Firebreak

4

Paul Brock led a charmed life and he knew it. More than once he'd survived when he shouldn't have survived; when Pam Saugherty had saved him instead of jailing him, for instance. More than once he'd fallen in shit and come out smelling like ... not roses. Like money.

It was unsettling to realize it was the money that had made it possible for him to fall into the shit all over again, this time with maybe no coming out at all. It was the money that had made it possible to spend all this time planning revenge against Parker, to at last find Parker, and to hire somebody to do him down once and for all.

Well, that hadn't worked. Not only did Charov turn out not to be the platinum pro he was cracked up to be, not only did Brock make the mistake of turning Parker's attention toward himself, but now his Outfit friends at Cosmopolitan weren't his friends any more. The schmuck who stayed out in the cold, that was Paul Brock.

The truth was, his own revenge jones toward Parker had shrunk away to nothing years ago. It was only for Matt's sake that he'd kept on, only for Matt's sake that he'd exulted when at last Parker's name had popped up on his own Web search, only for Matt's sake that he'd paid Charov the money and got himself into this mess.

What it was, he'd had some vague feeling—not a belief, barely articulated at all—that if he could bring down Parker, if he could show Matt that he'd brought down Parker, it would change Matt into something better, much closer to the man he'd used to be. The only man Brock had ever really wanted.

Matt wasn't a man anybody could want, not now. Swollen, bitter, helpless. In the old days, he'd been strong, purposeful, quick. He'd been mean then, too, and brutal, and seemed to take an angry pleasure in hurting women—like Pam—for making him want them. Brock hadn't cared about the meanness back then, because he'd had all the rest of Matt as well. But now the meanness was all.

Brock knew, of course, that killing Parker wouldn't bring back Matt's legs, but in his dream it would bring back Matt's spirit. Instead of which, it had brought the threat of Parker right into their home.

Brock made his living these days mostly by stealing technology for the mob. He owned a computer shop that made a small profit, he did debugging and other technical things for Cosmopolitan and others, but mostly he was the mob guys' computer genius, the one that could get them into closed files, find them everything from insider stock market knowledge to FBI surveillance tapes. They paid him well, or they had until now, when, because of Parker, all at once they'd cut him off. So that was the reason to finish Parker himself, if he could. Not for revenge, not any more, but just to get his livelihood back.

The first thing to do was move Pam out of the house until it was over. Matt hated Pam, and she despised him back. Usually Brock ignored that, because Pam made the household work, and had saved Matt's life, and saved Brock from going to jail. But now, having to watch and wait for Parker, Brock couldn't afford to be distracted. Matt had to stay, there was no choice about that, no chance for the two of them to go somewhere and hide, but Pam had to go.

"Go somewhere south," he told her. "Go somewhere sunny, phone me when you get there, tell me how to get in touch, I'll call you when things are normal here."

She said, "What's going to happen, Paul?" She was worried for him, he knew, not for herself, and certainly not for Matt.

He said, "The man who shot Matt and me, that you saw out front, he's going to try to finish what he started. I'm going to try to stop him. If I do, I'll call you. If I don't..." He shrugged, not wanting to think about that alternative.

She patted his arm. "I know you'll be all right," she said.

Neither of them mentioned Matt.

The first thing to do was switch off the circuit breaker to the riding chair that Matt almost never used these days, that made it theoretically possible for him to travel down the one flight of stairs to the other wheelchair, motorized and kept near the front door. Matt was rebellious now, since the threat of Parker had become real, rebellious and angry and unpredictable and probably afraid. Brock didn't want him to suddenly take it into his head to leave the building, go haring off in search of a gun, in search of old friends to help him, in search of the simple relief of movement.

The strange thing, the sad thing, was Brock's realization there were no old friends. Matt had always been too rough to have friendships, and the people he'd known had dropped away the instant he was hurt. Brock had many friends, bar friends and techie friends and music friends from his days running a record shop, but now he realized just how shallow those friendships really were. There was no one to stand beside him now. He was on his own.

