by Lisa Black
So she stood still, and listened.
Then someone grabbed her arm.
* * *
Jack shot the lock to gain entry. He remembered the door only too well and knew no amount of human-battering-ram action would break it. If this turned out to be another of Shanaya’s games and he had to pay for damage to commercial property, so be it.
The dim interior appeared vacant, the noisy, crowded cubicles now empty and dark. From the girl’s description it sounded as if the place went full blast all day, but perhaps they closed up once people in the farthest time zone stopped answering their phones.
“Take this floor,” he said in a quiet voice to West, the cop assigned to watch Shanaya Thomas.
“Everyone poured out of this place like ants from a smashed mound about fifteen minutes ago, right after your girl called nine-one-one with a hang-up. It took Dispatch that long to associate the number and get hold of me.”
“She didn’t come out with the crowd?”
“I didn’t see her. It’s possible I missed her, but I don’t think so. There weren’t that many women. And the GPS in the phone says it’s still here.”
“Got it.”
Jack hoped Jeffers would be in the boss’s office on the second floor, where he and Riley had been. He and his partner climbed the steps, guns drawn. Whoever was there must have heard their less-than-subtle entry but knew better than to come running. Jack heard no whispers, footsteps, grinding clicks of magazines as they were jammed into pistols. What he did hear sounded strangely like a child’s laugh.
At the top of the stairs they turned up the corridor, finding one lit doorway. With Riley behind him, Jack approached along the wall, then hazarded a glance through the glass in the upper door frame.
The day care room, with two children in it. A boy of about five, with a mop of unruly hair, building a cityscape out of square wooden blocks and apparently explaining every detail of the construction to another child of perhaps three, who rocked on the floor with a battered stuffed dog and did not appear to be listening. No one else in sight.
The hell, Jack thought. He peered around to the corners of the room, as much as he could. The solid metal door had only one square window at his eye level, perhaps ten inches square. No adult in sight. He debated—call Dispatch and tell them to send a child’s advocate over to possibly take custody, or wait to see what the situation turned in to. Again, this could still be some feint of Shanaya’s, and he and Riley would find nothing more on the premises than a lonely bookkeeper working late. And Jack would have to pay for a door lock. But if the situation turned much more ominous then he didn’t want to have children present.
He turned to Riley, already texting Dispatch to have a child’s advocate on standby. They moved silently past the door. The children took no notice.
The second floor appeared like the first—empty, dark, and silent, the row of inner offices unlit except for the one at the very end, where Jack and Riley had interviewed Mark Hawking.
If this wasn’t some feint of Shanaya’s—
Jack gestured around the room at large. Riley nodded and slunk off to the outer wall, examining the perimeter while Jack moved directly to the open office door. The cubicles appeared empty, surfaces gleaming slightly in the small amount of ambient light and what penetrated from the streetlights outside, but there were many barriers and desks and if he were the bad guys, he would have scattered into their depths when they heard the door downstairs splinter open.
He continued along the inner wall, ambush-ready dark cubicles to his right, ambush-ready dark offices to his left. At the doorway there remained nothing to do but show himself. He couldn’t see inside and calling out would simply forewarn them. The chances were good that he would accomplish nothing other than getting himself shot and really wished he had stopped to put on a vest first, but either way, better him than Riley.
Or he could peek around the corner like a girl in kindergarten, quickly enough to keep whoever waited inside from sighting and firing in time, and then at least he’d know what or who awaited him. Not dignified, but perhaps wise.
He peeked like a girl in kindergarten.
Only two people present, standing behind the desk: Shanaya Thomas, and Dr. Sidney Jeffers, currently holding a gun to Shanaya Thomas’s head.
“Come on in, Detective,” the doctor called.
Chapter 36
Jack stepped into the opening, watching Jeffers’s gun hand carefully. If it so much as twitched in his direction, he must step back. Returning fire would not be an option with Shanaya used as a human shield.
