Angel could see Lacy on the landing outside the window, alternately covering the space above her and down in the alley. She kept the gun pointed down and waved them forward. “It looks clear—” Lacy began to say.
From behind them, back in the hotel, came the sound of Yara discharging his weapon. Angel suddenly found Quintara’s body shielding her. He was facing away from her, his gun locked toward the shots. “Move, Lacy, get her out of here.”
Angel felt an arm scoop under her armpit and yank her through the window.
Whoever Yara had shot at was returning fire. Angel caught the smell of gunsmoke and scorched plaster dust.
Lacy led the way down the fire escape, leading with her gun.
Angel wished her Beretta hadn’t vanished with an unknown feline. Angel felt way too exposed, and tried to keep her eyes on everything at once—the slanting garbage-strewn alley below them, the blank featureless windows of the building across the alley, the roof of the hotel.
Windswept rain sliced through the gap between the buildings like an icy dagger, and the cast-iron fire escape rang in response. Behind them, in the hotel, gunfire increased in intensity.
There was the sound of sirens in the distance, a lot of sirens, but none of them seemed to be getting any closer.
For ten seconds or so, Lacy led her down the escape, half-running. They got down to the second floor landing, and Lacy covered the way they’d come as Angel grabbed the ladder. Angel hung on to a pair of rungs and pushed off, riding a scraping, rattling descent to the ground—
Angel wasn’t looking up, so when she heard Lacy discharge her weapon, she instinctively let go of the ladder and fell the rest of the way to the ground, rolling behind a dumpster when she hit the bricks.
Her adrenaline had been cooking for a long time. It shot home when the sledgehammer of Lacy’s gun was answered by a staccato thudding from above accompanied by the chiming of the fire escape.
Angel looked up when she’d come to rest. Lacy was dodging toward the ladder, firing up at the window they’d come from—
No, not the window, the roof.
Backlit by a lightning flash, Angel saw three human forms looking over the lip of the hotel’s roof. In the storm, Angel could barely discern the noise and flash of their suppressed submachine guns, except when the fire swept the fire escape and the iron came alive with orange sparks and clanging.
Lacy almost made it. She’d made it to the ladder, firing upward—Angel thought the bullet had caught the central figure—and had got one hand on a rung.
Angel could feel her throat tighten as one of the gunmen swept his fire across Lacy’s position.
The first shot hit Lacy in the right calf, blowing the cuff of her jeans into bloody rags. Lacy began a slow-motion collapse toward the edge of the fire escape. A second shot tore into Lacy’s hip, and that was when Angel saw the expression on her face change into a grimace.
Lacy got one last shot off before the two succeeding shots tore into her abdomen and her chest. Blood was rank in the air as Lacy tumbled headfirst past the ladder. Angel was halfway toward the mouth of the alley before she heard the body hit.
She turned at the mouth of the alley to face a noise to her right, but she never saw the person who hit her.
Chapter 19
Angel remembered the stunner hitting her. She remembered her muscles turning inert and the wet sidewalk rushing up to meet her at a cockeyed angle. She remembered something hitting her in the back of the head, making her vision go fuzzy, and she remembered a pressure in her arm that could have been an air-hypo—
After that was only a black, bottomless headache.
She faded in and out, her mind only coherent enough to register a few sense impressions. The sound of sirens faded into the thumping of a van speeding across the broken pavement of the Tenderloin.
She felt rough hands carrying her. She could smell her own blood warm and tacky on the back of her head. She faded out again as she heard elevator doors closing.
Then someone rummaging through her clothes. Removing her wallet. The smell of stagnant water and mildew.
A human voice asked, “Found the tickets?”
Angel wanted to open her eyes, but it seemed too much effort.
“Here they are,” said someone else. Angel felt something small get tossed onto her chest.
“Can we dump it now, Tony?”
“Are you nuts?”
“But—”
“You’re supposed to be smarter than the animals. What’d you think the Old Man would do if the Knights start pulling the same mistakes the furballs pull?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Did anyone ask you what you like? He’s having second thoughts. If this run-in with the cops doesn’t pay off, he might just cut us off entirely.”
“We have the tickets. Why do we need the rabbit?”
“Because.” The voices began to fade with distance and her hazy consciousness. “I don’t trust a source in the Fed. We hold the rodent until the data checks. Then we . . .”
She lost her grip on awareness.
The dripping woke her up. It felt like she was swimming up a stagnant sewer thick with black filth. Slow, painful, no real sense of progress, and she had a lightheaded feeling that could have been lack of oxygen but was more likely an aftereffect of whatever they’d doped her with.
But she knew she was really awake now because she could think.
She took a deep breath of the mildewed sewer smell and had a feeling that she’d been filed in a place a few notches below the Hotel Bruce.
Angel opened her eyes slowly, expecting to be blinded by whatever light was present in the room she was in. She wasn’t blinded. The only light was coming from a small square hole up on a rusting iron door about two meters away from her.
