by Dean Koontz
Why had the son of a bitch unbuttoned the coat unless there was something under it that he needed, and what might an irrational and angry man need that he kept under his jacket, his loose-fitting suit jacket, his roomy goddamned jacket?
Jack called a warning to Luther.
But Luther sensed trouble too. His right hand moved toward the gun holstered on his hip.
The perp had the advantage because he was the initiator. No one knew violence was at hand until he unleashed it, so he swung all the way around to face them, holding a weapon in both hands, before Luther and Jack had even touched their revolvers.
Automatic gunfire hammered the day. Bullets pounded Luther’s chest, knocked the big man off his feet, hurled him backward, and Hassam Arkadian spun from the impact of one-two-three hits, went down hard, screaming in agony.
Jack threw himself against the glass door to the office. He almost made it to cover before taking a hit to the left leg. He felt as if he’d been clubbed across the thigh with a tire iron, but it was a bullet, not a blow.
He dropped facedown on the office floor. The door swung shut behind him, gunfire shattered it, and gummy chunks of tempered glass cascaded across his back.
Hot pain boiled sweat from him.
A radio was playing. Golden oldies. Dionne Warwick. Singing about the world needing love, sweet love.
Outside, Arkadian was still screaming, but there wasn’t a sound from Luther Bryson.
Luther was dead. Jack couldn’t think about that. Dead. Didn’t dare think about it. Dead. Wouldn’t think about it.
The chatter of more gunfire.
Someone else screamed. Probably the attendant at the Lexus. It wasn’t a lasting scream. Brief, quickly choked off.
Outside, Arkadian wasn’t screaming anymore, either. He was sobbing and calling for Jesus.
Hard, chill wind made the plate-glass windows vibrate. It hooted through the shattered door.
The gunman would be coming.
CHAPTER TWO
Jack was stunned at the quantity of his own blood on the vinyl-tile floor around him. Nausea squirmed through him, and greasy sweat streamed down his face. He couldn’t take his eyes off the spreading stain that darkened his pants.
He had never been shot before. The pain was terrible but not as bad as he would have expected. Worse than the pain was the sense of violation and vulnerability, a terrible frantic awareness of the true fragility of the human body.
He might not be able to hold on to consciousness for long. A hungry darkness was already eating away at the edges of his vision.
He probably couldn’t put much weight on his left leg, and he didn’t have time to pull himself up on his right alone, not while in such an exposed position. Shedding broken glass as a bright-scaled snake might shed an old skin, unavoidably leaving a trail of blood, he crawled fast on his belly alongside the L-shaped work counter behind which Arkadian kept the cash register.
The gunman would be coming.
From the sound the weapon made and the brief glimpse he’d gotten of it, Jack figured it was a submachine gun—maybe a Micro Uzi. The Micro was less than ten inches long with the wire stock folded forward but a lot heavier than a pistol, weighing about two kilos if it had a single magazine, heavier if it featured two magazines welded at right angles to give it a forty-round capacity. It would be like carrying a standard-size bag of sugar in a sling; it was sure to cause chronic neck pain, but not too big to fit an oversize shoulder holster under an Armani suit—and worth the trouble if a man had snake-mean enemies. Could be an FN P90, too, or maybe a British Bushman 2, but probably not a Czech Skorpion, because a Skorpion fired only .32 ACP ammo. Judging by how hard Luther had gone down, this seemed to be a gun with more punch than a Skorpion, which the 9mm Micro Uzi provided. Forty rounds in the Uzi to start, and the son of a bitch had fired twelve, sixteen at most, so at least twenty-four rounds were left, and maybe a pocketful of spare cartridges.
Thunder boomed, the air felt heavy with pent-up rain, wind shrieked through the ruined door, and the gun rattled again. Outside, Hassam Arkadian’s cries to Jesus abruptly ended.
Jack desperately pulled himself around the end of the counter, thinking the unthinkable. Luther Bryson dead. Arkadian dead. The attendant dead. Most likely the young Asian mechanic too. All of them wasted. The world had been turned upside down in less than a minute.