It didn’t twitch. The barrel remained firmly in place at the girl’s right temple. Her eyes were huge and terrified, and she barely seemed to breathe.
The doctor said, “Tell your partner to stop where he is, because there’s two of my men out there with him.”
Jack called, “Riley! You’re not alone.”
No response, but that made sense. Riley wouldn’t want to make it easy for the hired goons to find him. Those goons would stand down, waiting for orders, as Riley cooperated with a temporary cease-fire—or so Jack hoped. The longer they could put off a firefight, the better, but Jack didn’t see how one could be avoided altogether. Jeffers had no options. The office had only one door and Jack stood in it. Pointing a gun at Shanaya seemed almost an empty threat; if he killed her, he’d still have nowhere to go but jail. All Jack would have to do is wait.
He hated waiting.
He said, “Dr. Jeffers. I would say Dr. Castleman, but—what did you plan to do when he came back from the Congo?”
“If he comes back from that hellhole. I’d have done what I’m going to do to now—close up shop and move on. This kind of work always has an expiration date. Linger too long, and the cement hardens around your feet. Classic mistake.”
“You won’t believe me,” Jack said, “but I know exactly what you mean.”
The man studied him, as if wondering. Shanaya breathed in with one short gasp, every atom of it audible in this tight space.
Jack pointed out, “But you’re a doctor. Med school, board exams, license. You’re going to walk away from all that?”
“Why would I have to? Nothing can connect me to this little enterprise, and I didn’t give opioids to patients who didn’t need them, or bill for procedures never done or durable medical equipment never purchased. The bad Dr. Castleman did. I’m kindly Dr. Jeffers, ministering to those who can’t afford care because other doctors only care about paying the insurance on their Lotus or keeping up with the country club fees.”
“Except you can’t get out of this building.”
“Without going through you, you mean?” Jeffers asked. “Good point.”
And he moved the gun from Shanaya’s temple and fired it at Jack.
The guy was quick—surgeon’s hands, Jack supposed. He jerked backward around the corner and felt the bullet graze his coat, the hot metal jerking the cloth with such speed that he had dropped to the ground and scuttled several feet away before he even smelled the fabric. One more shot blew through the office wall, showering Jack with tiny tufts of insulation. Feathers.
How to keep himself and Riley alive; and Shanaya as well, when she stayed stuck in a hole with a man more than willing to kill any inconvenient person he saw. He had to get out of it but couldn’t leave the room without his shadows making the movement obvious.
His two gunmen, however—
Off to his right he heard Riley say, “Jack?”
“Here.”
The light in the office went out. So much for shadows.
Jeffers would leave the room with Shanaya in front of him, an impossible target, while Jack sat there in the open. Not good. He straightened enough to walk in a sloping crouch and hustled toward the far corridor and the stairwell.
A shot flared but missed him in the dark. He picked up his pace as another shot answered.
“One down,” Riley called, his voice pinpointing his location. Another shot rang out,
then landed with the thump of a soft target rather than the thwack of a floor or wall. Jack’s adrenaline spiked. Had Riley been hit?
Jack had nearly reached the end when a divot exploded from the wall in front of him, showering his face with tiny specks of paint and brick. He broke to the left, away from the corridor and stairwell, dropped to his knees, and hazarded a glance behind him.
His eyes had adjusted somewhat and he could see the edges of the cubicles, the interior doors, and Jeffers approaching with Shanaya plastered to his chest. She had both hands on his arm as if trying to pull it away, but the gun at her face kept her from struggling too much.
At the same time Jack heard a chair skitter away and a soft footfall. He hoped to hell it was his partner and not the guy who might have just killed him.
He had left the stairwell open for Jeffers, to at least keep him moving in a straight line. Otherwise they’d wind up at the same impasse as in the office. Officer West had remained downstairs. Surely he would have heard the commotion and gotten into position. Besides, Jack hardly wanted gunfire right outside the day care center, though its door looked bulletproof.
