“Clear, clear, clear, clear,” Kylie said every time she opened another door and found nothing.
And then I saw it. The top of my head was just at countertop level, and I caught a flicker of red. It was the same glowing red light I had seen when Benoit started the countdown timer. It was coming through the glass door of a sleek, stainless-steel Breville toaster oven.
“Kylie, I got it,” I said, standing up.
“We only have two minutes. Can you disarm it?”
“Maybe if I had two days. I might have exaggerated my bomb experience,” I said. “I can’t even take a chance on opening the oven door. It could be rigged to blow. We have to ditch it-the whole thing.”
“Well, we can’t throw it out the window,” Kylie said. “God knows how many people we’d kill.”
“Do you have a safe?” I said. “That would contain some of the explosion.”
She shook her head. “What about the basement?” she said. “It’s like a bunker down there.”
“Not enough time. Even if your elevator managed to get us down there, we’d never get out.”
“We don’t need the elevator,” she said. “Grab it and follow me.”
The toaster oven was freestanding, about the size of a small microwave, and unplugged. I picked it up and followed Kylie.
“Garbage chute,” she said, bolting out the front door.
The incinerator room was just past the elevator. We went in, and Kylie pulled the chute door open.
As soon as she did, we both realized her mistake. The door was hinged at the bottom, and the hopper was designed to drop down only about sixty degrees. Plastic garbage bags could be squished and squeezed to cram down the chute. Stainless-steel toaster ovens couldn’t.
“Pull hard on the door,” I said. “Rip it right out of the wall.”
Kylie sat on the floor, grabbed the handle, and put all her weight on it.
“It won’t budge,” she said. “The bomb is too damn big to shove through the door.”
I stared at the red glow. We had ninety seconds.
Chapter 79
“Get me a sledgehammer,” I said.
“I don’t have a sledge-no, I have something. Give me a second,” she said, running back to her apartment.
“I can give you seventy-two seconds,” I yelled back after her. “And then we’re toast.”
I watched the timer count down to 1:00, 0:59, 0:58, and I wondered how much C4 Benoit could stuff into the guts of a toaster oven. From what I knew about his style, he wouldn’t skimp on the ingredients.
Kylie came back carrying a twenty-pound dumbbell. “Best I can do,” she said. “Hold the door open.”
I’m pretty sure I’m stronger than Kylie, but I wasn’t about to debate which one of us should be wielding the dumbbell. We had only thirty-seven seconds, and I figured whatever she lacked in brute strength, she would make up for with pure adrenaline.
I set the toaster oven on the floor, pulled down the chute door as far as the hinge would go, then grabbed the handle to hold the door in place.
“I’m hoping you’re as accurate with a dumbbell as you are with a Glock,” I said. “Try not to hit me. We’ve got thirty seconds. When we get down to ten, we should run like hell for your apartment.”
Kylie brought the dumbbell down hard. The force reverberated up my arm, but the door didn’t budge.
“Twenty-five seconds,” I said.
She swung it again.
The door hung on tight.
“Hit it again,” I said. “Third time’s the charm.”
I was right. The door gave. Not a lot, but it gave.
“It’s loose,” I yelled. “Again.”
She lowered the boom, and this time chunks of cinder block fell to the floor.
“One more time. Eighteen seconds.”
Kylie raised the dumbbell high and brought it down with a loud grunt worthy of Serena Williams.
The steel door hit the floor with a clatter.
I picked up the toaster oven as Kylie lashed out at the cinder block wall again and again.
It crumbled, leaving a gaping hole where the door had been. I could see the garbage chute. It was round. And wide.
“Out of the way!” I yelled.
I took one last look at the clock and dropped Kylie and Spence’s ultrachic, stainless-steel, countertop toaster-bomb into the abyss.
The window of time for us to get out of the incinerator room had passed.
“Seven seconds!” I yelled. “Hit the dirt.”
She dropped to the floor.
“Six.”
The irony of it all hit me in an instant. If Kylie and I had been able to run back to her apartment, we probably would have had a chance. But here in the incinerator room, we were directly above ground zero.
“Five.”
The bomb would explode in the basement, a fireball would travel up the chute like a cannon shot, and we would both be engulfed in flames. But maybe it didn’t have to be both of us.
“Four.”
We all die sooner or later. I always figured I had till much later, but if it had to be today, there was no place else I’d rather be, and no one else I’d rather be with.
I threw myself on top of her and covered her body with mine.
“Three. Two. One.”
Chapter 80
“Kaboom!” Gabriel screamed at the top of his lungs.
The semi-comatose man on the engine room floor snapped alert.
“Did you hear that, Charlie?” Gabriel said. “That was the kaboom of justice.”
Connor gave him a quizzical look.
“As of three seconds ago, the bitch cop who killed my girlfriend, and her asshole husband, who stole my identity, just got blown to hell. I wish I could have watched them go up in smoke, but I have bigger fish to fry. Namely your cronies on the top deck.”
Connor tried to talk through the duct tape, but all that came out was a shrill whine.
“You want a speaking part?” Gabriel said. “Okay, but you raise your voice, and I will stick this stun baton down your pants and fry your junk like a Jimmy Dean sausage. Understood?”
The man nodded, and Gabriel yanked the duct tape from his mouth.
Connor gulped air. “Thank you,” he wheezed.
“Don’t thank me, Charlie. I’m going to kill you in about half an hour.”
“Why me?”
“Don’t take it personally. I’m blowing up an entire boat. You just happen to be on it.”
“I don’t
“Bad news,
