by Eric Beetner
They ran in a serpentine motion for a few feet, then Elton broke off.
Gunfire followed them, smashing table legs and what glass wasn’t broken yet. The gunman traced Elton’s escape route, leaving Dale and Lauren to reach the doorway first.
Elton reached his destination, a wall switch not unlike the door locking mechanism upstairs. He punched a button on the wall and initiated a lockdown sequence. Heavy steel roll doors fell down over the blacked-out windows. A thick metal door moved on gears from the ceiling to block where the regular double doors were.
Elton made a sprint for the exit and caught a bullet in his leg. He faltered, then fell. The metal fire door nearly closed.
Dale tucked his gun in his belt. “Shit.” He reached forward as another burst of gunfire sounded. Dale could feel the heat from the flames inside the room as the metal door started to cut them off in the cooler, outer area. Elton grabbed his hand.
The shooting stopped. Out of ammo. Might not matter to Elton anyway. Dale pulled, but Elton was large. The door was three feet from closing. Dale slid forward on his butt, put a foot on the lowering door and used the leverage to pull Elton as hard as he could.
The big man slid forward and banged a hip on the door as he went through. He tucked his legs tight to his chest as the door came down the last twelve inches. Lauren reached in and took his hand, pulling him farther into the room.
Dale started to breathe a sigh of relief, but his foot slipped off the metal door and shot forward as the thick barrier locked into place. His toes were trapped underneath.
The screams were louder than the bullets.
Dale was on his belly, his right foot sole up and angled under the door. He remembered the time he got his fingers shut in the car door as they were loading up to go to Great Adventure. They had to cancel the trip and two of his fingers were in a cast for three weeks. Nothing compared to this. Nothing. He pounded the floor in agony.
Lauren came to him. “Holy crap. Are you stuck?”
He grunted out an affirmative. She moved closer to look. His shoe was bent under the weight of the door. The mechanism was locked tight.
“How do you raise this door?” Lauren looked at Elton.
“You don’t. Only the fire department can override it.”
She knew arguing with him would be pointless. She looked at Dale’s shoe again. Blood was seeping through. She bent low to him. “It looks like it’s only the big toe. Maybe the one next to it.”
“Fuck, it hurts.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. Pull him until it came loose? Or came off?
Elton, blood smeared on his cheek, scooted over on his backside. He clutched at his leg where a bullet had torn into his calf. “What can we do?”
“I don’t know.” Lauren tried to will her brain to think.
“We can shoot it off.” Elton drew his gun.
Lauren drew her new, fully loaded gun and held it on him. “Like hell you will. Drop it.”
Elton threw his hands up again. “Hey, come on. I’m with you guys.”
Lauren had developed a deep distrust of Elton and all his lab buddies in the past three minutes. So far no one in this building proved trustworthy, so she was done trusting.
“I said drop it.”
Elton let go of his pistol. Lauren turned to Dale, his eyes clenched in pain. “I hate to say it, Dale. But he’s got a good idea. It’s the only one we’ve got for now.” Dale shook his head. “And we don’t know how many more of those men are coming.”
Dale set his head against the floor, forehead down. He breathed deep. “Do it.”
Lauren took her new gun and pointed it at Dale’s foot. She set the barrel against the shoe, touching the metal of the door to get the minimum toe that she needed to break him free. She wondered if she should count to three or see if he needed to bite down on something. She decided he didn’t need to know when it was coming and before she lost her nerve, Lauren fired a single shot into Dale’s shoe.
CHAPTER 20
She thought of the baby. Clutching low across her stomach where the seat belt burned a red welt into her skin, Dahlia figured there was no way it could have survived the crash. She felt like she barely did.
Better than him, though.
She pulled the bloodied body of Pooch off the steering wheel and finally silenced the horn. The hard plastic wheel of the old Pontiac had bent across the top where Pooch’s forehead hit it. As his body slumped into the seat back, his front and bottom rows of teeth drooled out his mouth on a slime of blood and saliva.
