Текст книги "Dance Of Death"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

SEVEN

Somewhere, a clock chimed midnight, its deep, bell-like tones muted by the plush drapes and hanging tapestries of the library in the old mansion at 891 Riverside Drive.

D'Agosta sat back from the table and stretched in the leather armchair, fingertips working the kinks out of the small of his back. This time the library felt a lot more cheery: a fire was crackling atop wrought-iron firedogs, and light from half a dozen lamps threw a mellow glow into the remotest corners. Constance was sitting beside the fire, sipping tisane from a china cup and reading Spenser's Faerie Queene.Proctor, who had not forgotten D'Agosta's own taste in beverages, had drifted in a few times, replacing warm, half-finished glasses of Budweiser with chilled ones.

Constance had produced all the materials Pendergast saved concerning his brother, and D'Agosta had spent the evening poring over them. Here, in this familiar room, with its walls of books and its scent of leather and woodsmoke, D'Agosta could almost imagine Pendergast at his side, helping him take up the long-cold trail, pale eyes glittering with curiosity at the onset of the chase.

Except there was precious little here to chase. D'Agosta glanced over the documents, clippings, letters, photographs, and old reports that littered the table. Pendergast had clearly taken his brother's threat seriously: the collection was beautifully organized and annotated. It was almost as if Pendergast knew that, when the time ultimately came, he might not be around to face the challenge; that the task might be left to others. He'd saved every scrap of information, it seemed, that he had been able to obtain.

Over the last several hours, D'Agosta had read everything on the table two and, in some cases, three times. After Diogenes had severed his connection with the Pendergast clan following the death of his mother and father, he had gone largely into hiding. For almost a year, there was no word at all. Then a letter arrived from a family lawyer, asking that a sum of $100,000 be wired to a Zurich bank for Diogenes's benefit. This was followed a year later by another, similar letter, demanding that $250,000 be wired to a bank in Heidelberg. The family rejected this second request, and it prompted a response from Diogenes. That letter now sat on the table, sealed between two panels of clear Lucite. D'Agosta glanced once again at the spidery, meticulous script, so curiously inappropriate for a boy of seventeen. There was no date or location, and it was addressed to Pendergast:

Ave, frater-

I find it disagreeable to write you on this subject, or any other for that matter. But you force my hand. For I have no doubt you are the one behind the denial of my request for funds.

I need not remind you I will come into my inheritance in a few years. Until that time I shall now and then require certain trifling sums such as I requested last month. You will find it in your best interests, and in the best interests of others you may or may not know, to honor such requests. I should have thought our final discussion in Baton Rouge would have made that clear. I am very much preoccupied at present with various lines of research and study and have no time to earn money in the conventional manner. If forced to do so, I willobtain the funds I need-in a manner amusing to myself. If you do not wish to see my attentions diverted in this way, you will honor my request with all haste.

The next time I write you, it shall be on a matter of my own choosing, not yours. I will not bring this up again. Good-bye, brother. And bonne chance.

D'Agosta put the letter aside. Records showed that the money was promptly sent. The following year, a similar sum was wired to a bank in Threadneedle Street, London. A year later, another sum was sent to a bank in Kent. Diogenes surfaced briefly on his twenty-first birthday to claim his inheritance-eighty-seven million dollars. Two months later, he was reported to have been killed in an automobile accident in Canterbury High Street. Burned beyond recognition. The inheritance was never found.

D'Agosta turned the bogus death certificate over in his hands.

I am very much preoccupied at present with various lines of research and study.But what, exactly? Diogenes certainly didn't say, and his brother was silent on the matter. Or almost silent. D'Agosta let his eye fall on a pile of news clippings. They had been taken from a variety of foreign magazines and newspapers. Each had been labeled with an attribution and a date, and those in foreign languages had translations attached-once again, Pendergast thinking ahead.

Most of these clippings dealt with unsolved crimes. There was an entire family in Lisbon, killed by botulism, yet without any trace of food found in their stomachs. A chemist at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, was discovered with radial arteries of both wrists severed and the body carefully exsanguinated. Yet there was no blood at the murder scene. Files on several of the chemist's experiments were found to be missing. Additional clippings described still other deaths, more grisly, in which the corpses seemed to have been victims of various tortures or experimentation-the bodies were too badly damaged to be certain. And yet other clippings were mere obituaries. There seemed to be no logic or pattern to the deaths, and Pendergast did not leave any commentary on what it was that he had found interesting.

