“Stairs,” she muttered. She stepped into the stairwell, flicked on a pocket light, and led the way up. On the first floor there had been a little light, coming through the windows from the street. Except for the flash, the second floor was dark as a coal sack. At the top of the stairs we turned left, toward the back, and stopped at a green door that looked as though it were painted in place.

“Gotta be it,” she said. She tried the knob, found it unlocked, and pulled the door open. A short, steep flight of stairs led to a roof hatch. There were stacks of advertising booklets and old newspapers on the steps, covered with dust, and we stepped carefully around them as we went up. The hatch was secured by two simple hooks. She flipped them off, pushed the hatch up an inch or so, scanned the rooftop, then shoved it all the way off and we climbed through.

“Keep low,” she said. We crept across the tarpaper and gravel roof to the parapet. The City Hall was ten feet away, and the top was eight to ten feet above us. The windows facing us were dark. LuEllen crawled along the parapet, looking at the buildings opposite, checking lines of sight.

“What do you think?” I whispered when she came back.

“We can do it, but if there’s anybody on one of these other buildings, cooling off, we could be fucked,” she whispered back. “No help for that, though. Let’s get the ladder.”

We went back down to the first floor and found an aluminum extension ladder. I carried it to the base of the stairs while LuEllen found a package of nylon anchor rope. Then I took one end of the ladder, and she took the other, and we went back up.

“What’s the rope for?” I asked.

“We’re pretty exposed. If somebody comes after us, there’s the outside chance that we could tie the rope around one of the chimneys and go over the offside of the building and run.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Hey. I’ve never done time-“

“OK.”

On the roof we sat quietly, listening for voices and looking for lights on adjacent buildings. All we heard were the different hums of the streetlights and a thousand air conditioners. All we saw was a car roll past, its windows up. We wouldn’t be visible from the street; the tree covered us on the front side. We would be visible from a cop car rolling down the alley.