Dahlia had sat with the horn blaring for what felt like a long time but could have only been a minute before she felt strong enough to move. No airbags in a vintage car, only solid steel.
She turned, slowly. Looking again at Pooch, she saw how his chest now had a divot in the center where his ribcage collapsed. Somehow her arms had held and saved her from doing a header into the dashboard. She’d braced herself just in time, though her elbows hurt like hell from the impact.
After Pooch drew his gun on her, a gold-plated beast she thought at first looked like a toy, Dahlia first decided to go for sympathy.
“I’m pregnant, y’know.”
“Is that why that boy wanted to snatch you?” Pooch was single-minded on the money he could possibly get for her.
“I told you I don’t know why. I think it has something to do with my husband, but that won’t help you at all.”
“He, like, a banker or something? Stock broker? Lawyer?”
“Cop.” That shut him up for a moment. “Detective.”
Pooch thought about it, then pushed forward. “Is that who I send the ransom note to?”
Dahlia was more annoyed than scared, for some reason. The escalating traumas of the day had dulled her senses. She felt manipulated by Pooch. At least with the boys in the band she didn’t get double crossed.
“There’s no ransom, no reward. You’ve got the wrong idea. That guy wanted to take me somewhere, to see someone.”
“I thought you said kidnapping?”
“That is a kidnapping.”
Pooch screwed up his face in deep concentration, his eyes aimed out the windshield of the car, his one hand on the wheel leaving the other for the golden gun. Dahlia decided he was an idiot. A dangerous idiot, but not someone she was going to succumb to after outwitting T and his man, then some crooked cop. Dale always told her, in the event anyone tries to make you get in their car (too late) don’t wait to get to the destination. If you’ve made it that far, they have the advantage and chances drop by half that you will ever make it back alive.
She’d screwed up Dale’s advice on the home invasion, she didn’t want to screw this up too.
His mind was otherwise occupied with plans to get the phantom money he thought was out there waiting for Dahlia’s return. Between that and driving with one hand, Pooch was distracted. Enough for Dahlia to form her own plan. Not a great one, but she zeroed in on hers first and that made all the difference.
Pooch had driven them out of the city and toward the river. The buildings changed from retail and apartments to warehouses and shuttered factories. There had been a time when one of the nation’s largest vinyl record manufacturers was headquartered here. And a company that made flagpoles employed more than two hundred people.
Now the area was ghostly. The businesses that still hung on like barnacles under a ship did so behind high, razor-wire fences. The empty buildings looked overrun by the homeless.
Dahlia didn’t want to get any deeper into the wastes.
With Pooch concentrating to the point of a headache, she leaned over and in one motion unclipped his seatbelt with a thumb and wrapped her hand around the steering wheel and gave it a violent twist to the left.
The car dipped low on ancient shocks and veered for the sidewalk. Pooch fought her on the wheel, dropping his gun to get two hands on. She pushed with all she had, using
her right arm to brace herself against the dash. They aimed for a telephone pole. He veered the car back a little bit right, but not enough.
At the last second, Dahlia put her other hand on the dash, locked her elbows in place and shut her eyes. The left headlight hit the pole and the car came to a sudden stop. Glass from the windshield exploded into the car and Dahlia heard Pooch’s body thump against the wheel. She missed the second thud of his head whipping viciously to the side and hitting the crown of his skull on the post between the windshield and door.
The back tires lifted off the pavement, then slammed down announcing the arrival of the car. The front end was creased nearly to the engine block by the pole, which leaned away as if it were trying to avoid to oncoming car. Steam hissed from the crushed engine.
The sound of glass tinkling down to the floorboards slowed, then ceased. Bits of the windshield stuck in Pooch’s hair and clung to where blood flowed from his nose as his body slumped forward on the cracked steering wheel. The horn started blowing the alarm.