Now it was one-on-one, survival of the fittest, and Jack wasn’t afraid of that game. Though Darwinian selection tended to favor the guy with the biggest gun and best supply of ammunition, cleverness could outweigh caliber. He had been saved by his wits before and might be again.
Surviving could be easier when he had his back to the wall, the odds were stacked high against him, and he had no one to worry about but himself. With only his own sorry ass on the line, he was more focused, free to risk inaction or recklessness, free to be a coward or a kamikaze fool, whatever the occasion demanded.
Then he dragged himself entirely into the sheltered space behind the counter and discovered that he didn’t, after all, enjoy the freedom of a sole survivor. A woman was huddled there: petite, long dark hair, attractive. Gray shirt, work pants, white socks, black shoes with thick rubber soles. She was in her mid-thirties, maybe five or six years younger than Hassam Arkadian. Could be his wife. No, not a wife any more. Widow. She was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up against her chest, arms wrapped tightly around her legs, trying to make herself as small as possible, straining for invisibility.
Her presence changed everything for Jack, put him on the line and reduced his own chances of survival. He couldn’t choose to hide, couldn’t even opt for recklessness any longer. He had to think hard and clearly, determine the best course of action, and do the right thing. He was responsible for her. He had sworn an oath to serve and protect the public, and he was old-fashioned enough to take oaths seriously.
The woman’s eyes were wide with terror and shimmering with unspilled tears. Even in the midst of fear for her own life, she seemed to comprehend the meaning of Arkadian’s sudden lapse into silence.
Jack drew his revolver.
Serve and protect.
He was shivering uncontrollably. His left leg was hot, but the rest of him was freezing, as if all his body heat was draining out through the wound.
Outside, a sustained rattle of automatic-weapon fire ended in an explosion that rocked the service station, tipped over a candy-vending machine in the office, and blew in both big windows on which the gang symbols had been etched. The huddled woman covered her face with her hands, Jack squeezed his eyes shut, and glass spilled over the counter into the space where they had taken shelter.
When he opened his eyes, endless phalanxes of shadows and light charged across the office. The wind coming through the shattered door was no longer chilly but hot, and the phantasms swarming over the walls were reflections of fire. The maniac with the Uzi had shot up one or more of the gasoline pumps.
Cautiously Jack pulled himself up against the counter, putting no weight on his left leg. Though his misery still seemed inadequate to the wound, he figured it would get worse suddenly and soon. He didn’t want to precipitate it by any action of his own for fear that a sufficiently fierce flash of pain would make him pass out.
Under considerable pressure, jets of burning gasoline were squirting from one of the riddled pumps, splashing like molten lava onto the blacktop. The pavement sloped toward the busy street, and scintillant rivers of fire spread in that direction.
The explosion had ignited the roof of the portico that sheltered the pumps. Flames licked rapidly toward the main building.
The Lexus was on fire. The lunatic bastard had destroyed his own car, which in some strange way made him seem more completely out of control and dangerous than anything else he’d done.
Amid the inferno, which became more panoramic by the second as the gasoline streamed across the blacktop, the killer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d regained at least some of his senses and fled on
foot.
More likely, he was in the two-bay garage, coming at them by that route rather than making a bold approach through the shattered front entrance. Less than fifteen feet from Jack, a painted metal door connected the garage to the office. It was closed.
Leaning against the counter, he gripped his revolver in both hands and aimed at the door, arms extended rigidly in front of him, ready to blow the perp to hell at the first opportunity. His hands were shaking. So cold. He strained to hold the gun steady, which helped, but he couldn’t entirely repress the tremors.
The darkness at the edges of his vision had retreated. Now it began to encroach again. He blinked furiously, trying to wash away the frightening peripheral blindness as he might have tried to expel a speck of dust, but to no avail.
