“Hey,” Adam called to the boy. “What floor?”

“Fourth.”

“Is there an elevator?”

“Broken.”

“Hell,” Meyerson said.

“Stay here,” Silverstone told him, reaching for his bag. “That’s too far to lug the litter if we’re not going to need it. Dr. Robinson and I will take a look at him. If we need the litter one of us will come down to help you carry it.”

The project was a series of boxlike concrete structures. Building 11 was the one next to the pool; not old but already a slum. Graffiti and anatomically-improbable crayon drawings covered the walls of the lower entry but could not be seen on upper landings because darkness covered the void, the bulbs having been snatched or broken. On the second floor the darkness contained the reek of old garbage and something worse.

Spurgeon could hear Adam catch and hold his breath.

“What apartment?” he asked.

“Just follow me.”

Somebody upstairs was playing a savage thing by Little Richard, wild horses stampeding to a big, driving Motown sound. It grew louder as they climbed. On the fourth level the youth walked down the hallway to a door behind which the music played. Apartment D. He hammered on the door and inside somebody took the needle off the record.

“Open up. It’s me.”

“They with you?”

“Yeah. Two doctors.”

The door opened and the kid in the Nehru went in and then Adam. As Spurgeon followed he heard Adam’s warning.

“RUN, SPUR! GET—”

But he was already inside and the door had been slammed shut behind him. There was a single lamp. In its pool of light he saw four men; no, five, he realized as another walked out of the dark into his cone of vision, three white and two colored, not counting the boy. He recognized only one of them, a lean brown man with zulu hair and a pencil-line mustache, holding a kitchen knife that had been filed down until it was a very thin shiv.

“Hello, Speed,” he said.

Nightingale smiled at him. “Come in, Doc,” he said.

They moved into the room and faced the men.

“Didn’t know it was going to be you, longhair. No need for trouble. All we want is your friend’s bag.”

“What a stupid waste,” Spurgeon said. “Somebody who plays piano the way you do.”

Speed shrugged but grinned, complimented. “We got a couple of cats in a bad way. They need something fast. Matter of fact, I been without it too long myself.”

“Give them the bag, Adam,” Spurgeon said.

But Adam moved to the window.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Spurgeon said. “Give them the lousy bag.” He saw with fright that Adam was looking down at the pool. “Nobody’s that good a diver,” he said.

Somebody laughed.

“Splat,” said a voice from the darkness.

“That’s a wading pool, mister,” the kid said.