361 - Donald E. Westlake [26]
I shoved the door aside on its roller and pawed around on the other side till I found the switch. I turned it on and saw a bigger chunk of basement, just as filthy as this. Up ahead, there was humming. Machinery, not voice.
I went back to the foot of the stairs and shouted up. The girl came over and looked down at me. She stood with her legs pressed together and her palms flat against the front of her thighs, so I couldn’t peek up under her skirt. She said, “I got a customer here. What do you want?”
“We’re going on through this way,” I said. “You can close that door now.”
She started to bitch about it. I turned away and went through to the other part of the cellar. Bill was already over there, waiting for me. The girl kept bitching about how it wasn’t her job to close trap doors. I pulled the firedoor shut and then I couldn’t hear her.
Off this room there was a corridor, low-ceilinged, with concrete walls. The walls were dirt-gray except where fresh concrete had dribbled away and showed flaky white. At the end there was another firedoor. This one wasn’t fastened at all. We slid it open and went through to a part that was already lit. The humming was louder ahead of us.
We came to the end of the corridor a little ways after that door, and found a relatively clean part, with an old chunk of linoleum on the floor, and a battered old desk, and a girlie calendar on the wall. There wasn’t anybody there except a cat asleep beside the desk. The cat woke up when we got there, and slunk away to the doorway where the humming came from. It was brightly lit in there. I got a glimpse of metal stairs going down and a lot of dirty black machinery and a guy with a white housepainter’s cap sitting on a kitchen chair.
On the opposite wall, there was the door of the freight elevator. I pushed the button, and you could hear the loud groaning of the machinery in the bottom of the elevator shaft, even farther down than we were. The elevator came. It wasn’t fancy, like the one for the customers. It had wide plank flooring and chest-high sides and only a kind of grillwork on top and a grill gate at the front. We got on and I shut the gate and pressed the button for our floor. The elevator ground up slowly and stopped, and we got off. I pressed the top button and unlocked and closed the door. It went on up.
We came down the hall from the opposite direction that we usually took. There was nobody around. There was a telephone ringing. When we got closer, I could hear it was coming from our room. It rang six times and quit.
I listened at the door of the room. Then I unlocked it and shoved it open fast and ran in crouched, cutting to the right while Bill faded to the left. But I’d heard right, there wasn’t anybody there.
We packed what we needed in one bag and left the other one still open on a chair. Then we rumpled the beds. The place had been searched. Quietly, with things put back more or less in the right spot. Nothing had been taken, not even the two guns.
We went out to the hall, and I was just putting the key in the lock when the phone started again. Bill said to forget it but I told him, “No, we still live here. We don’t want them looking somewhere else.”
I went back in and picked it up on the fifth ring. A guy’s voice said, “Kelly?”
“That’s me,” I said. Behind me, Bill brought the suitcase back in and shut the door.
“Will Kelly? Will Kelly, Junior?”
“No, this is Ray.”
“Let me talk to Will.”
“Who shall I tell him is calling?”
“Never you mind, kid brother. You just put Will on, okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Hold on. I’ll get my big brudda for ya.”
“Thanks.” He thought he was the one being sarcastic.
I dropped the phone on the table and said to Bill, “Some guy. He’ll only talk to you. But he says Will instead of Bill.”
“Okay.” He came over and reached for the phone. When his fingers touched it, I saw the stagefright hit him, and I said, “What the hell. All you have to do is listen.”
“Yeah.” He picked it up and held it to his face and said, “Bill