High Chicago

CHAPTER 40

"You were watching the workers here yesterday," Birk said. "You must have seen how it's done. Like a monkey shimmying down a palm tree."

I had watched a man climb down a girder wearing work gloves and boots. Wearing a harness that would stop his fall if he lost his grip.

I said, "If I don't?"

"Francis will shoot you. He won't need much provocation either. I don't think he likes you."

"Too many people know why I'm here. If I'm found with a bullet wound, they'll come after you."

"They who? The police? Chicago averages five hundred murders a year."

"So I've heard."

"Your body will be found in an area known for gang activity. They'll chalk it up to misadventure on your part. The naive Canadian who wandered into the baddest part of town and was shot for whatever was in his wallet."

"No one will buy that."

"People have been buying what I sell all my life. Francis will swear I never left my apartment. I'll swear he was with me all night. Tom Barnett will swear I'm Elvis Presley if I tell him to. Anyway, it's a moot point because I don't think you're going to stand there and meekly take a bullet. Be a sport, Geller. I'm giving you a chance to walk away."

"Some chance."

"Come on!" he cried. "Where's your sense of adventure? You're young. You're fit. You've shown us some moves. You certainly have a knack for survival. You climb down four floors, you'll be back on concrete and you can make it to a stairwell from there. It's not inconceivable you could make it."

Not inconceivable. Just the kind of odds you want.

"I'm giving you more of a chance than, say, Basil Rathbone would have given Errol Flynn. More than George Sanders would have given Tyrone Power. There are no sharks in these waters. Your hands are no longer tied."

"Can we move this along?" Curry said.

"Poor Francis," Birk said. "Francis doesn't care for classic movies the way I do."

"I liked Kiss of Death," he said.

He would, the hairless fucking waxwork.

"And if I fall?" I said. "How are you going to explain that?"

"Very easily. You've made your little obsession with me quite public. Your scene at the Department of Buildings. Harassing my site manager here. The scenario would be obvious, I think. Having been ejected earlier, you broke into the site, commandeered the elevator, came up here looking for some evidence to support your outlandish theories about me. And fell. Ouch. The end."

"They're not that outlandish," I said. "You did have them killed, didn't you?"

"On the off chance you make it down in one piece, I think I'll decline to comment."

"And the home invasion? You engineered it, didn't you?"

"Quit whistling out your ass," Curry said.

"On the advice of my director of security, I think I'll duck that one too. Now start climbing." His voice had lost the playful singsong tone he'd been using, sounding more like the balls-to-the-wall negotiator he was supposed to be.

I walked back out along the twenty-foot beam until I reached the beam to which it connected. I squatted down, gripped the sides of the girder and hugged it close to my body, thinking of the workman I'd watched through binoculars, gripping with his feet, shimmying down, as Birk had said, like a monkey down a tree. Except a monkey was made for climbing: exquisitely muscled with feet that gripped like hands and a prehensile tail. I started inching down, keeping my eyes fixed on the pale clock face of the Wrigley Building across the ribbon of river that ran in from the lake. It took several minutes to make it down to the next horizontal beam, where I thought I could rest. But as soon as my feet touched it, something slammed into my right shoulder. The shock of it made me lose my grip for a moment. I slid down hard, felt skin tearing off my palms as I gripped the girder trying to stop my fall. I thought I'd been shot. But then something clanged off a girder far below, and I knew that someone above me, Birk or Curry, had thrown something down. A long bolt.

"Just keeping you honest," Birk called.

I swung my body to the outside of the girder and started down the next length. My hands were cramping around the girder. My quads were stiffening. My collarbone where the bolt had hit felt like it was broken. The muscle that connected it to the scapula was going into spasm. I kept going. Six inches, a foot. Stopped to wrap my arms around the girder and flex my hands. But as soon as I did, more bolts rained down. One hit my right forearm. Another just missed my head. I gripped the girder and renewed my descent.

Thought, "This is what you get for trying." A former colleague, the late Francois Paradis, once told me, "No good deed goes unpunished." Is that how it really is? Is this how it ends? The fall itself would be over in seconds. I wouldn't feel a thing. I'd be dead a millisecond after I hit the ground, before the pain impulses could travel to my shattered brain.

I descended another few feet. My hands were being rubbed raw by rough steel. My right arm was on fire from my wrist up to the base of my neck. When I got to the next horizontal beam I stopped to rest again, hugging the girder tight to present the smallest possible target. It didn't help. Another bolt hit my right leg just above the knee. I howled in pain.

"Sorry about that," Birk yelled.

"You are not," I heard Curry say.

I wasn't going to make it. They would find me at the bottom. Ship what was left of me home. My mother would be devastated. Jenn would cry her heart out. Hollinger would probably regret the way things had gone. My brother-what would he feel? I had no idea, and somehow that made me feel sadder than anything else.

