The Unseen by Hines Read Free Book Online Page B

checked the rear.
    Off the alley he saw three small basement windows, one of which looked to be open a crack. He paused a few minutes to watch for activity, then quickly walked to the window. Just above the window, he saw a symbol he’d seen at the Creep Club Web site: a large M with rounded tops, looking much like a McDonald’s logo.
    He leaned down to push the window open, and now, as he was leaning into the window and looking at the M sideways, he realized it wasn’t an M at all. It was two capital Cs, turned on their sides. CC. Creep Club. Evidently, the folks in the Creep Club believed in signing in—leaving marks for other infiltrators to see.
    Hearing or seeing no activity on the other side of the window, Lucas pushed it open and slipped inside. He dropped to the basement floor without a sound.
    He pushed the window closed behind him again, lit his flashlight, and began walking.
    Everything in the building smelled like mothballs, although he doubted mothballs had ever been used here. That would mean someone cared about something in here, wanted to preserve it, and that obviously wasn’t the case. Maybe he was just smelling mold and rot.
    He fell into a regular pattern. Ten steps, stop and listen, ten steps, stop and listen. Soon his light swept over an elevator shaft and, to the left of it, crumbling stone steps.
    Lucas went up the first two sets of stairs to the propped-open door of the main floor. No activity. He continued to the second floor and checked. Down a long corridor, light spilled out of a room. Voices, and occasional laughter, filtered toward him.
    After memorizing the location of the room, he went up the next two sets of steps to the third floor. The floors were solid poured concrete, so he had no worries about creaking or groaning boards as he walked down the hallway until he came to the room directly above the one the Creep Club occupied on the second floor.
    Some of the windows in this room were broken, and the weather had seeped in. Dark rust stains smeared the walls by the broken windows. Lucas checked the room. No utility chase attached. Not that he’d expected one. A water fountain out in the hallway; he could maybe work with that, hear some of what they were saying, if he had to. But he was hoping for something more promising. He didn’t bother to lie on the floor and try to listen; a couple feet of concrete would insulate the sound too much.
    Okay, he’d have to try an adjacent room on the second floor.
    He retreated down the stairs again and walked quietly down the tiled hallway toward the room where light came spilling out. As he approached, the sounds of the voices grew louder.
    They were meeting in room 227; the door on room 225, just to the south of them, gaped open. Good.
    He crept into 225 and looked around. No broken windows or leakage in this room, but that was about the best you could say for it. A couple of rickety old wooden chairs, a steel desk, some papers littering the floor. Above him the familiar acoustic tile. Whoever invented that stuff must be retired in the Bahamas, living off billions of dollars of income.
    He grabbed one of the chairs and set it by the wall adjacent to room 227. Because this was a poured concrete building, with several beams supporting the weight of each floor, he knew this wall wouldn’t be load-bearing. That meant it probably didn’t even go all the way to the ceiling; instead, it was most likely a partition built of two-byfour framing.
    As Lucas pushed aside the tile, he saw exactly what he wanted: the wall stopped about eight inches from the subfloor of the next story. Some electrical wiring and cables snaked across the space.
    He kept a roll of duct tape in his backpack, and he pulled off a length of it, looped it around his hand, then stretched across the top of the wall to an acoustic panel on the adjacent room. When the tape stuck, he lifted it ever so slightly, being careful not to shake loose any dust. No