Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Thirty-nine

I sat, shivering, against the stone wall on the fifth floor of the turret. A wisp of frigid air blew in through the slit window above my head. I’d cracked it open to keep me alert. And to hear.

It was almost midnight. I’d been waiting since dusk.

Outside, a truck lumbered up the overpass, and the railroad signal began to clang as another late freight rolled through. Across the spit of land, the jukeboxes in the tonks pulsed out rock and roll music made fifty years before. It was a regular night in Rivertown. Except that I was hiding, waiting for someone with a gun to come for me. Someone different than the night before.

I heard a car clattering off Thompson Avenue. I stood up, careful to step around the ladder I’d pulled up after me. The top slice of the turret, the fifth floor, is gotten to only by a trapdoor. There is another trapdoor, in the ceiling, that leads to the roof.

I eased to the edge of the window, worried that I’d see Maverick orange sputtering back under the streetlamp. Benny Fittle had left at nine forty-eight, convinced, I hoped, that the absence of my Jeep and the dark turret meant that I was gone for the night. I didn’t need Benny around to clutter up my plan.

There was something else I didn’t need: a dead cell phone. A couple of hours past sunset, out of nervousness, I’d thumbed open my phone to check the charge. It didn’t light up. My first reaction was to open the trapdoor, drop the ladder, and run down for the charger. My second reaction was that would be too risky. I might have chosen the exact moment my visitor arrived, and that could get me killed. I told myself it was better to stay where I was, atop a heavy, bolted trapdoor, sitting beside my largest kitchen knife, the handle of a baseball bat I’d found floating in the Willahock, and a flashlight. That conversation with myself wasn’t entirely effective. Every minute or so, I started shivering. I tried telling myself that was from the cold. That didn’t work much, either.

It was a sedan down below, an old clunker, black, or perhaps blue. It had turned off the side street and onto the stub of road that passed the turret on its way to city hall. The sedan cut its lights fifty yards away and coasted into a dark patch well behind the glow from the streetlight. Its engine went silent.

There was no moon. I kept watching the dark place where the car was but could see nothing. Lovers, perhaps, come to watch the Willahock.

A car door creaked open and, after a long few seconds, closed. There’d been no flash of an interior light. It was him, then.

Another car door opened, and closed just as quickly.

There were two of them.

I’d never considered that two would come.

One I could fight, if I had to. Even against a man with a gun, I had odds with the knife and the bat handle. They were lousy odds, but odds nonetheless. Against two men though, I had nothing. There were no odds against two men, not two men with guns.

I reached down to the floor. I needed to feel, again, the reassuring thickness of the lock bolt on the trapdoor. I’d oiled it that afternoon, so I could slide it all the way home. My fingers closed on the bolt. It was tight, locked solid.

I straightened up, edged to the window. Five stories below, the ground around the turret was black in the moonless night, too dark to see someone approaching the timbered door. When he-they-picked the lock and came in, the first-floor motion detector would trip the work lights I’d hung high on the beamed ceiling. Proof that I was gone, and enough light for them to find what I’d left behind.

But two of them had come.

I pressed against the cold limestone, straining to hear through the opened window. Only the sounds of a truck and a couple of drunks came back. A shiver prickled across my scalp.

Suddenly, a great, distorted rectangle of white light blazed across the snow. They’d opened the front door, tripped the first-floor lights. Other, thinner strips lay around the rectangle, bright spears thrown to the ground. Light from the slit windows.

They were in.

The long white rectangle narrowed and then disappeared. They hadn’t panicked at the sudden light; they hadn’t rushed to slam the door. They’d shut it almost leisurely. The turret was isolated on a deserted street, well removed from Thompson Avenue. No need to worry, not for two men with guns.

I watched the snow, imagining them moving through the first floor. They’d quickly see there was only a table saw and a white plastic chair. I’d left nothing for them on the ground floor.

A minute passed, then another, and then more white shafts of light lit the snow; these were farther out, spears thrown harder. I hadn’t heard them on the circular stairs. They’d padded up, taking care not to ring the metal.

That was the plan. They were following my plan.

I stepped back from the window. The second floor would take the time. They’d have to work through the kitchen, to make sure that there were only cabinets and lumber and tools, that no one was hiding, waiting for them. Then they’d cross to my office.

I’d left the file folder open on the card table. It was labeled CAROLINA DARE/LOUISE THOMAS ESTATE in laundry marker letters too thick to miss. Setting it up, a few hours before, I thought of that file as cheese in a mousetrap, set to trigger a delayed-action kill spring.

Except now there were two mice. The kill spring suddenly looked weak.

I’d figured it would take no time at all to see how Louise Thomas moved the money through Duddits’s banks in Georgia and Ohio and into Michigan and to understand how Louise’s lawyer got control after she died. The will in the file was almost identical to the one I had. Except that Duddits had removed my name as executor and inserted the name of that fresh-smelling bastard who’d killed Maris and beaten up Leo.

Duddits’s last bits of fiction showed Aggert’s withdrawal of one million two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars from Louise’s last bank account, in Michigan, and the documents he filled out to rent a large lockbox at the Workman’s Bank of East Chicago, Indiana.

They were good documents, my fear whispered to the needles dancing on my scalp.

New lights flashed outside. More spears now lay on the snow, farther still from the second-floor beams. I stared at them, not believing. The men had climbed up to the third floor.

There was nothing for them on the third floor. The trail to the money was in a file folder on the second floor, in plain sight.

