Welcome to the 1990s.
Connie rose from shelter far enough to line up a shot.
Harry was equally quick to take advantage of the lunatic’s sudden obsession with the saguaro. He came to his feet in another part of the restaurant and fired. Connie fired twice. Chunks of wood exploded from the door frame beside the psycho’s head, and the glass blew out of the porthole; they had bracketed him by inches with their first shots.
The geek vanished through the swinging door, which took both Harry’s and Connie’s next rounds and kept swinging. Judging by the size of the bullet holes, the door was hollow-core, so the slugs might have gone through and nailed the sonofabitch on the other side.
Connie ran toward the kitchen, slipping a little on the food-strewn floor. She doubted they were going to be lucky enough to find the creep wounded and squirming like a half-crushed cockroach on the other side of that door. More likely, he was waiting for them. But she couldn’t rein herself in. He might even step through the door from the kitchen and cut her down as she approached. But her juices were up; she was jazzed. When her juices were up, she couldn’t help but do everything full-bore, and it didn’t even matter that her juices were up most of the time.
God, she loved this job.
4
Harry hated this cowboy stuff.
When you were a cop, you knew violence might come down sooner or later. You might suddenly find yourself up to your neck in wolves a lot nastier than any Red Riding Hood ever had to deal with. But even if it was part of the job, you didn’t enjoy it.
Well, maybe you did if you were Connie Gulliver.
As Harry rushed the kitchen door, going in low and fast with his revolver ready, he heard her behind him, feet slapping-crunching-squishing on the floor, coming full-tilt. He knew that if he looked back at her, she would be grinning, not unlike the maniac who had shot up the restaurant, and although he knew she was on the side of the angels, that grin never failed to unnerve him.
He skidded to a halt at the door, kicked it, and instantly jumped to one side, expecting an answering hail of bullets.
But the door slammed inward, swung back out, and no gunfire followed. So when it swung inward again, Connie burst past him and went into the kitchen with it. He followed her, cursing under his breath, which was the only way he ever cursed.
In the humid, claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, burgers sizzled on a grill and fat bubbled in a deep-fryer. Pots of water boiled on a stovetop. Gas ovens creaked and popped from the intense heat they contained, and a bank of microwave ovens hummed softly.
Half a dozen cooks and other employees, dressed in white slacks and T-shirts, their hair tucked under white string-tied caps, pale as dead men, stood or cowered midst the culinary equipment. They were wrapped by curling tendrils of steam and meat smoke, looking less like real people than like ghosts. Almost as one they turned toward Connie and Harry.
“Where?” Harry whispered.
One of the employees pointed toward a half-open door at the back of the kitchen.
Harry led the way along a narrow aisle flanked on the left by racks of pots and utensils. On the right was a series of butcher blocks, a machine used to cut well-scrubbed potatoes into raw french fries, and another that shredded lettuce.
The aisle widened into a clear space with deep sinks and heavy-duty commercial dishwashers along the wall to the left. The half-open door was about twenty feet directly ahead, past the sinks.
Connie moved up to his side as they drew near the door. She kept enough distance between them to assure they couldn’t both be taken out by one burst of gunfire.
The darkness past that threshold bothered Harry. A windowless storeroom probably lay beyond. The smiling, moon-faced perp would be even more dangerous once cornered.
After flanking the door, they hesitated, taking a moment to think. Harry would gladly have taken half the day to think, giving the perp plenty of time to stew in there. But that wasn’t how it-worked. Cops were expected to act rather than react. If there was a way out of the storeroom, any delay on their part would allow the perp to escape.
Besides, when your partner was Connie Gulliver, you did not have the luxury of dawdling or ruminating. She was never reckless, always professional and cautious — but so quick and aggressive that it seemed sometimes as if she had come to homicide investigations by way of a SWAT team.
Connie snatched up a broom that was leaning against the wall. Holding it near the base, she poked the handle against the half-open door, which swung inward with a protracted squeak. When the door was all the way open, she threw the broom aside. It clattered like old bones on the tile floor.
They regarded each other tensely from opposite sides of the doorway.
Silence in the storeroom.
Without exposing himself to the perp, Harry could see just a narrow wedge of darkness beyond the threshold.
The only sounds were the chuckling and sputtering of the pots and deep fryers in the kitchen, the hum of the exhaust fans overhead.
As Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom beyond the door, he saw geometric forms, dark gray in the threatening black. Suddenly he realized it wasn’t a storeroom. It was the bottom of a stairwell.
He cursed under his breath again.
Connie whispered: “What?”
“Stairs.”
He crossed the threshold, as heedless of his safety as Connie was of hers, because there was no other way to do it. Stairways were narrow traps in which you couldn’t easily dodge a bullet, and dark stairways were worse. The gloom above was such that he couldn’t see if the perp was up there, but he figured he made a perfect target with the backlighting from the kitchen. He would have preferred to blockade the stairwell door and find another route onto the second floor, but by then the perp would be long gone or barricaded so well that it might cost a couple of other cops’ lives to root him out.