“What’s your plan, Jeffers?” Jack called. “You going to take out the entire Cleveland police force? Right now you only have fraud and unlawful imprisonment of that young lady. We know Wayne actually killed Evan Harding.” While, of course, acting on instructions from Jeffers, and he had left out Rick and Jennifer Toner. Jeffers didn’t need to know that they had connected the murders. It hardly boosted the incentive to put down the gun and make a deal.
Jack heard the brush of shoes on carpet at the outer wall and decided not to be a sitting duck for two different gunmen. He duck-walked over to the center aisle, took a peek, saw no one. Unfortunately the cubicles had been arranged in two solid rows. If he wanted to go up the center, cross to the interior wall, and come up behind Jeffers, he’d have to move all the way to the other end of the floor and then the full distance back to reach him.
He hadn’t bluffed about backup units responding. He and West had to keep Jeffers in place until they arrived, keep him from leaving the building with Shanaya, or she was as good as dead. It would be helpful, however, if Jack could get them all in a better position—take out that second guy, find Riley, and get Jeffers into a corner where he could see no other option but to surrender.
In other words, Jack needed to do the one thing he’d never been particularly good at—talking someone down. He needed Riley for that. He needed Maggie.
While he debated, he heard Jeffers shuffle around the corner and a sudden uptick in noise from the day care room. Jack hazarded a glance. In the vague blue light from outside Jack saw him pause outside the door, peering through the glass. Then he said, “Be right back, kids,” and Jack realized what the children had been shouting.
“Daddy!”
Then Jeffers took the gun from Shanaya’s head and fired at Jack, pulling her backward toward the steps as he did. Jack heard the pings of shots hitting the outer wall, the inner wall, the pipes snaking down the corner near the exposed wall. Then a hiss and a boom.
The room exploded with a blast that rocked his head back against the cubicle partition.
All of Jack’s senses failed at once. The light blinded him, the shock stunned him, and the shuddering noise deafened his ears. The ball of fire sucked all the oxygen from the room, and when he could breathe again he stumbled to his feet.
One of Jeffers’s shots had hit the gas pipe. Why that had caused an instant inferno, Jack couldn’t guess.
He turned to see Jeffers disappearing down the stairwell with Shanaya.
A scream, a primal, animal wail, cut through the choking air. A man, a figure cloaked in flames, came flailing through the smoke. Something—perhaps wishful thinking, perhaps the build or the cut of the fitted Columbia jacket—made Jack certain that this man on fire was not his partner.
Jack raised his gun but it would not be necessary—the guy sped past him without pausing, running senselessly to find some relief for the pain. The sight of his flesh burning was enough for Jack.
He ran toward the flames.
* * *
One floor below, Maggie nearly screamed when the officer grabbed her arm.
“What are you doing here? You’re the forensics tech, right?”
She shook her head in assent, momentarily speechless.
“Go back outside and get away from the entrance. Units are on their way.”
A shot rang out from the upper floor. Maggie abruptly understood the cliché about jumping out of one’s skin.
Jack.
She moved toward the staircase without thinking, confused when the officer grabbed her arm again, more forcefully than before.
“Now!” he hissed.
She hesitated. But this was their world, not hers. She needed to trust the officers to do what they did. She had to trust Jack. “Okay. Anything I should tell them when they get here?”
“Get across the street and out of sight. But if you can safely approach officers, tell them unknown number of suspects, unknown weaponry, unknown if possible hostage situation.”
That sounded less than helpful, but she turned to go. Then the explosion happened and the ground quavered underneath her feet.
The officer moved toward the stairwell, Maggie behind him. But when she realized what she was doing, she stopped again. She should not be here. She would only get in the way of the officers doing their jobs if they had to protect her as well as themselves, and Shanaya, and anyone else who might be in the place. But—Jack—
Two people came into sight. A man she did not recognize, with his arm around Shanaya’s neck and a gun in his hand, which he used to fire at the officer in front of her.
