Cut and Run

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

The man held her in a one-armed necklock, swinging first toward the room’s windows and then the door, back and forth like a drunken dancer.

It sounded like Normandy Beach out there.

His words muddled, he spoke aloud for the sake of hearing himself reason. “All this time of wanting you dead for what it is you claim to know…” A half minute or so passed before he completed the thought. “… and here you are, more valuable to me alive.”

She knew better than to try to speak, for each time she opened her mouth he cinched down harder on her windpipe and drove her toward unconsciousness. In these brief few minutes under siege, Hope had come to understand that she would not die the overpowered victim. Though overpowered, she playacted now, offering no physical resistance while she searched for opportunity, the tendrils of her training as a protected witness creeping back into her consciousness. Elbows. The heels of her feet. The opponent’s groin. His windpipe. She’d been told it took less than twenty pounds of upward pressure to tear a human ear away from the head, to grip it by the lobe and work it like a stuck zipper. Flooded with such thoughts, her mind had reached an uneasy calm, where time and sound and action seemed to slow, and during which time confidence grew in her. She had come this far on her own.

You shouldn’t have let me live, she thought.

Her moment came sooner than she’d expected, and when it arrived she knew it, she saw it as a gift, and she had no intention of allowing it to pass. It came as a one-two punch. First, a blinding flash, much more vivid, more present than what had come before. A ball of light so bright it flooded the room in a bluish tint that went beyond pure white. This was followed, nearly instantaneously, by a concussive sound wave that found its way deep inside her bones while shattering two of the windows and cracking the third. Glass rained down, sounding like a waiter’s misfortune. Hope rocked forward, using her bottom as a fulcrum, and then snapped to attention, catching the man’s jaw with the crown of her skull. She spun to her right, away from the elbow that clamped down on her throat and broke the viselike grip, never hesitating for a moment as she sped to the first of the shattered windows and paused only long enough to clear the jagged mouth of broken glass that rimmed the now-lopsided frame. She went out through that window like a hurdler, one leg stretched before the other, bent over toward her extended thigh like a diver, three stories up and falling, arms flailing now as she saw the two Dumpsters slightly to her left and realized she’d misjudged and chosen the wrong window. But no matter, she was free of him, in freefall, hands out swirling like a teenager leaping from a high rock into the pristine lake below. Her lake was asphalt, and her landing, horrific.

In total disbelief, Philippe watched his one remaining negotiating tool fly out the window like Peter Pan. The sheer nerve of her jumping out the window-an act he could never have done himself-so pissed him off that he ran to the open wall, leaned out, and trained the gun down on the collapsed and broken form below. He fired off a round, not seeing well enough amid the smoke and confusion to have much of an aim, and then fired again. Missed with both. He sighted more carefully this time, determined to end this, finding the bead and locking it onto her sprawled frame.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a red firefly light onto his chest, his first reaction, like anyone’s who spots a bee or wasp on their person, to swat it off. But it did not fly, for it was no insect. His last thought was recognition of what it was: a sharpshooter’s laser sight creating a red circle at the center of his chest.

And then, a hole. A ripping and shredding as a large-caliber-rifle slug exited a cavity five times larger than it entered.

Philippe was thrown back off his feet as if struck by a truck, arms out to his sides, on the bed of broken glass that jumped around him like sparkling fairies on the floor.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

As Larson arrived at the far end of the upstairs hallway, he heard two shots exceptionally close. Bam… bam… the sound of an execution. He arrived at a door and kicked it in, gun extended, only to see a well-dressed man lying dead in a sea of broken glass. Not bleeding, eyes open, and dead.

He might have moved on had he not seen the blue plastic of his smashed BlackBerry on the carpet in front of an empty overstuffed chair.

He checked closets. He spun around in the center of the room, convinced she was here. And then his mind reassembled the shattered windows, the dead guy in the tailored clothes killed where he was, and Larson rushed to get a look outside.

If his mind had been free of emotion, if he’d been able to clinically abstract how it was that this man could lie dead on the floor, he never would have approached the open window. But he was desperate for her now, and he knew without knowing, understood without any evidence whatsoever, that Hope had jumped.

He saw her there down on the asphalt, writhing in the pain of broken bones. And she saw him as well, just before it happened. He made that co

A red bead lit his jacket. Like a firefly.

His head snapped up to face the edgy sharpshooter somewhere out in all that darkness, and then… the heat of a bee sting, and the world went silent.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

The sound of applause. Ethereal. Or the beating of wings. The swirling white lights of angels, and a heavenly chorus rising like a whine. Then, blackness broken by a flickering gray wind and the faces of red pulsing demons all looking down at him. He, the center of attention, the focal point. It was how he’d imagined it might be, all but the strained faces of Hampton, Stubblefield, and Rotem glaring down at him like he’d done something wrong.

“Leave me alone,” he wanted to say. “Let me die in peace.”

If this was death, it felt anything but peaceful.

“He caught the insignia.” It was Rotem, shouting above the roar of the Bell jet helicopter-for that turned out to be the source of the wind and the drumming applause and the flashing red lights. The white spotlights came from the news choppers high overhead.

“Their sharpie caught the insignia on your jacket.” Rotem pointed out the white Fraternal Order of Police insignia on the chest of Larson’s borrowed windbreaker.

“Just as he fired, he jerked,” Hampton shouted. “Took your collarbone and a piece of your shoulder, but left you your heart.”

They had oxygen on him and intravenous in his arms. He tried to speak but could find neither the breath nor the ability to form any words. It was as if he were in someone else’s body and didn’t know the right controls.

The paramedics hoisted him up and passed him off to their colleagues in the helicopter.

“We’re right behind you,” he heard Hampton shout.

Larson felt his stretcher turned and placed down. A flurry of hands in thin plastic gloves rose above him as straps were pulled across him and tightened. If only he’d been able to ask, someone might have been able to answer, and so he tried again, his lips unwilling to cooperate, his brain a tangle of life-after-death and prayer and penance. An incomprehensible moment.

The red and white lights still flashed rhythmically, the only real things convincing him he might indeed be alive. How much a dream? How much wishful thinking?

And then he knew it had to be a dream, for as it turned out, the helicopter was made to carry two, not one. Two stretchers side by side with overhead stainless-steel hooks for the bags of intravenous fluid. There beside him she lay, her eyes open and moving to find his, which absolutely meant she must, too, be alive, or they were both dead and somehow sharing this moment, which wouldn’t have surprised him at all.