View from the Top: Grand Apartment Living

The building did not boast a single penthouse, but the top-floor apartments were considerably larger than those below, there being only four of them in all. The Rhino had tried to kick in the door of the first apartment they came to, but it seemed to have been secured by something as extravagant as thick metal locking bolts driven deep into the walls. His size-twelve boots boomed off the hardwood surface without any appreciable return on the effort. The next apartment door, however, yielded to his second kick with a terrible splintering and cracking of the door frame. The noise was awfully loud inside the empty building but insignificant when one considered the uproar of the street fighting a mile or two away. The two smugglers swept the darkened entry hall and a large open-plan living room beyond, but it was obvious that no living soul had set foot in there for years. After securing the wreckage of the front door by pushing a heavy couch up against it, they went about settling in for a few hours: drawing curtains so they could turn on a battery-powered camp light, firing up a small gas stove, and searching the kitchen cupboards for any usable supplies, whereupon Jules was yet again confronted by the barbaric habits of Americans high and low. "There simply is no fucking tea in this place," she complained ...»