D'Agosta picked up the pile, riffled through it. There was a variety of thefts, too. A pharmaceutical manufacturing company, reporting the robbery of a freezer full of experimental drugs. A collection of diamonds mysteriously vanished from a vault in Israel. A rare, fist-sized piece of amber containing a leaf from a long-extinct plant, lifted from a wealthy couple's apartment in Paris. A unique, polished T. rex coprolite, dating precisely from the K-T boundary.

He replaced the clippings on the table with a sigh.

Next his eye fell on a small sheaf of papers from Sandringham, a private school in the south of England that Diogenes attended-unknown to his family-to finish out his last year of upper school. He had managed to get himself accepted on the strength of several forged documents and a phony set of parents hired for the occasion. Despite a first– semester report card putting him in the first of every form, he was expelled a few months later. Judging from the paperwork, the school gave no reason for the expulsion and responded to Pendergast's queries with evasion, even agitation. Other papers showed that Pendergast had contacted a certain Brian Cooper on several occasions-Cooper had briefly been the roommate of Diogenes at Sandringham-but it seemed the boy refused to respond. A final letter from the youth's parents said Brian had been placed in an institution, where he was being treated for acute catatonia.

Following the expulsion, Diogenes slipped completely out of view for more than two years. And then he had surfaced to claim his inheritance. Four months later, he staged his own death in Canterbury.

After that, silence.

No-that wasn't quite true. There was one final communication. D'Agosta turned toward a folded sheet of heavy linen paper, sitting alone at one corner of the table. He reached for it, opened it thoughtfully. At the top was an embossed coat of arms, a lidless eye over two moons, a lion crouched beneath. And at the very center of the sheet was a date, written in violet ink with what D'Agosta now recognized as Diogenes's handwriting: January 28.

Inexorably, D'Agosta's mind returned once again to the October day when he'd first held the letter-here, in this room, on the eve of their departure to Italy. Pendergast had shown it to him and spoken briefly of Diogenes's plan to commit the perfect crime.

But D'Agosta had returned from Italy alone. And now it was up to him-and nobody else-to follow through for his dead partner, to stop the crime that presumably would occur on January 28.

Less than a week away.

He felt a rising panic; there was so little time left. The roommate at Sandringham: now, there was a lead. He'd call the parents tomorrow, see if the boy was talking. Even if he struck out there, undoubtedly there were other boys at the school who had known Diogenes.

D'Agosta folded the paper carefully and returned it to the table. Beside it lay a single black-and-white photograph, scuffed and creased with age. He picked it up, held it to the light. A man, a woman, and two young boys, standing before an elaborate wrought-iron railing. An imposing mansion could be seen in the middle distance. It was a warm day: the boys were in shorts, and the woman wore a summer dress. The man stared at the camera with a patrician face. The woman was beautiful, with light hair and a mysterious smile. The boys were perhaps eight and five. The elder stood straight, arms behind his back, looking gravely into the lens. His light blond hair was carefully parted, his clothes pressed. Something about the shape of the cheekbones, the aquiline features, told D'Agosta this was Agent Pendergast.

Beside him was a younger boy with ginger hair, hands pressed together, fingers pointed skyward, as if in prayer. Unlike his older sibling, Diogenes seemed faintly disheveled. But there was nothing in his dress or his grooming to account for this. Maybe it was something in the relaxed, almost languid draping of his limbs, so out of context with the chastely positioned hands. Maybe it was the parted lips, too full and sensual for a person so young. Both eyes looked the same– this must have been before the illness.

Still, D'Agosta was drawn to the eyes. They weren't looking at the camera, but at some point past it if they were looking at anything at all. They seemed dull, almost dead, out of place in that childish little face. D'Agosta felt an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of his stomach.

There was a rustle beside him and D'Agosta jumped. Constance Greene had suddenly materialized at his side. She seemed to have Pendergast's ability to approach with almost total silence.

"I'm sorry," Constance said. "I didn't mean to startle you."

"No problem. Looking at all this stuff is enough to creep anyone out."

"Excuse me. Creep out?"

"It's just an expression."

"Have you found anything interesting? Anything at all?"