The air smelled of gasoline and hot tar. Shifting wind blew smoke into the room—not much, just enough to make him want to cough. He clenched his teeth, making only a low choking sound in his throat, because the killer might be on the far side of the door, hesitating and listening.
Still directing the revolver squarely at the entrance from the garage, he glanced outside into whirlwinds of tempestuous fire and churning shrouds of black smoke, afraid he was wrong. The gunman might erupt, after all, from that conflagration, like a demon out of perdition.
The metal door again. Painted the palest blue. Like deep clear water seen through a layer of crystalline ice.
The color made him cold. Everything made him cold—the hollow iron-hard thunk-thunk of his laboring heart, the whisper-soft weeping of the woman huddled on the floor behind him, the glittering debris of broken glass. Even the roar and crackle of the fire chilled him.
Outside, seething flames had traveled the length of the portico and reached the front of the service station. The roof must be ablaze by now.
The pale-blue door.
Open it, you crazy sonofabitch. Come on, come on, come on.
Another explosion.
He had to turn his head completely away from the door to the garage and look directly at the front of the station to see what had happened, because he had lost nearly all of his peripheral vision.
The fuel tank of the Lexus. The vehicle was engulfed, reduced to just the black skeleton of a car enwrapped by greedy tongues of fire that stripped it of its lustrous emerald paint, fine leather upholstery, and other plush appointments.
The blue door remained closed.
The revolver seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. His arms ached. He couldn’t hold the weapon steady. Could barely hold it at all.
He wanted to lie down and close his eyes. Sleep a little. Dream a little dream: green pastures, wildflowers, a blue sky, the city long forgotten.
When he looked down at his leg, he discovered he was standing in a pool of blood. An artery must have been nicked, maybe torn, and he was going fast, dizzy just from looking down, nausea swelling anew, a trembling in his gut.
Fire on the roof. He could hear it overhead, distinctly different from the crackle and roar of the blaze in front of the station, shingles popping, rafters creaking as construction joints were tortured by the fierce, dry heat. They might have only seconds before the ceiling exploded into flames or caved in on them.
He didn’t understand how he could be getting colder by the moment when fire was all around them. The sweat streaming down his face was like ice water.
Even if the roof didn’t cave in for a couple of minutes, he might be dead or too weak to pull the trigger when at last the killer rushed them. He couldn’t wait any longer.
He had to give up the two-hand grip on the gun. He needed his left hand to brace himself against the Formica top of the counter as he circled the end of it, keeping all weight off his left leg.
But when he reached the end of the counter, he was too dizzy to hop the ten or twelve feet to the blue door. He had to use the toe of his left foot as a balance point, applying the minimum pressure required to stay erect as he hitched across the office.
Surprisingly, the pain was bearable. Then he realized it was tolerable only because his leg was going numb. A cool tingle coursed through the limb from hip to ankle. Even the wound itself was no longer hot, not even warm.
The door. His left hand on the knob looked so far away, as if he were peering at it through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
Revolver in the right hand. Hanging down at his side. Like a massive dumbbell. The effort required to raise the weapon caused his stomach to keel over on itself repeatedly.
The killer might be waiting on the other side, watching the knob, so Jack pushed the door open and went through it fast, the revolver thrust out in front of him. He stumbled, almost fell, and stepped past the door, swinging the gun right and left, heart pounding so hard it jolted his weakening arms, but there was no target. He could see all the way across the garage because the BMW was up on the service rack. The only person in sight was the Asian mechanic, as dead as the concrete on which he was sprawled.
Jack turned to the blue door. It was black on this side, which seemed ominous, glossy black, and it had gone shut behind him.
He took a step toward it, meaning to pull it open. He fell against it instead.
Harried by the changeable wind, a tide of bitter tarry smoke washed into the double-bay garage.
Coughing, Jack wrenched open the door. The office was filled with smoke, an antechamber to hell.
He shouted for the woman to come to him, and he was dismayed to hear that his shout was barely more than a thin wheeze.
She was already on the move, however, and before he could try to shout again, she appeared out of the roiling smoke, with one hand clamped over her nose and mouth.