I felt tears in my eyes. From the wind, the pain, the rage throttling my heart.

I started down again. Two more floors, I told myself. A dozen more cramps. A hundred more breaths. Breathe into your hands, Geller. Into your quads, your knee, your shoulder, your arm. Fill your chest, your head with air. Sharp, cold nighttime Chicago air. Air off the lake. Air whistling through these towers around you. Breathe it. Climb down through it.

Two more bolts came down. Both missed, clanged off the girder. Maybe I was getting harder to see from up there.

I reached another horizontal beam, changed my position so all that was exposed was my hands and feet.

Another bolt hit my left hand. "Fuck!" I yelled. I felt blood spill through my straining fingers but didn't let go. Wasn't going to let go.

What if I just stay here? I thought. What if they find me in the morning, clinging to this post, stuck to it with dried blood, a twisted figurehead on the good ship Millennium Skyline?

Explain that, Mr. Birk.

But my left hand was starting to give way. My right was barely holding on.

What if I just let go? Would a good coroner be able to tell anything about ante-mortem injuries? "Hmm. These welts on his hand, his collarbone, his knee. Not consistent with a fall from a great height."

Would it matter? Birk could probably buy off a coroner. He had at least one cop in his pocket. Plenty of room for a coroner-or did Illinois have medical examiners? Didn't matter. Birk could afford either one.

Nearly a thousand feet to fall. A few seconds at most. My entire body was begging to let go. My hands wanted to. My feet did too. My mind, my heart, my will-the pain was sapping them all.

And then I heard a hum-more than a hum, a mechanical whine-something moving off to my right, on the other side of the building.

The hoist was coming back up.

Why would Birk and Curry have summoned it? They weren't through with me yet. The game wasn't over. Unless it meant they couldn't see me from above anymore and would come to the floor I was on and finish me; or go down to ground level and wait for me to fall.

No more bolts were falling from above, which gave me a chance to climb freely. If I made it down one more floor, I'd be on concrete. But I'd also be right where they expected me to be. They'd be standing in the elevator or stairwell entrance and finish it. But there was another choice. Do the horizontal beam walk again. Come in on an unfinished floor above where they'd be waiting. If the wind didn't blow me off, maybe I could find a weapon-the kind of bolts they had been throwing-or a section of rebar or chunk of concrete to drop on Curry's head from above.

My muscles were still cramping and both palms were bleeding. My feet felt frozen inside my shoes. But three floors down from the top, I inched out onto a beam and moved slowly along, summoning every ounce of my training in movement and fighting, staying steady and balanced, getting closer to the corrugated floor: fifteen feet, ten feet, five. When I was close enough I launched myself forward and landed on my side. Pain shot through my shoulder where the first bolt had hit. But I was back on firm ground of sorts, in a place with a fighting chance. I sprinted toward the elevator. It would have to pass me on the way up to fetch Birk and Curry then come back down. I hunted for a weapon, spied a wrench that had fallen between two sections of flooring, hefted it. It was the best chance I had to take Curry out. Break his gun arm, stave in his shiny skull.

And then take Simon Birk apart.

The elevator ground slowly up the side. I could see light inside it, a bare bulb that made the smears in its Plexiglas surface look ghostly, as if it had been wiped by a spectral hand. I'm left-handed but shifted the wrench to my right, which didn't hurt as badly. I breathed in as deeply as I could without sending more spasms through my side. I had two, maybe three minutes to get ready. I looked for a shadowed place to hide, to make them come to me, to shift the game to my terms.

The game. I had enough to hate Birk for already, but turning my life, my death into a game for his amusement, an entertainment of sorts? I wanted to entertain the living shit out of him. I had to focus my anger, not let it get the better of me, at least not until Curry was down.

But the elevator never went up to their floor. It stopped at mine. And when the doors opened the only person in it was Gabriel Cross.

I stumbled into it and fell onto the floor. I would have shaken his hand but I doubted he wanted any part of my blood-smeared lumps of meat.

"You got my message," I said.

"No," he said. "I got Mr. Birk's." And he surprised me by doing a note-perfect impression of Birk. "'Gabriel, I wonder if you'd do something for me. Walk back out to the end of that girder.' Like he's the organ grinder and I'm the monkey. I could tell they were up to no good with you. When I got to my truck, I took a look up through my binocs. And there you were, doing Spiderman. Figured you might need a lift."

He started the hoist back down. They could throw all the bolts they wanted. I was safe inside it.

"You work for a man," Cross said, "that's all it means. Doesn't mean he owns you. Used to, maybe. Not today. Not with all these buildings going up. Not when you're a Mohawk who's not afraid of heights."