D'Agosta shook his head. "Nothing we didn't talk about earlier." He paused. "The only thing is, I didn't see anything in here about Diogenes's illness. Scarlet fever, according to Aunt Cornelia. She said it changed him."

"I wish there was more information I could give you. I've searched the collections and the family papers, just in case there was something Aloysius overlooked. But he was very thorough. There's nothing else."

Nothing else.Diogenes's whereabouts, his appearance, his activities, even the crime he planned to commit: everything was a blank.

There was only a date-January 28. Next Monday.

"Maybe Pendergast was wrong," D'Agosta said, trying to sound hopeful. "About the date, I mean. Maybe it's not for another year. Or maybe it's something else entirely." He gestured at the documents strewn across the table. "All this seems so far away and long ago. It's hard to believe something big's about to happen."

The only response from Constance was a faint, and fleeting, smile.

EIGHT

Lorace Sawtelle passed the oversize vellum menu back to the waiter with relief. He wished that once-just once-a client would come to him.He hated the sprawling concrete jungles they all worked in: Chicago, Detroit, and now New York. Once you got to know it, Keokuk wasn't so bad. He knew all the best watering holes and titty bars. Some of his clients might even develop a deep admiration for certain Iowan charms.

Across the table, his client was ordering something that sounded like cough-up of veal. Horace Sawtelle wondered if the man really knew what the hell he was asking for. He himself had scanned the menu, first one side and then the other, with deep misgivings. Handwritten French script, and unpronounceable at that. He'd settled on something called steak tartare. Hell, how bad could it be? Even the French couldn't ruin steak. And he liked tartar sauce on fish sticks.

"You don't mind if I glance through them once more before signing?" the client asked, holding up the sheaf of contracts.

Sawtelle nodded. "You go right ahead." Never mind that they'd spent the last two hours going over them with a damn magnifying glass. You'd think the guy was buying a million dollars' worth of Palm Beach real estate instead of fifty grand in machine parts.

The client buried his nose in the paperwork and Sawtelle looked around, idly crunching on a breadstick. They were sitting in what looked to him like a glassed-in sidewalk cafe, protruding out into the sidewalk from the main restaurant. Every table was full: these pasty-faced New Yorkers needed all the sunlight they could get. Three women sat at the next table, black-haired and gaunt, picking at huge fruit salads. On the far side, a fat businessman was digging into a plate of something yellow and slippery.

A truck passed in a shriek of grinding gears, seemingly inches away from the glass wall, and Sawtelle's hand closed reflexively, breaking the breadstick. He wiped his hand on the tablecloth in disgust. Why the hell had the client insisted on eating out here, in the January chill? He glanced up through the glass ceiling at the pink awning, La Vielle Villestitched on it in white. Above towered one of the huge cliff dwellings that passed for apartments in New York City. Sawtelle eyed the rows of identical windows rising toward the sooty sky. Like a damn high-rise prison. Probably held a thousand people. How could they stand it?

There was a flurry of activity near the entrance to the kitchen and Sawtelle glanced over disinterestedly. Maybe it was his lunch. Prepared tableside, the menu had said. And just how the hell were they going to do that: wheel a Weber grill over and fire up the charcoal? But sure enough, here they came, a whole damn procession of men in white smocks, pushing what looked like a small gurney in front of them.

The chef parked the rolling table at Sawtelle's elbow with a proud flourish. He barked a few orders in rapid-fire French and several underlings began to scurry around, one chopping onions, another frenziedly beating a raw egg. Sawtelle scanned the rolling table. There were little white toast points, a pile of round green things he guessed were capers, spices and dishes of unknown liquids, and a cupful of minced garlic. In the center, a fist-sized wad of raw hamburger. No steak or tartar sauce to be had for love or money.

With great ceremony, the chef dropped the hamburger into a stainless bowl, poured in the raw egg, the garlic, and onions, then began mashing everything together. In a few moments, he removed the sticky mass and dropped it back onto the rolling table, working it slowly between his fingers. Sawtelle glanced away, making a mental note to ask that the hamburger be cooked extra-well-done. You never know what kinds of diseases these New Yorkers carry around.And where was the damn grill, anyway?

