A few people were wandering through the streets, but it was still too early for the factories that filled most of this part of town to come to life.
At the rear of our building we found something interesting. The back door was closed. Its edge, and the edge of the frame, close to the lock, were scarred. Somebody had worked there with a jimmy.
Mickey tried the door. It was unlocked. Six inches at a time, with pauses between, he pushed it far enough back to let us squeeze in.
When we squeezed in we could hear a voice. We couldn’t make out what the voice was saying. All we could hear was the faint rumble of a distant man’s voice, with a suggestion of quarrelsomeness in it.
Mickey pointed a thumb at the door’s scar and whispered.
“Not coppers.”
I took two steps inside, keeping my weight on my rubber heels. Mickey followed, breathing down the back of my neck.
Ted Wright had told me Whisper’s hiding place was in the back, upstairs. The distant rumbling voice could have been coming from there.
I twisted my face around to Mickey and asked:
“Flashlight?”
He put it in my left hand. I had my gun in my right. We crept forward.
The door, still a foot open, let in enough light to show us the way across this room to a doorless doorway. The other side of the doorway was black.
I flicked the light across the blackness, found a door, shut off the light, and went forward. The next squirt of light showed us steps leading up.