Page 57 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

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Dark passages, the smell of wet stone, the smell of mold.

He recalled the scent of the blood from the woman he shot. Her husband’s too. He’d killed them both that day.

Now, he eased forward silent and studied her flashlight beam, and from the width of the bright disk on the wall he knew approximately where she was standing, examining whatever it was she was examining. If she stayed in that corner, yeah, it would be good. Though he was a large man, Lyle Spencer could move quickly. Much of his height was in leg, not torso. His strides were long.

He considered options.

There really was only one.

Get behind her.

The beam of her light was sweeping slowly over the floor. She’d be facing away from the door he was near.

Now, he told himself. And stepped forward.

30

Lyle Spencer’s world lit up with white fire.

“Drop the rod. Now. I am armed and I will fire.” Her voice was razor raw.

He turned, glaring into the brilliant light in her hand.

Ah, clever. He glanced to the side. The woman had tied up the flashlight with a grocery bag—there were dozens on the floor—and left it dangling from an old piece of skeletonized machinery to trick him. Her new flashlight wasn’t one at all. It was the app on her phone.

He shook his head in dismay and looked calmly at the muzzle of her pistol, aimed directly at him.

The rod, pointed toward the ground now, swung back and forth in his hand, the way a baseball player casually carries the bat to home plate.

“I’m a police officer. Drop the rod now. You move one step, I will fire.”

He had no doubt that she would.

Back and forth, back and forth.

She held the weapon perfectly steady. The bigger Glocks, he knew, were not light weapons.

Back and forth.

“Do it now.” Not shouted, as another cop might have done. The voice was calm, icy. Her final warning.

A moment longer. He dropped the rod, which hit the concrete and bounced, ringing twice, with the sound of a dull bell.

I’m walking along a street on the Upper East Side, my eyes on the vehicle I’m about to break into, a block away.

Seeing the model and make of the car, I can’t help but think about Englishman Joseph Bramah, who created a cylindrical key lock in the late 1700s that was so sophisticated it’s still in use today. (He offered a sizable challenge reward to anyone who could pick it. The reward stood for sixty-seven years, until the great Exhibition of 1851, where it was picked by none other than my idol, Alfred Hobbs.)

Bramah found a huge market for his lock but he wasn’t able to make them fast enough to turn a profit. So, the brilliant inventor (beer draft pumps, modern toilets, banknote presses) invented something else that turned his business around: the assembly line.

Which supposedly inspired Henry Ford, and the industrialist began using the technique to manufacture cars.

And it happens to be a descendant of Ford’s Model T that I’m about to break into just now.

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