He missed, and the officer retreated, leaping to the left behind the curved reception desk instead of diving to the right into the sea of cubicles with their thin walls. Maggie imitated him. She would not make it across the open area to the door. And she didn’t really want to.
Though she really wished she had a gun.
Chapter 37
Whatever had been used to carpet and upholster the main room on the upper floor, it did not seem to be particularly fire-resistant. The feathers combusted at will and the gaping, open wall had instantly become a sheet of flame, licking out from its hole with darting tongues of fire. The speeding tendrils followed their own unpredictable trails. Jack went up the far aisle, next to the outside wall, where the smoke and flames were the thickest. The fire danced along the floor, shadowed by patches on the ceiling, and leapt through areas of the wall where some past residues fed its needs. He bulldozed into this miasma toward the limp form lying underneath one of the windows.
The smoke grew thick. Visibility became a problem, but moving past one smoldering piece of carpeting, his foot landed on something soft. He crouched to feel rather than see a hand, attached to an arm. An arm wet with blood.
His hands moved farther, to a chest clothed in a sweatshirt and bits of blood and gore from the hole in it. Not Riley, then, who had been in his usual shirt and tie. Jack felt a wave of relief he wouldn’t have expected.
He felt the neck for a pulse, found none, and abandoned the man, moving toward another figure on the floor. That had to be Riley, alive or dead—unless another unknown remained in play. Which, given the events to date, would not surprise him in the slightest.
Then he heard Maggie call his name.
* * *
Shanaya also wished she had a gun. Or a knife, or even a ballpoint pen that she might be able to pull out and stab this asshole in the thigh to get him to let go of her as soon as he moved the gun from her face to shoot someone else. But she had nothing. Except—
The boss—she still didn’t even know what his name was—pivoted her toward the receptionist desk, keeping her between himself and the cop. The light drifting down the stairwell from the day care room gave a dim illumination to the foyer, enough that she could see the two people now half-cowering behind the marble desk. The
cop emerged, slowly. That forensic chick who had counted all Shanaya’s money peeked over the heavy marble counter, staying safe, the lucky bitch. She looked at Shanaya and not the man with the gun.
“Let’s take a second here,” the officer began.
“We don’t have a second,” the man said. “In case you haven’t noticed, the building’s on fire. So I’m going to get out of here, and if you try to stop me, I’ll—”
The gun that had been grinding into the skin of her right temple slid toward her eye, hovering in front of her brow as the guy couldn’t decide whether to aim it at her or at the cop.
She had had just about enough of this shit.
“You’re not going to get out of here,” she told him. “You might as well let me go and give up.”
“Shut up.”
“They’re cops. There are more of them than there are of you.”
In response, he moved his arm from where it choked her to curl one hand over her mouth, squeezing her face and smashing her skull into his collarbone so hard it hurt.
The cop kept talking, trying to offer the guy some way to let her go that would sound acceptable, trying to couch “give up and go to jail for, like, ever” in appealing terms.
This guy had no intention of giving up or going to jail or doing anything other than killing everyone who got in his way. And that would be her as soon as he no longer needed her.
Shanaya opened her jaw, struggling against his hand, and one of his fingers slipped inside. Then she bit. She clamped down as hard as she could.
He yelped, and she jerked down on his gun hand. It went off but didn’t hit her.
She couldn’t see a lot of options here. He was stronger than her, and even with taking the flesh of his fingers down to the bone didn’t get him to let go of the gun. Even if he let go of her, she’d never make it to the door before he shot her. Bullets remained the biggest threat, so that’s what she dealt with.
Keeping his finger grinding between her teeth, she grasped his other hand with both of hers, snaked her digits around his and pulled. The gun fired and fired again; she kept her elbows locked and didn’t care so long as the bullets didn’t go into any part of her own anatomy. She heard more screams—whether they came from the guy or the cop or the woman, she didn’t know, but hoped to hell she hadn’t hit either of them or the cop might start shooting back while she still provided a warm flack jacket for her captor.