Dahlia lifted the gun from under a layer of broken glass. Time to figure out where she was.
CHAPTER 21
“I need an answer, sir.” Lewis stayed in his seat watching O’Brien’s back as his boss hovered at the liquor cabinet. He watched the mayor shoot a glass of scotch, hang his head, and set the glass down.
“You’re saying it will be fast?”
Lewis looked at Roy. He knew the mayor’s question was for the fixer, not him. Lewis nodded to the man for him to answer.
Roy, devoid of emotion, calmly assuaged the mayor’s fears. “Fast, silent, painless.” O’Brien nodded. “Tell you the truth, it’ll be nice for a change.”
Lewis gave Roy a chastising look. He tried to calm the boss with his own logic. “Fact is, sir, we probably won’t even need Roy at all. If we haven’t heard by now…”
O’Brien turned. “What? If we haven’t heard, then what?”
Lewis accepted the challenge in O’Brien’s voice. He swallowed. “Then she’s probably already dead.”
The thought had occurred to O’Brien. In a strange way it was the best-case scenario. It’s one reason why he didn’t fight the crazy notion of sending in a one-man rescue squad. He couldn’t be sure which was more likely to backfire—one man or a small army.
“It’s hard, Lewis. You’ve got to understand.” O’Brien looked up, got nothing from Roy’s eyes. No sympathy, no sadness, no fear. He turned to Lewis again. “I’m losing my daughter. You see that, right?”
“Sir…” Lewis shifted in his seat. Time to seal the deal. “Didn’t you lose her a long time ago?”
The little punk was right. Lewis knew O’Brien’s family better than he did most times. Lauren began pulling away years ago, during the first campaign. She felt none of the thrill of victory when they won, didn’t give a damn when they moved into the mayor’s mansion, didn’t care about city functions, didn’t do squat for the first reelection campaign.
Much of that could be chalked up to Lauren being a teenager. Moody, temperamental, and robbed of her normal teenage years by the spotlight forced on her by her dad and his choice to seek office. But what was it now that she was a woman in her early twenties? Residual teenage angst?
And now it had been confirmed what she knew about him. If she did get out alive, what relationship would they have? What could they have with him behind bars?
Lewis was right. He’d lost her. His own stupid fault, maybe, but she was gone and she wasn’t coming back. The woman who left that office complex would be on a mission to destroy him. He’d lose his job, his money, his wife, his legacy.
Yes, Lewis was right. And O’Brien hated him for it.
He addressed Roy, avoiding Lewis altogether. “Quick. And painless.”
“You have my word.” Roy stood, the first sign that he was eager to get this show on the road. He extended a hand to the mayor, his version of a binding contract. O’Brien looked at the outstretched hand for a moment, licked sweat off his upper lip, then shook.
Roy turned without another word and headed for the door.
Lewis rose to his feet, buttoning his sport coat. “You’ve made the right decision, sir.”
“Shut up and get out of my office, Lewis.” The liquor cabinet beckoned O’Brien again.
STILL ON THE 7TH FLOOR
This is my punishment, thought Dale. It’s finally catching up with me and all the vengeance in the universe is falling from the sky on one goddamn day.
Seemed about right. He’d gotten away with too much for too long. He knew it. How many times had he thought about extricating himself from his deals? Of going straight? But once you were in with someone like Tat—it was near impossible to bring yourself out.
The stupid thing was—and Dale realized this now when his hopes of escaping the high-rise were dwindling to nothing—he never spent any of the money.
The fastest way to get busted for taking bribes and kickbacks was to drive up to the precinct in a new Aston Martin. The surefire way to spark an IA investigation is to take the wife to Aruba for two weeks. No cop has that much money.
He’d done the math not too long ago and figured he’d taken in over two hundred and fifty grand over the years, and he’d spent maybe three grand of it. Most of that was paying for the new gutters on the house, the transmission rebuild in his car, and a new washer dryer for Dahlia’s birthday. He saw now how insulting that was to his wife. Buying her a fucking chore machine? How had she stayed with him so long?
