started up the stairs.
101