Once committed, he took the stairs as fast as he dared, slowed only by the need to stay to one side, against the wall, where the floorboards would be the tightest and the least likely to sag and squeak underfoot. He reached a narrow landing, moving blindly with his back to the wall.
Squinting up into utter lightlessness, he wondered how a second floor could be as perfectly dark as a basement.
From above came soft laughter.
Harry froze on the landing. He was confident that he was no longer backlit. He pressed tighter to the wall.
Connie bumped into him and also froze.
Harry waited for the queer laugh to come again. He hoped to get a fix precise enough to make it worth risking a shot and revealing his own location.
Nothing.
He held his breath.
Then something thumped. Rattled. Thumped again. Rattled. Thumped again.
He realized some object was rolling and bouncing down the steps toward them. What? He had no idea. His imagination deserted him.
Thump. Rattle. Thump.
Intuitively he knew that whatever was coming down the stairs was not good. That’s why the perp had laughed. Something small from the sound of it, but deadly in spite of being small. He was infuriated with himself for being unable to think, to visualize. He felt stupid and useless. A foul sweat suddenly sheathed him.
The object hit the landing and rolled to a stop against his left foot. It bumped his shoe. He jerked back, then immediately squatted, blindly felt the floor, found the damn thing. Larger than an egg but roughly egg-shaped. With the intricate geometric surface of a pinecone. Heavier than a pinecone. With a lever on top.
“Get down!” He stood and threw the hand grenade back into the upper hall before following his own advice and dropping as flat as possible on the landing.
He heard the grenade clatter against something above.
He hoped his throw had sent the damn thing all the way into the second-floor hall. But maybe it bounced off a stairwell wall and was arcing down even now, the timer ticking off the last second or two before detonation. Or maybe it had barely landed i
n the upstairs hall and the perp had kicked it back at him.
The explosion was loud, bright, cataclysmic. His ears rang painfully, every bone seemed to vibrate as the blast wave passed through him, and his heartbeat accelerated even though it had been racing already. Chunks of wood, plaster, and other debris rained over him, and the stairwell was filled with the acrid stench of burnt powder like a Fourth of July night after a big fireworks display.
He had a vivid mental picture of what might have happened if he had been two seconds slower: his hand dissolving in a spray of blood as he gripped the grenade upon detonation, his arm tearing loose of his body, his face crumpling in on itself….
“What the hell?” Connie demanded, her voice close yet far away, distorted because Harry’s ears were still ringing.
“Grenade,” he said, scrambling to his feet.
“Grenade? Who is this bozo?”
Harry had no clue as to the guy’s identity or motivation, but he now knew why the Ultrasuede jacket had hung so lumpily. If the perp had been packing one grenade, why not two? Or three?
After the brief flash of the explosion, the darkness on the stairs was as deep as ever.
Harry discarded caution and clambered up the second flight, aware that Connie was coming close behind him. Caution didn’t seem prudent under the circumstances. You always had a chance of dodging a bullet, but if the perp was carrying grenades, all the caution in the world wouldn’t count when the blast hit.
Not that they were accustomed to dealing with grenades. This was a first.
He hoped the lunatic had been waiting to hear them die in the explosion — and had instead been caught unawares when the grenade boomeranged on him. Any time a cop killed a perp, the paperwork was horrendous, but Harry was willing to sit at a typewriter happily for days if only the guy in the Ultrasuede coat had been transformed into wet wallpaper.
The long upstairs corridor was windowless and must have been night-black before the explosion. But the grenade had blown one door off its hinges and had torn holes in another. Some daylight filtered through the windows of unseen rooms and into the hallway.
Damage from the explosion was extensive. The building was old enough to have lath and plaster construction instead of drywall, and in places the lath showed through like brittle bones between ragged gaps in the desiccated flesh of some ancient pharaoh’s mummified body. Splintered floorboards had torn loose; they were scattered half the length of the corridor, revealing the subfloor and in some places the charred beams beneath.
No flames had sprung up. The snuffing force of the blast had prevented anything from catching fire. The thin haze of smoke from the explosion didn’t reduce visibility, except that it stung his eyes and made them water.
The perp was not in sight.
Harry breathed through his mouth to avoid sneezing. The acrid haze was a bitterness on his tongue.
Eight doors opened off the hall, four on each side, including the one that had been blown entirely from its hinges. With no more direct communication than a glance, Harry and Connie moved in concert from the top of the stairs, careful not to step in any of the holes in the floor, heading toward the open doorway. They had to inspect the second level quickly. Every window was potentially an escape route, and the building might have back stairs.
“Elvis!”
The shout came from the doorless room they were approaching.
Harry glanced at Connie, and they both hesitated because there was a weirdness about the moment that was unsettling.
“Elvis!”
Though other people might have been on the second floor before the perp had arrived, somehow Harry knew it was the perp shouting.
“The King! The Master of Memphis!”
They flanked the doorway as they had done at the foot of the stairs.
The perp began shouting titles of Presley hits: “Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, Money Honey, Jailhouse Rock….”
Harry looked at Connie, raised one eyebrow. She shrugged.