She was lying on a concrete floor where the black filth had been there so long that it’d probably sunk several centimeters into the stone. The walls were wet with moisture and black fuzz, and in a few places the walls had been leaking long enough to leave rippling white deposits near the floor.
She was in a three-by-six-meter room with one door, and the only things in the room other than her were a pile of old boxes against the far wall, and pipes that traveled the long axis of the room, near the ceiling.
At least they had left her her clothes.
Angel sat up and something tumbled off her chest. It was her wallet. She picked it up and went through it. The only thing missing was the sheaf of football tickets . . .
“Shit.”
She sat down and tried to collect her thoughts. She could remember overhearing the humans talking around her, but the only solid recollection she had was one snatch of dialogue. That was enough to screw with her day.
The Knights of Humanity, wonderful.
The bunch of pink psychos were after Byron’s data as well as everyone else. And, God help her, that made it look like there was yet another player in the game.
Worse, they were going to check those ramcards they lifted from her. These guys knew exactly what they were looking for. It was only a matter of time before they found out those tickets weren’t the genuine article. Then they’d be back.
She had to get the hell out of here.
The door first.
Angel dragged one of the boxes, a thick metal and plastic one, over to the door to give her a chance to look out the little rectangular hole. The box smelled rank with oil. There was still some legible writing stenciled on it, despite the water. It said, “5.62 mm 1000 rounds U.S.”
Before she used it as a stepladder, she opened it to make sure it was empty.
The window was narrow. She could see a slice of a hallway lit by a yellow incandescent bulb. It was all brick and concrete, with plastic-sheathed pipes snaking the ceiling. To her left she could see a slice of a metal staircase going up, to her r
ight she saw a black space that could have been an opening to a larger basement.
The door was ancient iron. Oxidation coated it centimeters thick under a surface of black grime. She groped through the hole and tried to reach the latch so she could push the thing open. The attempt was futile. She had a hard time believing that the door could open at all—even when it was unlocked . . .
That was when she noticed a blatant asymmetry in the room.
The iron door’s right side touched the right wall of the room she was in. A wall that didn’t match the other three. Dry cinderblock, not the dripping red brick of the other walls. The construction was recent. The lines of the cinderblock showed little wear, and none of the grime of the other walls. The pipes that snaked across the ceiling disappeared into its top edge.
Angel looked at where the pipes entered the cinderblock wall. There were a few cast iron pipes, a half-dozen pipes sheathed in plastic insulation, a few finger-thick copper tubes, and four color-coded PVC tubes that rode shoulder-to-shoulder through the upper right corner of the wall.
Those pipes were probably carrying optical cable for the building. Collectively, the pipes occupied a space in the wall a meter square.
PVC was hard, but it was hard plastic, not metal. It could break when presented with a convincing argument.
“How the hell am I going to do this?”
Angel stepped off the box and flexed her legs. She looked up at the four pipes. They probably carried optical cable. She might be wrong. If they carried something under pressure, her idea would get her into deep trouble. Angel shrugged and started dragging other empty ammo boxes to the cinderblock wall. She’d already touched bottom of shit river. Whatever happened, she wasn’t sinking any deeper.
The ammo boxes were impact-resistant plastic and aluminum. They looked like they could take a lot of abuse. More abuse than PVC could—she hoped.
She stacked six boxes into a lopsided pyramid, with the point directly under the four pipes. She climbed up and lay on her back under the pipes. She had about a meter of clearance. It was a real lousy position to be in if those pipes carried pressurized steam.
“Come on,” she whispered as she rested her feet against the pipes. “They aren’t even warm.”
She took a few deep breaths, hugged the sides of the box as hard as she could with her arms, and slammed the two bottom pipes as hard as she could. The shock vibrated down the muscles of her leg, squeezing her tail and making her biceps ache.
With the second kick she felt something give, and the smell of abused plastic began wafting down. Again, and something definitely gave, though she didn’t quite know if it was the pipes or the box she was on.
Again, again, again . . .
Fast, because someone just had to hear all this noise. Her keepers had to be on the way now. The two lower pipes had split from the wall, falling to either side of her. Her legs were bleeding where pieces of plastic had sliced. Severed optical cable fell in tangled heaps as she began kicking the upper pair of pipes. Pain was digging into her shins, clawing into the muscles of her thighs. Her feet felt as if they’d been flayed open, and every impact brought an involuntary gasp. “Give, dammit!” she yelled at the two pipes, not caring about the volume.
And they gave.
Plastic crashed around her as her feet slipped through and slapped the ceiling. On the other side of the wall, she could hear more crashing. Tangles of optical cable fell past her.
Weak light from beyond the wall began to trickle through the hole.
Now that she could spare some of her attention, there were people in the hall outside the cast iron door. She heard five or six of them. Human. At least one more was riding heavily down those metal stairs.
One of them began sweeping a flashlight beam through the hole in the door. The beam started at the far end.
