Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

“Well, it’s locked now and you can’t have the keys. You’ll just have to do your grave robbing someplace else.”

Fatigue was starting to hit me. I didn’t have any more energy to give to arguing with him. I stuffed the wadded gauze into my jeans pocket and turned without speaking.

Mrs. Feldman bustled me down the hall. “I hope you can leave him alone now. I shouldn’t have let you in in the first place, but he’s never listened to me. If my sister’d been here-she looks just like Mother. Don’t come back again. Not unless you have his check for the Indiana Arms. It’s just a fire to you, but it meant something special to him.”

I started to say something about my own warm and wonderful character but broke it off-she wouldn’t care. I’d barely stepped across the threshold when she began snapping the locks shut.

A Leap in the Dark

I didn’t feel like an overstuffed goose anymore, that was one good thing. At the same time, my bravado had cost me the dressing to my left hand. I tested it gingerly against the steering wheel. The blisters rolled and squished a bit.

I got out and opened the trunk and pulled out the towel I’d stuck in my equipment belt. I wrapped it around my left hand, using my teeth to hold it in place while I tucked the ends inside. It made a slippery glove, but I could manage driving now.

As I drove across Touhy to the Edens, I was so tired and depressed that I wondered if I should abandon my project at Alma Mejicana. Often when I feel like quitting I hear my mother’s voice in my head, exhorting me. Her fierce energy was tireless-the worst thing I could ever do in her eyes was to give up. Tonight, though, I heard no echoes in my head. I was alone in the dark city with my sore palms and bruised shoulders.

If you’re going to sink into self-pity, go home to bed, I scolded myself. Otherwise, your mission is bound to fail. For acrobatic derring-do you need to be at the peak of self-confidence, not down in a well.

I didn’t want to dwell on the scene in Seligman’s musty kitchen, but I forced myself at least to think about what he’d told me. Rita Donnelly had been sitting on something. I should have probed her harder about her daughters at the time, but it had seemed so purely personal. If it wasn’t their paternity she’d been hiding, what was it about them she didn’t want people to know?

The light at McCormick stayed red so long I was only roused from my musings by the violent honking behind me. Startled, I leapt forward through the intersection, barely clearing it on the yellow and getting a finger from an irate driver accelerating past me.

Going sixty on the Edens, I found managing the steering so difficult with my towel-wrapped hand that I couldn’t think about anything except the car and the traffic. I moved into the right-hand lane and slowed to fifty. As I maneuvered past the construction zone at Roosevelt, the damned engine started grinding again. I had to slow to forty before the noise subsided.

I drove straight to Ashland without mishap and once more circled the Alma Mejicana building through the alley. No lights showed. This time I parked on Forty-fifth near the mouth of the alley in case I needed to get to my car quickly.

I tied Eileen’s scarf around my head and pulled the equipment belt from the trunk to strap around my waist. With the weight I’d lost recently it hung a little low; the flashlight and hammer banged unpleasantly into my thighs when I walked. I hugged the footstool close to my chest. It was an unpleasant sign of my weakened state that a weight I would normally find negligible slowed me down tonight.

Even though the night air was pleasantly cool the streets were empty. Most of the buildings on the east side of the alley were commercial; the residents behind the fence on the west side probably hung out on the street behind.

It was just after nine-thirty when I reached the telephone pole down the alley from Alma Mejicana. I looked up at it dubiously in the starlight. Behind their wrappings my palms tingled. I undid the towel on my left hand and stuck it in my waistband at the small of my back. On the footstool my outstretched fingertips were just shy of the first set of spikes. I planted my feet firmly on the stool, bent my knees, and jumped.

The first time I was too scared about slicing open my left palm and didn’t hang on. The clatter I made knocking the footstool across the alley woke the neighborhood dogs. I lay in the shadow of the fence, rubbing my thigh where the hammer had dug in when I crashed, waiting for angry householders to appear.

When no one came I picked up the rolling stair and carried it back to the pole. The dogs were thoroughly roused now; I could hear various shouts at them to shut up. Their unified chorus apparently made the owners think they were barking at each other.

Back on top of my stool I took some diaphragm breaths, leaning my head against the pole. The pole is an extension of my arms. It welcomes me as a sister. It will not fight me as an intruder.

I repeated this litany a few times, bent my knees, and jumped without waiting to think it out. This time I grabbed hold of the spikes and wrapped my thighs around the pole, ignoring the sharp bite of the hammer and the twinge in my shoulder blades. I moved fast, still not thinking about my hands, shinnying up the rough wood until I could reach the second row of spikes and hoist myself up standing.

Once I’d done that it was easy to climb the remaining ten feet so I was level with the building top. When I stepped onto the roof I felt exhilarated with my achievement, so much so that pain and fatigue lay shielded behind a wall in my head. I ran lightly across the rooftop, judged the three-foot gap, and jumped it easily. The next break was wider, and upward, but confidence was now carrying me in an easy tide. I turned off my mind and made the jump, my left foot scraping the side of the wall but the right landing clear on the asphalt.

I went to the edge facing the alley and cautiously shone my flash. My garage marker lay in front of the next building; Alma Mejicana was the one beyond that. The jump this time was the five-footer, but downward. The building where I landed was close enough to my target that they almost shared a common wall.

I stepped across and explored the surface. Sure enough, a trapdoor lay behind the vent pipes. I pried at it gently with the claw end of the hammer. As I’d hoped, they didn’t bother locking it; it came up heavily, I laid my towel on the asphalt behind it and hoisted it slowly open, my shoulders sending out little white-hot sparks of pain that I tried to ignore. I had to strain to get the door to a balance point and then drop it softly on the towel beneath.

I lay down next to it, catching my breath and making sure no alarms sounded. The moon was in its dark phase. The stars were chips of cold glass in the black sky. Despite my exertions and my long underwear, I shivered.

Before the night demons could approach me I sat up and shone my flashlight into the building. Opening the trap had released a set of hanging stairs. I climbed softly down in my black high-tops. I was in a small attic where the heating and cooling apparatus was set up. Some rough stairs, wide enough to handle equipment, led to the main part of the building.

Even though the streets were empty I didn’t want to risk rousing someone by turning on the building lights. Stuffing the scarf in my back pocket I started exploring the interior. A frugal use of my flashlight showed that the two floors of the building had been divided into a series of offices. For the most part they were bare of furniture. One was set up with a metal desk and an Apollo computer.