Dale wanted to wrap his hands around the ruined foot, but he also didn’t want to touch it. He wanted to scream, but he didn’t want to exert his body that much for fear of setting off the exposed nerves in his foot.
He pressed a cheek into the floor, squeezed his eyes shut, and sucked against grinding teeth.
Lauren stood over him, shuffling nervously and waving her hands as if she’d seen a dead mouse in her kitchen.
The foot came cleanly out from under the metal emergency door. All that could be seen of Dale’s missing toe beneath the door was a charred bit of rubber from his shoe. His foot jumped like a frayed electrical cord at the end of his leg. The curve of his shoe rounded the slow arc over his smaller toes, then cut off suddenly in a jagged line of red where it should have continued a slow curve down.
Still in his lab coat, Elton lay a few feet away on the floor clutching his left calf where a bullet still burned hot below the muscle. Even still, he sounded like he felt bad for the pain Dale was in. “Jesus Christ, man.”
“I had to do it.” Lauren still hopped from foot to foot, feeling phantom pains and hot guilt. She tried to get a good look at the wound but found it hard to see Dale’s bouncing foot clearly. “I think we should wrap it in something.”
“Here.” Elton pulled his lab coat off and tore a sleeve. He handed it to Lauren, a ready-made tourniquet.
She bent down and put a hand on Dale’s shoulder. “I need to wrap it up, okay? Honestly, it doesn’t look that bad.”
He knew she was lying, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at it yet. He nodded his approval and Lauren went to work. He tried to stifle low, guttural screams as she tied the sleeve over his foot and cinched it tight to slow the blood. It wasn’t bleeding as much as she thought it might and when she was close, she could see that part of the wound had been cauterized by the proximity of the gun blast.
She finished and bent down to his ear again. “It looks like only the one toe. The big one.”
With the torture over, Dale flopped onto his back and opened his eyes for the first time. He could feel the heat of the fire in the room next door coming through the metal barricade. He came to terms with the pain, accepting his punishment. He still had jail time to look forward to but that would require getting out of the building, which looked like a dim vision on a foggy horizon.
“We should get moving. More will come soon.” Elton was trying to stand.
Lauren, the only one without
a bullet wound, looked around the tiny landing where they stood. Blocked from entering the rest of the floor by steel safety doors and with an open elevator shaft behind them, the controls all shot to hell, she didn’t see much of a way out.
“And how, exactly?”
Elton nodded to the shaft. “We climb.”
Dale knew he wasn’t an active member of the negotiations, but he agreed with Elton. They had to keep moving. The fire would go out and more of Tat’s militia men would come. Someone would fix the elevator and they’d show up to the strains of soft jazz, but they’d be there. And they couldn’t sit around and wait for that to happen. They hadn’t come this far only to stall out now. Dahlia was still out there. Lauren still had to get home.
“He’s right.”
Lauren met his eye from directly above him. “Are you sure you can do it?”
“No. But I’m not staying here.”
Elton was already dragging himself to the open elevator shaft. Dale grabbed on to Lauren’s pant leg. “Help me up.”
She bent down and got him to his one good foot. He leaned on her like a crutch and they all went to look down into the black hole of the shaft. No one spoke for a moment as they followed the cables down until they were eaten by darkness. The walls of the shaft were a crisscross of metal support beams and the mechanisms for the doors were substantial and could make good footholds for a climb. But for two gimps and a woman who had never been rock climbing, even on one of those fake indoor walls? And who had a terrible fear of heights?
This was not a sure bet, but it was the only game in town, so they all anted up.
“I’ll go first.” Elton swung his legs over the edge and sat with his feet dangling above the blackness. Hs face showed the pain, but he bit through it.
Lauren was unsure about his qualifications as a team leader. “How’s your leg?”
