They didn’t stay to help with the cleanup.

23

NOT HAVING the hoped-for comfort of Darlene in his life, Doug had dinner with a couple college friends, also bachelors, also beginning to get querulous about it, and got home at quarter to ten to find the lights on and John and Andy seated in his living room, reading his magazines. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t you guys have homes of your own?”

“Where do you get your magazines, Doug?” Andy wanted to know. “A dentist’s office?”

“I’ve been busy lately,” Doug explained. “I’m behind on my reading.” And he thought, I’m apologizing to these people! They’re in my home. I don’t want them here.

Dropping last year’s TIME on an end table, Andy said, “We don’t wanna take up a lotta your time. Particularly when it’s that old. We just wanted to drop by, tell you, there’s a little change in the personnel.”

“Change? What do you mean, change?”

John said, “A couple facts come together today and we saw we didn’t have the exactly perfect string for this job.”

“You’re changing the crew?” Doug didn’t get it. “That’s what this is about? Why do you want to change the crew?”

“Because you did,” John said.

“See,” Andy said, “Ray’s a nice addition to the group, climbing up the walls and all that, but it means we got one guy too many.”

“You don’t wanna work in a crowd,” John explained.

“So what are you saying?” Doug asked. “One of the group is leaving?”

“Stan,” Andy said.

“Stan? What, Stan? He’s the one started this thing. His mother. But he’s the first one in.”

“But he’s a driver,” Andy said. “There’s no place in this thing for a driver, it’s all on the third floor of that building on Varick.”

Doug, trying to wrap his head around this change, said, “What does Stan think about it?”

“There’s always another job,” Andy said, with a shrug. “Always another day.”

“Is he happy about it?”

“Happy doesn’t come into it,” John said. “After we saw you people today, we thought it over, and we all agreed, the string’s got to change. So Stan’s out.”

Struck by a sudden horrible thought, Doug said, “You didn’t—You didn’t kill him, did you?”

They were both clearly astonished. John said, “What are you talkin about?” and at the same time Andy said, “We’re the nonviolent crowd, remember?”

“But you’re criminals,” Doug reminded them. “Is there really any such thing as a nonviolent criminal? Except politicians, you know, white collar.”

Andy, speaking with great sincerity, said, “I can guarantee you, Doug, we stay away from violence completely unless there’s absolutely no way it can get back at us.”

“Which is never,” John added.

Doug was unconvinced. He said, “Tiny? Are you saying Tiny isn’t ever violent?”

“Look at Tiny,” John suggested. “Does he need violence?”

“We don’t want to take up your whole night here,” Andy said. “All we wanted was to come by and tell you, Ray’s in, so Stan’s out, and you can tell that payroll guy.”

“Quigg,” John said.

“Yes, I will.” Doug frowned at them. “That was worth a whole trip? You couldn’t call me tomorrow? You’re gonna see me Monday.”

“We wanted you to know when it was fresh,” John explained. “You’ve got your girl Marcy working on it, shaping it, making it entertainment, we didn’t want her to waste any time shaping Stan, because he’s out.”

“I’ll tell her,” Doug said.

“Thank you, Doug,” John said, with dignity, and they both got up and left.

Doug brooded at the closed door through which they’d just passed. Something’s wrong here, he told himself. Something smells funny about this. But what? And why?

24

ONE A.M. A gleaming black limousine comes to a stop on Varick Street. The building door beside it opens and two men come out and cross the sidewalk to the limo. The limo’s rear door opens and an extension ladder slides out horizontally into midair. First one of the men grasps the oncoming ladder, then the other. The two men turn and carry the ladder to the building doorway, open into darkness. The limo’s passenger says a word to the driver and climbs out to the sidewalk. He shuts the door, crosses to the building, enters into the same darkness as the other two men and the ladder, and shuts that door behind himself. The limo purrs away around the corner.

Crash.

“Turn on a light,” Tiny said. “You’re gonna bust every windshield in here.”

Kelp found the light switch and turned on the overhead fluorescents. “No, it was a side window,” he said. He was at the front end of the ladder.

Dortmunder, at the other end, said, “We’ll do the indoor stuff first.”

Kelp looked across the massed vehicles to the elevator platform way over on the other side. “I think,” he said, “we got to carry it over our heads.”

“Save a lotta glass that way,” Tiny commented.

Holding his end of the ladder up in the air over his head, Kelp started the dodging and weaving necessary to thread the needle in here. Dortmunder followed, his end of the ladder also up in the air, and Tiny followed as caboose. They would use the ladder to get to the second floor because they didn’t know what would be alarmed when the building was supposed to be empty, and the elevator seemed like a prime candidate for security.

As they neared the elevator, Stan and the kid came up out of a horseless hansom cab, both yawning a little. (Stan was out of the public part of events, but not out of the inner circle parts.) The kid said, “That’s really comfortable, that thing.”

“Not much scenery, though,” Stan said, and nodded at the ladder. “Good. Now we find out if the damn place is worth the trouble.”

“It better be,” Kelp said. “I’m not doing this for wages.”

At the elevator at last, Kelp put his end of the ladder down while Dortmunder walked the other end up toward the vertical. The other three came in at that point to lay hands on the ladder, to help and hinder, and when it was upright they pushed up the extension, elongating the ladder into the upper darkness.

“Ouch!”

Kelp looked over at Dortmunder. “You okay?”

“Not until you lower it a little so I can get my thumb out.”

“Sorry.”

They completed the extension without further incident, and Tiny said, “We don’t have to do a mob scene up there, everybody in everybody’s way. Dortmunder, you and Kelp go on up, see what it looks like.”

“Right.”

So Kelp went up the ladder, Dortmunder following, and on the next level they came to the empty space fronting Combined Tool. Six feet back from the hole for the elevator an off-white wall stretched across from the right-side outer wall, with the one brown door in the middle of it they’d seen before. Just to the left of the elevator area, a second wall came forward, perpendicular from the first one, running beside the elevator hole to the front of the building.

So this empty rectangle of space with the door in it was all at this level they could see. Of course this door too was equipped with palm-print recognition. They stood back—not too far back—and considered the situation.

“Wires,” decided Kelp.

“You’re right.”

They both had flashlights out now, shining them on the walls and ceiling. Kelp said, “Electricity. Phone. Cable. Security. A cluster of wires.”

Dortmunder pointed his light at the stone side wall of the elevator space. “They gotta do surface-mount. You can’t bury wires in a stone wall. See, like that.” And his light shone on a gray metal duct, an inch square, coming down from above. “That’s where they put in those cameras, to screw us outta the storage space.”

“Well, let’s see.” Kelp turned the other way, looking at the side wall where it came close to the front of the building. “There we go.”