“The New York Dispatch is only read by half the city,” she said. “With your paper we’ll get the other half, too.”
I eyed the pen, wondering if there was a way I could use it. Not that I’d been trained in any Bourne-esque dojo where they taught you how to kill two people with a single pen.
“Mr. Reeves here will watch you. I don’t expect your finest work, Henry. Time is of the essence.”
I didn’t know what to do. Amanda’s life versus thousands of people who would read about this drug and be tempted to buy it. I pictured Amanda, sitting at home, while the city burned around her. Then I pictured her grieving at my funeral, not knowing I’d given my life for her.
What the hell could I do?
Before I could do or say anything, there was another knock at the door behind Eve Ramos. It startled her very briefly, and I took a step forward.
She opened it, and standing there was Rex Malloy.
“Eve,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Sheffield and Parker,” he said. “They didn’t come alone.”
Ramos stood there, unsure what to make of what
Malloy had said. We had come alone. What the hell was
Malloy talking about?
Suddenly I heard a loud noise come from outside the compound. A second explosion, then a third, rattling the floor, reverberating. Somebody was shooting at the warehouse from outside. Eve Ramos’s eyes narrowed as she stared at me. I had no answers.
They didn’t come alone.
Had somebody followed us?
“Get up, Parker,” Ramos said, her voice gone to steel.
She marched over and grabbed me by the hair, pulling me up. I stood, wrenched away.
“Get off of me.”
Then I realized where the gunfire had come from. We weren’t being shot at from outside. Somebody inside the compound was firing at someone outside.
Then it dawned on me.
We had been followed. By Jack O’Donnell.
49
The first volley of gunfire drove them to dive behind the police cars, bullets strafing the metal, punching quartersized holes in every car. Jack O’Donnell felt a pain in his arm as he hit the ground, dirt kicking up around him.
He was surrounded by two dozen of New York’s finest, and now that the level of violence had escalated there was sure to be SWAT and helicopter backup. But for now it was just this ragged old journalist and a bunch of cops who’d walked into a buzz saw.
“Is this normal?” Jack shouted when the gunfire stopped.
Chief of Department Louis Carruthers, his back pressed up against a blue-and-white, shook his head. “Not in the least. It only means one thing, so you’d better keep your head down.”
“What’s that?”
“It means they’re not planning to be arrested.”
Jack slowly picked himself, peeked over the hood of a car, just in time for another round to rip up the car and force him back to the ground.
His heart was beating a million miles a minute, but something besides fear coursed through the old lion.
Neither Henry or Curt knew Jack had followed them all the way from Parker’s apartment, and it gave Jack a slight bit of pride to know he still had a little left in the old oil can. But when he saw the two men force Henry and Curt to follow them at gunpoint, he knew the time for hideand-seek was over.
It was less than ten minutes before the cavalry arrived, and it took less than one to tear open the gated entrance and force themselves inside. Jack didn’t know what to expect, but when he saw the massive warehouse and the sentry guards, the fence barricading the area from both trespassers and onlookers, he had a feeling they’d stumbled onto the very heart of where the Darkness was produced.
“Do we just wait until they run out of bullets then?”
Jack yelled above the storm.
Carruthers looked at him and shook his head.
Then he yelled to the rest of the cops perched outside,
“There are two innocents in there, including one of our own. Let’s get them the hell out of there!”
Then a barrage of gunfire strafed the outside of the warehouse, shattering glass, shredding brick, smoke and dust pouring from everywhere.
Jack covered his ears, felt dirt and gravel raining down around him, stinging his face and neck. And below the pain in his arm, the rapid pace of his heart that scared the hell out of him, Jack had a feeling this was just the beginning.
50
When the gunfire first erupted, Eve Ramos went into the stairwell to find out what was going on. I could see her and Rex Malloy talking. Malloy was animated, pointing somewhere I couldn’t see, gesturing like mad as
Ramos stood there impassively, processing it all. Behind them, still in the room with me, was Leonard Reeves.
And unlike his two comrades, Reeves’s eyes betrayed him. He looked nervous, the kind of man who might dish out violence but never expected it to come back to him.
Whatever Rex Malloy was saying, it was frightening
Leonard Reeves something bad.
While they were preoccupied, I picked up the pen and quietly walked over to where Reeves was standing. He was not an especially large man, about five foot ten, not fat but without much discernible muscle definition.
Sometimes you could take one look at a person, the way they carried themselves, and know how brave they were.
What kind of fight they would put up. In Leonard Reeves,
I got the sense of a man who talked a big game but once cornered, would piss his pants faster than an eight-yearold with a tiny bladder.
So with little time to decide my course of action, I took a chance that could lead either to my freedom, or my death.
Gripping the pen in my fist, the point sticking out two inches, I wrapped my left arm around the front of
Reeves’s neck and jammed the pen right under his jawline on his carotid artery, hard enough that I felt the tip threaten to pierce skin. Reeves was surprised and struggled, crying out, but I whispered into his ear, “Move once more and you’ll see your blood all over Malloy’s nice blond hair.”
Reeves relaxed. His hand was still on the arm that held his neck in place, but there was no strength in it.
I could feel the gun against my hip, and holding the pen I quickly grabbed it and swapped the writing utensil for the pistol. Not a bad choice. I flicked the safety off.
I’d only held a gun once before, and even then it was out of self-defense. I didn’t want to fire it.
Right now, though, I was certain that if need be I would use it. I wasn’t sure who was more frightened: me knowing I could be forced to end a man’s life, or Reeves knowing his life was in the hands of a man who had