At first, when she leaned against him, Jack thought she was seeking support, strength he didn’t have to give, but he realized she was urging him to rely on her. He was the one who had taken the oath, who had sworn to serve and defend. He felt dismally inadequate because he couldn’t scoop her up in his arms and carry her out of there as a hero might have done in a movie.
He leaned on the woman as little as he dared and turned left with her in the direction of the open bay door, which was obscured by the smoke. He dragged his left leg. No longer any feeling in it whatsoever, no pain, not even a tingle. Dead weight. Eyes squeezed shut against the stinging smoke, bursts of color coruscating across the backs of his eyelids. Holding his breath, resisting a powerful urge to vomit. Somebody screaming, a shrill and terrible scream, on and on. No, not a scream. Sirens. Rapidly drawing closer. Then he and the woman were in the open, which he detected by a change in the wind, and he gasped for breath, which came cold and clean into his lungs.
When he opened his eyes, the world was blurred by tears that the abrasive smoke had rubbed from him, and he blinked frantically until his sight cleared somewhat. Because of blood loss or shock, he was reduced to tunnel vision. It was like looking at the world through twin gun barrels, because the surrounding darkness was as smooth as the curve of a steel bore.
To his left, everything was enveloped in flames. The Lexus. Portico. Service station. Arkadian’s body was on fire. Luther’s was not afire yet, but hot embers were falling on it, flaming bits of shingles and wood, and at any moment his uniform would ignite. Burning gasoline still arced from the riddled pumps and streamed toward the street. The blacktop along the perimeter of the blaze was melting, boiling. Churning masses of thick black smoke rose high above the city, blending into the pendulous black and gray storm clouds.
Someone cursed.
Jack jerked his head to the right, away from the terrible but hypnotically fascinating inferno, and focused his narrowed field of vision on the soft-drink machines at the corner of the station. The killer was standing there, as if oblivious of the destruction he had wrought, feeding coins into the first of the two vending machines.
Two more discarded cans of Pepsi lay on the asphalt behind him. The Micro Uzi was in his left hand, at his side, muzzle pointing at the pavement. He slammed the flat of his fist against one of the
buttons on the selection board.
Feebly shoving the woman away, Jack whispered, “Get down!”
He turned clumsily toward the killer, swaying, barely able to remain on his feet.
The can of soda clattered into the delivery tray. The gunman leaned forward, squinting, then cursed again.
Shuddering violently, Jack struggled to raise his revolver. It seemed to be shackled to the ground on a short length of chain, requiring him to lift the entire world in order to bring the weapon high enough to aim.
Aware of him, responding with an arrogant leisureliness, the psychopath in the expensive suit turned and advanced a couple of steps, bringing up his own weapon.
Jack squeezed off a shot. He was so weak, the recoil knocked him backward and off his feet.
The killer loosed a burst of six or eight rounds.
Jack was already falling out of the line of fire. As bullets cut the air over his head, he fired another shot, and then a third as he crumpled onto the blacktop.
Incredibly, the third round slammed the killer in the chest and pitched him backward into the vending machine. He bounced off the machine and dropped onto his knees. He was badly hurt, perhaps mortally wounded, his white silk shirt turning red as swiftly as a trick scarf transformed by a magician’s deft hands, but he wasn’t dead yet, and he still had the Micro Uzi.
The sirens were extremely loud. Help was nearly at hand, but it was probably going to come too late.
A blast of thunder breached a dam in the sky, and torrents of icy rain suddenly fell by the megaton.
With an effort that nearly caused him to black out, Jack sat up and clasped his revolver in both hands. He squeezed off a shot that was wide of the mark. The recoil induced a muscle spasm in his arms. All the strength went out of his hands, and he lost his grip on the revolver, which clattered onto the blacktop between his spread legs.
The killer loosed two-three-four shots, and Jack took two hits in the chest. He was knocked flat. The back of his skull bounced painfully off the pavement.
