Kells shook his head. “I’ll make out.” He peeled two bills off the roll in his pocket, handed them to the little Irishman. He turned swiftly and went into the darkness between two houses, heard Fifty-eight’s “Thank you, sir,” behind him.
The driveway ended in a small garage; there was a gate at one side leading to a kind of narrow alley. Kells crossed the alley and walked north along a five-foot board fence for about a hundred feet. Then he climbed over the fence and went across a vacant weed-grown lot toward the rear end of the building that housed Ansel’s.
Its three stories were dark and forbidding in the rain; no light came from the rear, and the side that Kells could see seemed entirely windowless. It was raining hard by now — he rolled his coat collar up, pulled the brim of his soft hat down.
He slipped once in the mud, almost fell. In righting himself he remembered his wounded leg suddenly, sharply. It was throbbing steadily, swollen and hot with pain.
He went close to the building. It was very dark there, but looking up he could see the vague outline of a fire escape against the yellow glow of the sky. He smiled to himself in the darkness, put the back of his hand against his forehead. It was hot, dry.
He felt his way along the wall of the building until he was under the free-swinging end of the fire escape. It was almost four feet beyond his reach. He went back the way he had come to the fence, went along it until, in the corner the fence made with a squat outbuilding, he found a fairly large packing case. He stood on it and found that it would hold his weight; he balanced it on his shoulder and carried it back into the shadow of the building.
Standing on the box, he could just reach the end of the fire escape; he put his weight on it, slowly. It creaked a little, came slowly down.
When the bottom step was resting on the packing case he crawled slowly, carefully up to the first landing. He lay on his side, held the free-swinging part so that it would come up quietly. Then he stood up.
Two windows gave on the second landing. One was boarded up snugly, no light came through. Kells put his ear to it, could hear only a confused hum of voices. The other window had been painted black on the inside but a long scratch ran diagonally across one of the panes. He took off his hat, put his eye close to the scratch.
He was looking into the office that ran almost the width of the building, was partitioned off from the big upstairs room by a wall of rough, unpainted pine boards.