“It's none of your bloody business.”
“Ahh, I see. None of my business, huh?”
“That's right.”
“Your well-being is my business,” he countered. She looked up into his luminous eyes. “Does that mean you won't let any harm come to me?”
“Never.”
She gritted her teeth. “Then get me the hell out of here.”
“Consider it done.”
TWENTY-NlNE
As they stepped out into the silent corridor, someone shouted, 'There! There they are!” This was followed by a radio signal voice, saying, “They're at the incinerator!”
“This way,” shouted Lucas, tugging at her robes and forcing her along, using his back as a shield for her. He fumbled the now cumbersome skull in his hands, but he held on to it.
They came to a labyrinth of choices, tunnels going off in six directions. Meredyth stopped, stood before the confusing maze, and said, “Which way?”
“Any way, just don't stop!”
They went down the center, located a stairwell that spiraled and coiled about itself. They took this up and up, the noise of their pursuers getting ever nearer. At one point on the stairwell, he grabbed hold of her and stopped Meredyth in her tracks, cautioning silence and no movement.
They could hear the voice of a man speaking into a radio. The killers were in constant contact with one another. He peered over the stairwell and a steel-shafted arrow ruffled his hair, making him leap backwards. They continued their run up the stairs. Their pursuers all wore the heavy robes of the monastery.
Once back on solid ground, they found themselves in back of the altar in the church, where they shrugged off their robes. Lucas threw them across the staging area of the pulpit, hoping their pursuers would see the discarded robes and believe that he and Meredyth had run across the stage toward the opposite side and the exit.
He then pulled Meredyth close and crouched behind some scattered stage props and an ancient piano. They heard the heavy footfalls of the enemy as one, two, three scurried by, one of them calling out, “This way.”
Her body was pressed close to his. She smelled wonderful, even spellbound as she was by fear.
“I don't think I can move from this spot ever again,” she said, trying to catch her breath.
“Now maybe you understand why I'd have preferred to make this little junket on my own?” he chastised her.
“You couldn't've gotten this far without me,” she countered, glaring at him in challenge.
“Then prove your courage. We're getting out of here, now.”
“Now?”
He pointed. 'Through that exit.”
“When?”
“Now,” Lucas whispered, getting to his feet, holding on to the skull like a bowling ball, his fingers looped through the eye sockets, holding on to Meredyth with the other hand.
They raced breathlessly for the nearest exit sign, Lucas kicking out at the bar lock on the door, sending it flying open. Behind them, they could hear the shouts of their pursuers, and Lucas felt the biting clutch of one of the arrows as it dug into his shoulder, sending him careening down to the alley floor with the powerful impact, the stolen skull skittering out ahead of him, Meredyth screaming and instinctively diving alongside him to reduce her vulnerability as a target.
Lucas expected to feel the bite of another bone-hard, ice-cold arrow through his back and through the heart at any moment, lying as he was, helpless on the asphalt, but he dared not let them linger here, so he kept pushing onward, getting to his knees, yanking at her with his one good arm, shouting, “Don't stop! Don't look back! Run.” But before they could get to their knees, and before the doors they had just burst through could close on their hydraulic hinges, an explosion of gunfire rang out.
Lucas, his back and left shoulder bleeding profusely from the arrow lodged there, instinctively draped himself across Meredyth while the barrage of gunfire continued. Lucas guessed that they were so riddled with bullet wounds they felt nothing now, and he guessed that they were lying in the alleyway opposite the soup kitchen side of the church.
When the gunfire ended, Lucas looked ahead to see the rictus of the skull sourly smiling at him. He felt no pain other than the throbbing and the weight where the steel-shafted arrow wavered in his back. He had felt the impact of the thing with such force because it had slammed into bone, fragments now no doubt spider webbing inside the wound. He imagined a hospital stay, if he survived. He felt no bullet wounds.
Then he saw a pair of black leather shoes approach, saw hands reach down and lift the skull, and he heard Phil Lawrence asking, “Now who do you suppose we have here? You got any idea, Stonecoat?”
“Captain Lawrence?”
“Don't worry, Dr. Sanger, Lucas,” he replied, crouching now, turning the skull in his hands. “We took out the hit squad. Now we'll turn this place inside out to see just how widespread Father Aguilar's influence was here. That means mass arrests and a hell of a lot of interrogation.”
“Let me the hell up,” Meredyth complained, and Lucas immediately got off her, sitting Indian fashion now in the middle of the black alleyway. All around them police were shouting for lights, and orders were being bellowed out as uniformed officers raced into the church to begin making arrests.
Staring back over his shoulder, the steel shaft in his back moving back and forth like a pendulum on a metronome, the pain increasing with the sway of the heavy arrow, Lucas saw some five or six cowled brothers, all dead, still bleeding from their wounds, not so much as a moan from any of them, each with a crossbow near his corpse. Among them, his cowl thrown back, his face a mask of horror, was Father Aguilar, a bullet wound through the forehead, blood crisscrossing his face.
“Oh, God, Lucas, you're hurt!” Meredyth shouted in his ear.
'Thanks for letting me in on the secret,” he managed a tortured joke, his voice croaking. “How deep is the head buried?”
“Deep,” she muttered. “It didn't penetrate to the other side?” she asked. He felt his chest. “No… hit bone. Hurts like hell.”
Meredyth and Lucas looked ahead to see the other shadowy gunmen emerge. They first saw big Jim Pardee, followed by the thin, ambling Fred Amelford; then came a stunned Andrew Bryce, Randy Oglesby, and someone Lucas couldn't quite make out until Meredyth said, “It's Conrad.” She held on to Lucas's shoulder, sobbing, “Are you going to be all right?” She dared not tell him how close to the heart the arrow had obviously run.
“Go ahead,” he said in his most nonchalant voice. “Go to him.” He indicated Conrad, her boyfriend.
Randy Oglesby rushed to Lucas, and Lucas, fighting off a fainting spell, heard him explaining that he had gotten a call from Conrad McThuen, and that Oglesby had in turn called Phil Lawrence, who had in turn put together this small squad of commandos familiar with the case.
Phil Lawrence was kneeling over Lucas now, too, saying that the bleeding looked bad. Lucas tried to focus on the moment, to keep control, to not black out. He imagined that Conrad McThuen and Randy Oglesby had hung back beyond the line of fire, and for the first time Lucas got a look at the tall, good-looking boyfriend, who at the moment was utterly shaken, his eyes wide, his mouth agape, trying to do other than ape Meredyth's name as she guided him back to where Lucas remained half up, half down on the asphalt.
Lucas concentrated on his dislike for Conrad. He wore expensive, post-yuppie, L. L. Bean clothes, his glasses alone worth one of Lucas's paychecks. He might be exactly what Meredyth required in a man, Lucas thought but didn't believe.
Beside McThuen now stood a grinning Randy Oglesby, who was praising both Meredyth and Lucas for their courage. He saluted Lucas, as if to say, “Well done!”
Pardee, a heavy man who carried his weight well, rushed past Lucas, as did Fred Amelford, each anxious to have a look at the kill, Pardee repeating the phrase, “We got the bastards… we finally got the bastards.”