At that moment, a waiter appeared at the client's side and slipped a plate onto the table. Sawtelle looked over in surprise just as another waiter darted in and slid something in between his own knife and fork. Looking down, Sawtelle saw with incredulity that the glistening patty of raw beef-now tamped down into a neat little mound-sat in front of him, surrounded by wedges of toast, chopped eggs, and capers.

Sawtelle looked up again quickly, uncomprehending. Across the table, the client was nodding approvingly.

The chef beamed at them briefly from the far side of the table, then stepped back as his flunkies began wheeling the apparatus away.

"Excuse me," Sawtelle said in a low voice. "You haven't cooked it."

The chef stopped. "Pourquoi?"

Sawtelle jerked a finger in the direction of his plate. "I said, you haven't cookedit. You know, heat. Fire. Flambé."

The chef shook his head vigorously. "No, monsieur.Is no cook."

"You don't cook steak tartare," the client said, pausing as he was about to sign the contracts. "It's served raw. You didn't know?" A superior smile came briefly to his lips, then vanished.

Sawtelle sat back, rolling his eyes heavenward, struggling to keep his temper. Only in New York. Twenty-five bucks for a mound of raw hamburger.

Suddenly, he stiffened. "Sweet Caesar, what the hell is that?"

Far above him, a man dangled in the sky: limbs flung wide and flailing silently in the chill air. For a moment, it seemed to Sawtelle that the man was just hovering there, as if by magic. But then he made out the thin taut line of rope that arrowed upward from the man's neck. It disappeared into a window above, black and broken. Sawtelle stared openmouthed, thunderstruck by the sight.

Others in the restaurant had followed his gaze. There were sharp intakes of breath, a sudden gasp.

The figure jerked and shuddered, its back arching in agony until the victim seemed almost bent double. Sawtelle watched, transfixed with horror.

Then, suddenly, the rope parted. The man, flapping his arms and churning his legs, dropped directly toward him.

Just as suddenly, Sawtelle found he could move again. With an inarticulate cry, he threw himself backward in his chair. A split second later, there came an explosion of glass, and a shape hurtled past in a shower of glass and landed with a deafening crash on the women and their fruit salads, which disintegrated into a strange pastel eruption of reds and yellows and greens. From his position on his back on the floor, Sawtelle felt something warm and wet slap him hard across the side of the face, followed almost immediately by a shower of broken glass, dishes, cups, forks, spoons, and flowers, all raining down from the impact.

A strange silence. And then the cries began, the screams of pain, horror, and fear, but they seemed strangely soft and far away. Then he realized that his right ear was full of an unknown substance.

As he lay on his back, the full impact of what had just happened finally registered. Disbelief and horror washed over him once again. For a minute, maybe two, he found himself unable to move. The cries and shrieks grew steadily louder.

At last, with a heroic effort, he forced his unwilling limbs to respond. He rose to his knees, then staggered to his feet. Other people were now climbing to their feet, the room filling with the muffled shrieks and moans of the damned. Glass lay everywhere. The table at his right had turned into a crumpled mound of food, gore, flowers, tablecloth, napkins, and splintered wood. His own table was covered with glass. The twenty-five-dollar mound of raw hamburger was the only thing that had been spared, and it sat in solitary splendor, fresh and gleaming, all by itself.

His eyes moved to his client, who was still sitting, motionless, his suit splattered with something indescribable.

Abruptly, involuntarily, Sawtelle's limbs went into action. He swiveled about, found the door, took a step, lost his balance, recovered, took another.

The client voice followed him. "Are-are you going?"

The question was so inane, so inappropriate, that Sawtelle broke into a choking, hoarse laugh. "Going?" he repeated, clearing his ear with a tug. "Yeah. I'm going."He lurched toward the door, coughing with laughter, his feet crunching across glass and ruin, anything to get away from this terrible place. He hit the sidewalk and turned south, his walk breaking into a run, scattering pedestrians in his wake.

From now on, people would just have to come to Keokuk.

NINE

William Smithback Jr. got out of the cab, tossed a crumpled twenty through the front passenger window, and looked up Broadway toward Lincoln Center. A few blocks uptown he could make out a vast throng of people. They'd spilled out into Columbus and across 65th Street, creating one mother of a traffic jam. He could hear people leaning on their horns, the shriek of sirens, the occasional earth-shuddering blaaaatof a truck's air horn.