The next thing was to think about how Parker could get into the building. There was the front door. The rest of the ground floor was a tourist shop, T-shirts and

postcards and such, with its own separate entrance, and its own furnace in its own closed-off section of the basement, so there was no access from there. Behind the house, the narrow slate-surfaced space was a closed areaway between this row of brick houses and the larger newer apartment house that faced on the next street.

There was the roof. Most of this block was nineteenth-century row houses, built all together, with the same ₍ flat roof. Originally they'd all been single-family residences, like Brock's, but some of the houses were now split up into apartments, with public stairwells. Parker could get into any of those buildings with no problem, make his way to the roof, walk from there over to this roof, and come down through the trapdoor at the top of the stairwell.

When Brock had bought the house, there had been a fire escape down the front of it, but he'd gotten approval from the Landmarks Commission and had it removed. So that meant there were only the two possibilities: the front door and the roof.

Before she'd left, Pam had stocked the place with non-perishable food. There was no reason for Brock to leave the house for the next few days, so no reason to keep that front door functional. He kept a few tools in a kitchen drawer, including a hammer. In the cluttered basement, he found a three-foot length of two-by-four, and an old coffee can that held a mix of screws and nails and drill bits and Allen wrenches. Carrying these upstairs, he nailed the two-by-four to

the floor against the inner front door, which opened inward. It wouldn't open now. Let Parker have the small vestibule out there; he wouldn't get through this door.

The trapdoor was more difficult. The way it worked, there was a square hole in the roof, two and a half feet across, with a thick six-inch-high rim on all four sides. A square heavy cover fit over that, not hinged. The way you got out to the roof was to lift the cover straight up, slide it leftward, and set it on the roof.

The sides of the cover came down outside the rim. Two hasp locks opposite each other hung down from the cover just inside the rim, to hook over swivel eyes screwed to the rim. The cover itself was thick wood sheathed in a layer of roofing material, to keep it waterproof.

For the normal run of burglar, the hasps were deterrent enough, giving no sign of weakness to an exploratory tug. But Parker would be more determined, and Brock had known for a long time that the hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood of the rim, as old as the house, had become soft with time, and the screws set into it to hold the swivel eyes were short, to be within the thickness of the rim. A tenacious man with a crowbar could eventually drag those screws out of there, and the lid would lift right off.

He stood at the top landing of the house, next to his bedroom, for a long while, looking up at the trapdoor, one hand holding a rung of the iron ladder bolted to the wall here. Finally, he went back down to the kitchen tool drawer, found the tape measure, carried it upstairs, climbed the ladder, and measured the distance between the hasps, just above the swivels. Twenty-eight and a half inches. He went back down to the kitchen, got out the small saw, and sacrificed a broom, holding it braced above the sink as he cut off the handle at twenty-nine inches. He carried that and the hammer upstairs, and wedged the stick into position, pressed tight against both hasps. Now, upward pressure wouldn't cause the screws to move sideways out of the wood.

Later, he went downstairs and made a simple and not very good dinner for himself and Matt. There was almost no conversation between them at the table, except when Matt said, "What are you doing about it?"

"I've blocked things so he can't get in," Brock told him.

Matt didn't like that. "For how long? A year? Ten years? The thing to do is let him in! Bring him in, get rid of him for good!"

"We can't do that, Matt."

"You can't do it, you fucking faggot! Give me a gun! Let me defend myself against the bastard!"

"I'm keeping him out," Brock said, and wouldn't talk about it any more.

He couldn't sleep. He lay in the dark in his bedroom on the top floor, two stories up from Matt, with faint illumination from the city outside painting the room a dark pinkish gray. His room was at the back, to keep away from street noise, so it was usually quiet up here. It was quiet tonight, but he couldn't sleep.

He was still awake at 2:37 in the morning, by the bedside clock, when he heard the footsteps on the roof. Moving, then stopping. Moving again, stopping again. Silent a long time, as Brock stared at the ceiling, listening to his own heart. Then moving again, moving away.

He's here, Brock thought.