It was caution; they were making sure no one was in the turret. Let them check the third floor, see the bed, the clothes piled on the chair, the fiberglass shower temporarily installed. There was nothing else there. Let them come up to the fourth floor, even. The stairs ended there. There was nothing at all on the fourth floor, not even the ladder, now.

Outside, some drunken fool shouted across the spit of land. I pulled at the casement window, carefully drawing it closed to shut out the noise. What I needed to hear was inside, on the third floor.

I knelt to feel the slide bolt again. Certainly it was solid enough to hold the heavy trapdoor in place no matter what they hit it with. The whole floor was strong, made of tight planking milled close to a century before and cut thick enough to stop bullets. I pressed my ear to the fine gap between the trapdoor and the floor.

A sliver of light wavered faintly, just in front of my eye. I turned away quickly, blinked my eyes swiftly to regain my night vision. I’d installed no motion lights on the fourth floor; they’d come up silently and were examining the seams in the trapdoor with a flashlight. My mind flirted with lunacy: I wanted to scream down through the wood, tell the fools that everything they needed was lying on my card table. I made no sound, of course. I held my breath and looked away from the light faintly outlining the trapdoor.

Something began scratching at the underside of the trapdoor, as if testing the wood, probing it. The scratching stopped. Something hit the trapdoor, hard. It hit it again, just as solidly. A man’s voice swore, faint, muffled by the thick wood.

They’d taken a two-by-four from downstairs, used it to ram the trap door. That it was bolted shut told them someone was on the fifth floor.

My mind flashed ahead. They’d think of my tools, scattered in the kitchen. They’d choose the electric circular saw; I had nothing else that could cut through thick wood. They’d know it would take them a long time to cut through the floor, even wielding a circular saw, but they were figuring they had at least four or five hours until sunrise.

I had those hours, too.

I rolled off the trapdoor and quietly stood up. I had the knife, the baseball bat handle, and the flashlight.

I opened the slit window facing the spit of land. I could yell out, wave the flashlight beam, and hope someone on Thompson Avenue would hear. The window, though, was narrow, and with the first three floors lit up by my work lights, a flashlight beaming from the fifth floor might be hard to spot. It would be better if I went up to the roof. I could wave the flashlight up there like a beacon.

Footfalls pounded the circular stairs below. They were running down to the kitchen for my tools.

I moved the ladder under the trapdoor to the roof. Once outside, I’d pull the ladder up behind me and use it to wedge the trapdoor shut. Then, in my pea coat and knit hat, I could dance myself crazy to stay warm as I shouted and waved my flashlight signal into the sky. Sooner or later, some late-night denizen would focus foggy eyes on me long enough to yell for the cops.

The metal stairs rang again. They were charging back up to the fourth floor. I had plenty of time. They’d soon learn it would take hours to cut through the planking to get to the fifth floor. Then they’d think they’d have to do it again, to get to the roof. Except that was impossible. The roof timbers were over a foot thick, impossible to cut with a circular saw. I would be absolutely safe, up on the roof.

I climbed the first rungs of the ladder. Halfway up, my fingers grazed the heavy braided pull rope for tugging the roof door closed. I climbed five more rungs and reached for the first of the twin side bolts. I’d greased them in October, the last time I’d been up on the roof. The first bolt slid back as if it had been buttered. The second slide bolt was tougher but loosened on the third tug.

They started pounding beneath the floor below. For a moment, I paused, confused, as metal thudded against wood, clanging every third or fourth blow. I guessed they were swinging my crowbar at the heads of the metal bolts that fastened the hinges through the oak. Let them swing. The old carriage bolts were blacksmith hardened; a week’s worth of beating wouldn’t crack them loose.

Twin side bolts undone, I reached up and pushed against the trapdoor. It didn’t move.

Down below, the pounding stopped.

They were thinking. They’d have to use that circular saw. I had plenty of time to work the roof door loose.

The pounding started again.

I moved up another rung, got better leverage, pushed up with flat palms. The trapdoor did not budge. Bile worked up the back of my throat: The roof was new, thick and well insulated. The kind of roof designed to keep heat trapped in the turret, where it couldn’t melt away the twenty-four inches of snow that had fallen since December.

Furious at my cockiness, at my stupidity, I ducked my head, lunged up with my shoulder. Once, twice, and again. The trapdoor didn’t flex an inch. It was frozen to my new roof under a winter’s worth of snow and ice.

The pounding stopped.

I gave the roof door a last push. Nothing. I started down the ladder.

The slit window facing Thompson Avenue would have to do. Yell and wave my flashlight; somebody would notice. If not now, then later, when the lizards and the city hall staffers passed by on their way to work. The floor was thick; there was time. I jumped off the ladder while I was still two rungs up. No need to worry about noise.

Excited laughter came from down below. Laugh, you bastards, I thought as I moved to the window.

I pushed the window all the way open. And stopped.

New spears of light lay on the snow down below, farther out from those cast by the first three floors. They were from the fourth floor, just below me-but these weren’t white from incandescent bulbs. These were orange…and flickering.

I looked down at the floor, not believing. Faint threads of orange light danced in the gap around the trapdoor. I dropped to my knees, pressed my nose against the crack.

Fire.

I jumped up and ran to close the window that would turn the turret into a gigantic flue, sucking the flames up toward me. The Kovacs brothers could stay down on the lower floors and wait in safety. For me to come to them.

They laughed, down below, crazed men, excited by the spectacle.

Die of smoke. Die of burns. Die of gunshots or of beatings.

Don’t die suffocating, waiting to choose.

I grabbed the knife, slid back the locking bolt. I tugged open the trapdoor-and jumped.