Smithback threaded his way through the sea of motionless vehicles, then turned north and began jogging up Broadway, his breath misting in the cold January air. It seemed he ran just about everywhere these days. Gone was the dignified, measured step of the ace New York Timesreporter. Now he rushed to get his copy in on time, dashed to each new assignment, and sometimes filed two stories a day. His wife of two months, Nora Kelly, was not happy. She'd had expectations of unhurried dinners, sharing with each other the events of the day, before retiring to a night of lingering pleasure. But Smithback found he had little time for either eating or lingering. Yes, he was on the run these days: and for good reason. Bryce Harriman was running, too, and he was hard on Smithback's heels.

It had been one of the worst shocks of Smithback's life to return from his honeymoon and find Bryce Harriman lounging in his office doorway, grinning smugly, wearing the usual insufferably preppie clothes, welcoming him back to "our paper."

Ourpaper. Oh, God.

Everything had been going his way. He was a rising star at the Times,had nailed half a dozen great scoops in as many months. Fen-ton Davies, his editor, had started turning automatically to Smithback when it came time to hand out the big assignments. He'd finally convinced his girlfriend Nora to stop chasing old bones and digging up pots long enough to get hitched. And their honeymoon at Angkor Wat had been a dream-especially the week they'd spent at the lost temple of Banteay Chhmar, hacking through the jungle, braving snakes, malaria, and stinging ants while exploring the vast ruins. He remembered thinking, on the plane ride home, that life couldn't possibly get any better.

And he'd been right.

Despite Harriman's smarmy collegiality, it was clear from day one that he was gunning for Smithback. It wasn't the first time they'd crossed swords, but never before at the same paper. How had he managed to get rehired by the Timeswhile Smithback was halfway around the world? The way Harriman sucked up to Davies, bringing the editor lattes every morning, hanging on his every word like he was the Oracle of Delphi, made Smithback's gorge rise. But it seemed to be working: just last week, Harriman had bagged the Dangler story, which by rights belonged to Smithback.

Smithback quickened his jog. Sixty-fifth and Broadway-the spot where some guy had reportedly fallen right into the midst of dozens of people eating lunch-was just ahead now. He could see the cluster of television cameras, reporters checking their cassette recorders, soundmen setting up boom microphones. This was his chance to outshine Harriman, seize the momentum.

No briefing under way yet, thank God.

He shook his head, muttering under his breath as he elbowed his way through the crowd.

Up ahead, he could see the glassed-in cafe of La Vielle Ville. Inside, police were still working the scene: the periodic flash of the police photographer lit up the glass restaurant. Crime scene tape was draped everywhere like yellow bunting. His eye rose to the glass roof of the cafe and the huge, jagged hole where the victim had fallen through, and still farther, up the broad facade of Lincoln Towers, until it reached the broken window from which the victim had precipitated. He could see cops there, too, and the bright bursts of a flash unit.

He pushed forward, looking around for witnesses. "I'm a reporter," he said loudly. "Bill Smithback, New York Times.Anybody see what happened?"

Several faces turned to regard him silently. Smithback took them in: a West Side matron carrying a microscopic Pomeranian; a bicycle messenger; a man balancing a large box filled with Chinese takeout on one shoulder; half a dozen others.

"I'm looking for a witness. Anybody see anything?"

Silence. Most of them probably don't even speak English,he thought.

"Anybody knowanything?"

At this, a man wearing earmuffs and a heavy coat nodded vigorously. "A man," he said in a thick Indian accent. "He fall."

This was useless. Smithback pushed himself deeper into the crowd. Up ahead, he spotted a policeman, shooing people onto the sidewalk, trying to clear the cross street.

"Hey, Officer!" Smithback called out, using his elbows to dig through the gawking herd. "I'm from the Times.What happened here?"

The officer stopped barking orders long enough to glance his way. Then he went back to his work.

"Any ID on the victim?"

But the cop ignored him completely.

Smithback watched his retreating back. Typical. A lesser reporter might be content to wait for the official briefing, but not him. He'd get the inside scoop, and he wouldn't even break a sweat trying.

As he looked around again, his eye stopped at the main entrance to the apartment tower. The building was huge, probably sported a thousand apartments at least. There'd be people inside who knew the victim, could provide some color, maybe even speculate on what happened. He craned his neck, counting floors, until he again reached the open window. Twenty-fourth floor.

