Page 60 of Pro Bono

“It is,” he said. “Every office on this floor has been closed for at least three hours, and the cleaning company doesn’t come again until Fridaynight.” He got up and opened the conference room door, and Vesper stood with him in the doorway to the waiting room.

They could hear the sound of low voices outside the door in the hallway. Then they saw the doorknob wiggle back and forth a little, but it was locked and wouldn’t turn. Warren took Vesper’s arm and pulled her back a step, closed the conference room door and locked it, and then began gathering the papers they had been copying and collating. He took the papers in a single pile into the storeroom at the side of the conference room, where there was a copier, a wall of shelves to hold office supplies, and some filing cabinets. He bent over and worked the combination of the safe and opened the door. He put the documents in one of the safe’s divisions, and then heard a loud thud and crack as a man threw his shoulder against the outer door of the office and the door swung inward.

On the shelf beside the papers Warren saw the two pistols he had taken from Copes and Minkeagan after they had kidnapped Vesper. He took them out of the safe, shut the door, spun the dial, pulled Vesper away from the door, and pushed the steel desk in the room up on its end in front of the door to provide a barrier.

He’d heard a voice, so there had to be at least one speaker and one listener. They could be Copes and Minkeagan turning on him, or the two men he had fought off with a golf club at his condominium coming back for revenge. They could be anybody. He found the magazine release on the first pistol, saw it was fully loaded, slid it back in, pulled back the slide and saw there was a round in the chamber, and slid it back. He had left the other pistol in the same condition.

He muttered, “I’m lucky I didn’t kill us both.”

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said.

They heard the men on the other side of the door throwing furniture in the conference room aside, and then the thud of a body against the door. The sound was repeated, but this door was different from the one in the outer office. It was steel, with a heavy-gauge lock and dead bolt.

There was gunfire. Warren could see the door vibrate three times, as bullets pounded the metal around the lock. He pulled Vesper down with him on the floor behind the upended desk while three more rounds pounded against the door.

There was silence, while Warren and Vesper waited. She whispered, “What do you think they’re doing?”

“Trying to figure out if there’s another way to hit us.”

“Is there?”

Outside the building, Minkeagan and Copes were in their most recent car watching the office of Warren & Associates. Since Charlie Warren had been attacked by the two thugs at his apartment and Minkeagan and Copes had intervened, they had been observing him very closely. They had a certain expectation of the men who had attacked him. Charlie Warren had beaten them badly with his golf club, and they were sure those two hadn’t forgotten it. The question was whether they would do anything about it.

Minkeagan said, “What did you hear? Was that three shots?”

“Let’s go,” Copes said.

They got out of the car and went across the street to the office building. They ran down the sloping driveway to the elevator, tried pressing the button, but the machine was dead. They tugged on the doorto the stairway, but it wouldn’t budge. Minkeagan said, “We’ll have to bypass the switch lock.”

Copes took out his knife, turned a screw, and popped the metal cover off the elevator controls. He and Minkeagan had taken an advanced class in Ely on rescue for firefighters, so they knew how to get power to an elevator if the problem didn’t involve fire.

On the sixth floor, the gunfire resumed. This time the bullets weren’t hitting the door to the back room. They were aimed at the wall to the right of the door, in three-round volleys. The door was steel, but the walls were plywood, two-by-fours, and plasterboard. The bullets that hit the spaces between two-by-fours pierced the wall. Most of them hit the upturned steel desk, punched through the steel bottom of the lowest drawer and expended their force ricocheting among the upper drawers and desktop. A couple pierced the wall and hit the opposite wall.

Warren saw a series of three that did this, and he realized he could sight from the hole in one wall to the hole in the other and know roughly where the shot had been fired from. He waited, saw three new holes appear in the wall, aimed at the wall and did his best to place five rapid shots on that line of bullet holes. He heard another volley beginning, stepped to the other side of the desk, and fired four more in that direction.

The gunfire through the wall stopped. Warren changed pistols so he had the one with a full magazine in his right hand. He listened, but heard nothing he could identify. He looked at his watch, stood with his back to the wall and facing the steel door and the entry holes.

Vesper said, “What’s happening?”

“Not sure,” he said. “I might have hit one of them, or scared them off. But I think they’re reloading and waiting for me to open the door to see what’s up so they can kill me.”

They waited and listened, but a sound had to be loud to be audible through the wall.

They stayed where they were for five minutes, and then five more, and then Vesper said, “Do you smell something?”

“Yes. It’s like smoke.”

After a few more seconds she pointed at a bullet hole in the wall above Warren’s head. “Look!”

There was a thin wisp of smoke seeping through the hole. Warren stepped close to the steel door, held his hand near to it, and then cautiously touched it and pulled his hand away, then let his hand stay on it for a second. “It’s not very hot yet, but there’s definitely a fire. We’ve got to get out,” he said. “Here. This gun has about seven rounds left, ready to go. If you see a man, and he’s not me, pull the trigger. We’ve got to stay as low as we can because the smoke will be filling the upper half of the room. We’ll have to take the stairs. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Ready?”

“No choice.”

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