“Stuck on You, Little Sister, Good Luck Charm…”
Harry signaled to Connie that he would go through the door first, staying low, relying on her to lay down a suppressing fire over his head as he crossed the threshold.
“Are You Lonesome Tonight, A Mess of Blues, In the Ghetto!”
As Harry was about to make his move, a grenade arced out of the room. It bounced on the hall floor between him and Connie, rolled, and disappeared into one of the holes made by the first explosion.
No time to fish for it under the floorboards. No time to get back to the stairs. If they delayed, the corridor would blow up around them.
Contrary to Harry’s plan, Connie rushed first through the blasted doorway into the room with the perp, staying low, squeezing off a couple of rounds. He followed her, firing twice over her head, and both of them clattered across the shattered door that had been torn off its hinges and blown down in the first explosion. Boxes. Supplies. Stacked everywhere. No sign of the perp. They both dropped to the floor, threw themselves down and between piles of boxes.
They were still dropping, scrambling, when the hallway went to pieces in a flash and a crash behind them. Harry tucked his head under his arm and tried to protect his face.
A brief hot wind brought a storm of debris through the doorway, and a lighting fixture on the ceiling dissolved into glass hail.
Breathing the fireworks stink again, Harry raised his head. A wicked-looking piece of wooden shrapnel — as big as the blade of a butcher’s knife, thicker, almost as sharp — had missed him by two inches and embedded itself in a large carton of paper napkins.
The thin film of sweat on his face was as cold as ice-water.
He tipped the expended cartridges from the revolver, fumbled the speedloader from its pouch and slipped it in, twisted it, dropped it, snapped the cylinder shut.
“Return to Sender, Suspicious Minds, Surrender!”
Harry was pierced by a longing for the simple, direct, and comprehensible villains of the Brothers Grimm, like the evil queen who ate the heart of a wild boar, thinking it was really the heart of her stepdaughter, Snow White, whose beauty she envied and whose life she had ordered forfeited.
5
Connie raised her head and glanced at Harry, who was lying beside her. He was covered with dust, chips of wood, and glimmering bits of glass, as she no doubt was herself.
She could see that he wasn’t getting off on this the way she was. Harry liked being a cop; to him a cop was a symbol of order and justice. Madness like this pained him because order could be imposed only through violence equal to what the perpetrator dealt out. And real justice for the victims could never be extracted from a perp who was so far gone that he couldn’t feel remorse or fear retribution.
The geek shouted again. “Long Legged Girl, All Shook Up, Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me!”
Connie whispered: “Elvis Presley didn’t sing ‘Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.’”
Harry blinked. “What?”
“That was Mac Davis, for God’s sake.”
“Rock-a-Hula Baby, Kentucky Rain, Flaming Star, I Feel So Bad!”
The geek’s voice seemed to be coming from overhead.
Cautiously Connie eased up from the floor, revolver in hand. She peered between the stacked boxes, then over them.
At the far end of the room, near the corner, a ceiling trapdoor was open. A folding ladder extended from it.
“A Big Hunk o’ Love, Kiss Me Quick, Guitar Man!”
The walking piece of dog vomit had gone up that ladder. He was shouting at them from the dark attic above.
She wanted to get hold of the geek and smash his face in, which was not a measured police response, perhaps, but heartfelt.
Harry spotted the ladder when she did, and as she rose to her feet, he stood beside her. She was tense, ready to hit the floor again fast if another grenade dropped out of that overhead trap.
“Any Way You Want Me, Poor Boy, Running Bear!”
&nb
sp; “Hell, that wasn’t Elvis, either,” Connie said, not bothering to whisper any more. “Johnny Preston sang ‘Running Bear.’”
“What does it matter?”
“The guy’s an asshole,” she said angrily, which was not exactly an answer. But the truth was, she didn’t know why it bothered her that this loser couldn’t get his Elvis trivia correct.
“You’re the Devil in Disguise, Don’t Cry Daddy, Do the Clam!”
‘“Do the Clam’?” Harry said.
Connie winced. “Yeah, I’m afraid that was Elvis.”
As sparks squirted from the shorting wires in the damaged light fixture overhead, they crossed the room on opposite sides of a long waist-high row of boxes, closing in on the attic access.
From the world beyond the dust-streaked window, faraway sirens wailed. Backup and ambulances.
Connie hesitated. Now that the geek had gone into the attic, it might be best to flush him out with tear gas, lob up a concussion grenade to stun him senseless, and just wait for reinforcements.
But she rejected the cautious course. While it would be safer for her and Harry, it could be riskier for everyone else in downtown Laguna Beach. The attic might not be a dead end. A service door to the roof would give the creep a way out.
Evidently Harry had the same thought. He hesitated a fraction of a second less than she did, and started up the ladder first.
She didn’t object to his leading the way because he was not acting out of some misguided protective urge, not trying to spare the lady cop from danger. She’d come through the previous doorway first, so he led this time. They intuitively shared the risk, which was one thing that made them a good team in spite of their differences.
Dragon Tears Page 3