Angel pulled herself up to the hole she’d made. She had to make it through before the goobers on the other side of the metal door saw the light shining through the hole. They hadn’t seen it yet only because they were using a flashlight and had their backs to an incandescent bulb. It would only be a few seconds before one of them noticed the pale red light filtering through the top of the wall—
Not to mention the PVC pipe lying everywhere.
She climbed over the lip of the hole. The pipes had been packed close enough together that the only blockage was a combination of mortar and a waterproof sealant—both had already crumbled. The pipes on the other side of the wall had been pulled out of her way by their own weight.
Angel scrambled through the hole.
She landed on a familiar-feeling pile of boxes as she heard the chaos outside the next room raise a notch. Her assumption about the iron door had been more or less right. She heard a stomach-churning scrape as three or four humans manhandled it.
Angel found herself in a dry room, where the smell of oil replaced the smell of mildew. As her eyes adjusted to the two or three faint red light fixtures, she had trouble believing what she saw.
She was standing on a stack of ammo crates.
Fully packed, brand-new ammo crates.
She jumped off the crate and found herself surround by crates of weaponry. Grenades, rifles, pistols, and enough ammunition to run a small war. This room was twice the depth of the room she’d just left, and there was hardly any floor space to maneuver.
She didn’t see an exit immediately, and it sounded like those guys had the door open. Angel opened the latch on a case that was labeled “Grenades.” A flashlight beam swept by the hole in the wall, and she heard a chorus of bitching in the room beyond.
One voice out there knew where the hole went because Angel heard a very distinct, “We’re fucked . . .”
Why disappoint them? Angel pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it through the hole as hard as she could. She could hear them scatter as she dove at the base of the wall.
The explosion hurt her ears. She could hear the metal pipes above her groaning and snapping like old bones. The smell of smoke rushed in from the hole, making her eyes water and choking off her breathing. She heard one human scream, and she began to smell rusty steam from the broken pipes.
When it became clear that the destruction was going to remain on that side of the wall, Angel got up and kicked open one of the boxes, spilling army-issue forty-fives all over. She popped a crate of ammo and loaded one, hoping that she wasn’t taking too long.
When she had the pistol loaded, she grabbed a grenade and started looking for the exit.
The walls were smooth cinderblock, no openings. It took her a while to notice the circular manhole in the ceiling. A ladder set into the wall led up to it—the only exit.
The rungs hurt her abused feet as she did her best to climb one-handed. Before she tried to open the manhole, she checked to make sure the safety was off . . .
“Wait a minute,” Angel muttered to herself. There was only one entrance to this room, and they knew where she was. The rear was cut off by boiling steam, so, odds were, they were ringing the damn manhole.
How the hell was she going to get past that?
On the plus side, they needed her alive because they wanted her line on the data.
On the minus side, keeping her alive seemed to be a management decision and the grand majority of these bald nutballs would like to see her a smear on the wall.
She put the gun away and took out the grenade.
When she pushed the manhole cover aside, she led with the grenade in her hand, sans pin. One of them had some smarts because he started yelling, “Don’t shoot,” as soon as her grenade cleared the hole.
Somehow, she managed to climb out of the hole without being cut to ribbons by the fifteen skinheads that were ringing the opening—hairless, tattooed, leather-clad punks aiming everything from twenty-twos to a Vind 10 auto at her.
She’d emerged into the Knights’ auditori
um. A real theater, stage and all, balcony, banners and spotlights, as well as strategically placed vid units. She had come through the floor to the rear of the central aisle.
The skinheads surrounded her in a rough circle, bracing their weapons on the backs of the seats. One of the stage spots had been turned around to face her.
She stood, straddling the hole, grenade in her left hand.
“Put the pin back—” Tony, their leader was using the PA system. Smart fella, she thought, this could end up pretty messy.
“Afraid I dropped the pin down there.” Angel nodded down the hole. “And unless you folks get real friendly real fast, this pineapple’s going home to mama.”
“Do not threaten—”
“Fuck you!” Angel let go of it with all but two fingers. It hurt to hold it together like that, and her hand began to shake. She hoped that made them as nervous as it did her. “I really, really, want an excuse to light up all that ordinance. You drop me, you drop it.” There was a lengthy silence. The folks surrounding her were looking pretty damn nervous. She stuck her hand in her pocket and fondled the gun. “You need fucking directions? Drop the guns or this place becomes a memory!”
“Do as it says,” came the sound over the PA. Like your pronouns, Jack, she thought. Caved in real easy, didn’t you? You are going to sharpshoot my ass, aren’t you? Where’s the sniper?
The skinheads made a lot of disgusted sounds and shed the weapons.
“Go on stage where I can keep an eye on you.” Where’s the sniper? She was under the balcony, precious few places they could hide—
The damn spotlight, of course.
“Do it,” said the PA.
My, aren’t we accommodating. I’m dead as soon as you can take me out without me dropping the grenade. Angel started sliding around the perimeter of the hole. For the sniper, it’d look like she was making sure the skinheads behind her didn’t try anything on their trek to the stage . . .
The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2 Page 43
