Page 95 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

Well, guess that meant his opinion was that the building was about to come down.

Nothing to do about it now, except climb.

Lift … grip … straighten.

Eighty feet wasn’t so far. Less than a third of the length of a football field.

Seventy feet.

Sixty feet.

Have to say, Trudes, itispretty damn far.

Fifty.

Jesus, Lord, the hurt.

Lift … grip … straighten.

“I don’t know, Dad.” The girl’s voice is uneasy.

“Come on, hons, you can do it,” Spencer says to her.

They’re fifty feet off the ground, he and twelve-year-old Trudie, blond and slim and ponytailed. They are rising at about the same pace upward.

“I don’t know,” she gasps.

“One step, one grip at a time,” he encourages.

“I got it,” the girl says and lunges for another rock above her head.

And she falls, gasping and calling out.

The spotters, who have her well under control, slow her descentand she does a rather stately abseil to the floor, which is covered in green padding.

“You good?” he calls, looking down.

“I’m good.”

Up ten more feet and Spencer rings the sixty-foot bell and descends. The soft surface always struck him as pointless since if you hit anything except marshmallow at more than thirty miles an hour, you can say goodbye to a lot of portions of your body.

“Want to head home?” he asks his daughter.

“No, kinda want to try it again.”

That’s my girl, he thinks, but doesn’t dare say. Instead, he nods to the wall. “Beauty before brains.”

Lift … grip … straighten.

Spencer looked up at the twelfth-floor ledge.

How far?

Thirty-five feet.

Lift … grip … straighten.

Twenty-five.

---