He began pushing his way through the crowd again, avoiding the megaphone-wielding cops, tacking as directly as he could toward the building's entrance. It was guarded by three large policemen who looked like they meant business. How on earth was he going to get in? Claim to be a tenant? That wasn't likely to work.

As he paused to survey the milling throng of press outside, his equanimity quickly returned. They were all waiting, like restless sheep, for some police brass to come out and begin the briefing. Smithback looked on pityingly. He didn't want the same story everybody else got: spoon-fed by the authorities, telling only what they wanted to tell with the requisite spin attached. He wanted the realstory: the story that lay on the twenty-fourth floor of Lincoln Towers.

He turned away from the crowd and headed in the opposite direction. All big apartment buildings like this had a service entrance.

He followed the facade of the building up Broadway until he finally reached its end, where a narrow alley separated it from the next building. Thrusting his hands back into his pockets, he turned down the alley, whistling jauntily.

A moment later, his whistling stopped. Up ahead lay a large metal door marked Service Entrance– Deliveries.Standing beside the door was another cop. He was staring at Smithback and speaking into a small radio clipped to his collar.

Damn.Well, he couldn't just stop dead in his tracks and turn around-that would look suspicious. He'd just walk right past the cop like he was taking a shortcut behind the building.

"Morning, Officer," he said as he came abreast of the policeman.

"Afternoon, Mr. Smithback," the cop replied.

Smithback felt his jaw tighten.

Whoever was in charge of this homicide investigation was a pro, did things by the book. But Smithback was not some third-rate line stringer. If there was another way in, he'd find it. He followed the alley around the back of the building until it turned a right angle, heading once again toward 65th.

Yes.There, not thirty yards in front of him, was the staff entrance to La Vielle Ville. Deserted, with no cop loitering around outside. If he couldn't get to the twenty-fourth floor, at least he could check out the place where the man had landed.

He moved forward quickly, excitement adding spring to his step. Once he'd checked out the restaurant, there might even be a way to get into the high-rise. There had to be connecting passages, perhaps through the basement.

Smithback reached the battered metal door, pulled it ajar, began to step in.

Then he froze. There, beside a brace of massive stoves, several policemen were taking statements from cooks and waiters.

Everybody slowly turned to look at him.

He put a tentative foot in, like he was going somewhere.

"No press," barked one of the cops.

"Sorry," he said, flashing what he feared was a ghastly smile. "Wrong way."

And, very gently, he closed the door and stepped back, walking back around to the front of the building, where he was once more repelled by the sight of the vast herd of reporters, all waiting like sheep to the slaughter.

No way, not him, not Bill Smithback of the Times.His eye cast around for some angle of attack, some idea that hadn't occurred to the others-and then he saw it: a pizza delivery man on a motorbike, hopelessly trying to work his way through the crowd. He was a skinny man with no chin wearing a silly hat that said Romeo's Pizzeria,and his face was splotched and red with frustration.

Smithback approached him, nodded toward the carrier mounted on the back. "Got a pizza in there?"

"Two," the man said. "Look at this shit. They're gonna be stone-cold, and there goes my tip. On top of that, if I don't get it there in twenty minutes, they don't have to pay-"

Smithback cut him off. "Fifty bucks for your two pizzasand the hat."

The man looked at him blankly, like a complete idiot.

Smithback pulled out a fifty. "Here. Take it."

"But what about-"

"Tell them you got robbed."

The man couldn't help but take the money. Smithback swiped the hat off the man's head, stuck it on his own, opened the rear carrier on the motorbike, and hauled out the pizza boxes. He moved through the crowd toward the door, carrying the pizzasin one hand and jerking off his tie with the other, stuffing it in his pocket.

"Pizzadelivery, coming through!" He elbowed his way to the front, came up against the blue barricades draped in crime scene tape.

"Pizza delivery, SOC team, twenty-fourth floor."

It worked like a dream. The fat cop manning the barricade shoved it aside and Smithback hiked through.

Now for the triumvirate at the door.

He strode confidently forward as the three cops turned to face him.

"Pizza delivery, twenty-fourth floor."

They moved to block his way.

"I'll take the pizzasup," one said.

"Sorry. Against company rules. I got to deliver directly to the customer."

"Nobody's allowed in."