No, no, the twenty-footer, which had been properly tilted and footed for safety, had been eschewed with the dismissal of a race car driver being offered a tricycle. Instead, Balz was somehow managing to tiptoe his way up the stone, his fingertips and toes cruising along the mortar joints.
“How the hell is he doing that?” Rhage muttered as he came around the corner.
“Bubblegum on his shoes,” somebody with the brother answered.
“Is he even wearing shoes?”
“He better be or those little piggies of his are going to be frozen bacon in the next minute and a half.”
Z let out a little more lead, and then a little more. After which he felt compelled to call out, “You need to set some hooks now and loop yourself in.”
“I will,” Balz said. “Just a bit farther.”
“You got this, Z?” Rhage asked.
“Yeah. I’ll scrape him off the snowpack when he falls off.”
“Call us for backup if you need us. We’ve got those ground-level shutters out in front to deal with.”
Z nodded, and stayed focused on the Bastard. And of course, there was no setting hooks and loops going on. Balz just kept crabbing his way up the stone wall, finding fingerholds, toeholds, in the seams of mortar. When he got to the problem window, some twenty feet up, he reached over with his left hand, grabbed on to the track of the shutter, and pulled himself across so he was in the center of the no-go issue.
“Now you tie yourself,” Z yelled up. “Before you do anything. Or I’ll pull you down myself.”
Balthazar smiled under his arm. “You can’t do that.”
Z yanked the rope to answer that one.
“But I’ll shatter into a thousand pieces,” the Bastard said. “That’s what you’re worried about, right? Seems silly to prove the danger by creating it—and then who will fix this shutter?”
“There’s a bush under you. FYI.”
“Oh! Well, then it’s not that dangerous to begin with, and messing about with hooks will not only ruin the structural integrity of this house, but it’ll slow me down and accomplish nothing. Kind of like this conversation.”
“Has anyone told you you make no damned sense?”
Balz turned back to the faulty shutter. “It’s come up once or twice. Fortunately, I can get very hard of hearing when I want to.”
Z closed his eyes. When he reopened them—prepared to tell the fucker to go ahead, it was his goddamn life to wager on the asshat wheel of craps—Balz was already in a yank with the bottom of the half-shut shutter, gloved hands locked on like loaves of bread, body arching back. If that thing decided to get with the program, the Bastard was going to free-fall into—
“Not going to budge,” Balz puffed. “Shit. Let me try the next one.”
“What do you think is wrong with them?” Z said.
Distantly, the wind let out a roar, the sound like that of a train on the approach. Good thing the mansion weighed as much as the mountain or it might get blown off.
“I think the motors have burned out,” Balz yelled down. “You can smell the electric fire up here.”
The Bastard crab-walked over to the next fixed sash. Pull. Tug. Nowhere.
“Wait, I have an idea.” The male took the rope off his waist and tied it onto the bottom of the shutter. “You have better leverage than I do.”
“Get out of the way.” Before the Bastard could do what he inevitably would with the arguing, Z cut in with, “You’re wrong. So shut the fuck up.”
“How do you know what I was going to say?”
“History.”
But the Bastard still put his gloved hands back on the shutter.