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“We good to enter?”

“My friend said it’s not going to collapse on its own but we should stay away from the fifth floor, southeast corner of the building. That part’s not sound.”

We followed Choir Boy’s directions for entering the building, easily locating the low spot along the back fence. We shimmied under it, then crossed the busted and weedy pavement to the basement window Choir Boy had told us to go to—but it was covered with plywood screwed into the frame. The south rear door was chained and locked. So was the north entrance.

Sampson pulled on an old bulkhead door hidden behind a rusted dumpster at the back of the building, and it protested but opened with a screech. We heard an ambulance pass in the distance as we turned on our Maglite flashlights and climbed down into the basement.

At first glance, the musty, cobwebbed place appeared empty except for spiders and cockroaches. Then we played our lights over a pile of filthy sleeping bags and trash in the corner, and I recognized the gin brand and whispered, “Choir Boy’s bunk.”

Sampson nodded, shining his light on the dusty floor.

“Other folks been in here,” he muttered as he drew his Glock. “That footprint’s small enough to be from Anna’s nine-year-old.”

I nodded and got out my pistol as well. “How do we handle this? Yell for them?”

“Let’s keep quiet,” he said. “We don’t know the situation.”

I agreed and we moved as one through the basement to the stairs. We climbed up to a fire door that opened into a stairwell with another metal fire door opposite. We stood there listening but heard nothing.

Sampson opened the second metal door, and we stepped into a hall with broken windows at either end that provided some dim light as we crept along, pausing often to listen. The doors to the apartments had all been removed.

The fire and water damage was everywhere. In places, the plasterboard sagged and hung off the walls and the ceilings. Electrical wires and melted plumbing pipes dangled in the cavities created by the flames and the fire hose.

In a few spots you could see right up through the ceiling into the fifth-floor hall. The air there reeked of old smoke.

The dust in the doorways didn’t show many tracks going in or out, but a steady breeze came down the hall, blowing around the curled brown leaves and trash.

We cleared the first floor, then climbed to the second and did the same. Here there were more footprints, some larger, adult, but again disturbed by the swirling breezes. Pigeons roosted on the third floor. They flushed and cackled alarm as they escaped through the gaping windows, leaving their feathers floating in newly stirred dust.

Sampson covered his mouth with his forearm and muffle-sneezed twice before coughing. He lowered his arm, shook his head, whispered, “So much for keeping quiet.”

The words had no sooner left his lips than we heard a loud thump almost directly above us. Dust and bits of mortar fell from the ceiling, and we heard another thump and then a third. This was followed by faint squealing and a fourth thump.

Sampson whispered, “Call for backup?”

“Whoever is up there will hear a radio,” I whispered. “If it’s the kids, we need to get to them now.”

“Here we go, then,” he muttered. “Quiet as mice.”

95

AS BIG AS HE was, my best friend and partner could move in near silence, which he did as we went back into the stairwell and climbed to the fourth floor. By our calculations we were heading toward the apartments in the southeast corner of the building, facing away from the street.

I almost sneezed but held it. We heard that thumping noise ahead of us and then an insistent squeal from an apartment in the far corner of the building. John Sampson and I moved as quickly as we dared, guns up, peering into the other apartments as we passed but seeing nothing, not even a single track in the dust.

Sampson went to the wall before the last apartment on the right. I slid in behind him, covering our six o’clock and watching the hall at the north end of the condemned building.

The thump again. The squeal again. Only this time the squeal was a garbled word:

“Help!”

John took a quick glance around the corner, pulled back. “It’s them,” he whispered. “I can see the two boys. They’re zip-tied and gagged.”

“I’m going,” I said; I went around him and through the doorless entry to the apartment, which stank of smoke.

Across the narrow room, Boog and Luke were sitting propped up against the wall. They saw me and started screaming through the cloths stuffed in their mouths as I moved toward them and past an empty kitchen area to my left.

For a moment I thought they were warning me about a danger, but when I took a quick look around the corner to my right, gun up, I saw they were trying to draw my attention to Anna’s daughter, Emma. She was lying there, curled up on her right side, zip ties on her wrists and ankles.