The van didn’t stop. The kid’s arm jutted suddenly from the driver’s open window and a blinding red light caught Ben’s eyes. But not before he saw that the kid held a gun.
A silver van, the gunman on the roof had said.
Ben flung himself between a Saab and a BMW. A shot cracked, shattering the BMW’s window above him. The van’s brakes squealed as though the driver stood on the pedal. Ben didn’t huddle under the sedan; he rolled under two SUVs parked next to it, grease staining his shirt and pants, trying his hardest to be silent.
Nowhere else to run. Nowhere to escape. The kid could just get out of the van and shoot him dead, ease down, smile at Ben in his temporary fortress of undercarriage and concrete.
Ben waited to hear the van door open. But instead he heard an eruption of gunfire.
Pilgrim barreled out of the stairwell—he’d caught a glimpse of Ben running down the stairs, hitting the second-level door—and saw Ben dodging a van, a laser sight dancing, a glow seeking flesh, then a shot fracturing the rear windshield of a car behind where Ben had stood.
The van. Jackie Lynch. Teach was inside that van if the gunman had told the truth.
Then the laser sight swung toward Pilgrim, caught between the stairwell door and a parked car, as the van braked to an awkward, neck-snapping stop.
The shots sang a warble of th-weets and Pilgrim retreated backward, the sting and burn of steel ripping through flesh in his shoulder and his arm. He staggered, missing the door as Jackie leaned out the window to tighten his aim and finish the job.
He retreated, blindly, no place to run, and threw himself over the concrete lip of the garage wall. He dropped into emptiness. How far up was he? he wondered. He couldn’t remember past the pain.
Now in a burst of speed the van powered past where Ben hid.
The guy could kill him easy, why was he running?
Because he just shot who he was really after. Pilgrim.
Ben crawled from under the utility vehicle. Bullet holes scored the wall along the stairwell door, a spill of blood decorated the lip of the edge. Where, presumably, Pilgrim had stood in chasing him.
He started to run toward the other stairwell. He heard a screech of brakes. He stopped. Pilgrim could be lying back there, dead, dying.
He leaned against a parked truck. His and Pilgrim’s lives were somehow connected, tied to each other, because of the murder of Adam Reynolds and how Ben had been framed for it. I can answer your questions,Pilgrim had said, and you can answer mine. We can help each other. But not if we’re both in custody. If Pilgrim died, Ben might never be able to prove his innocence. Homeland Security could threaten him all over again, his reputation would be destroyed, he would never know the truth. Pilgrim must know the reasons why Ben’s life had been targeted and ruined.
Pilgrim had saved him from Kidwell, from the gunman on the roof.
Ben ran back to the edge of the garage and peered down the side. Pilgrim lay, a story and a half below him, in a row of crushed yaupon bushes, moving his arms, groggy, hurt, barely lifting his head.
Halfway down the incline to the ground floor, a crowd of college kids were laughing and piling into their cars, debating through the open windows which club to visit. Jackie guessed they hadn’t heard the sounds of the silenced shots or had attributed the bangs to festival noise. But the kids were taking their own sweet, slow time, calling from car to car while they inched out of the parking slots, blocking the passage. Jackie slammed on his brakes to keep from veering into them.
Jackie rolled down the window. “Move it, goddamn it!”
“Hey! Politeness, dude.” A boy his own age, sitting in one of the cars, slurred his syllables and gave Jackie a beer-soaked smile. Jackie wanted to shoot and knife them all, but the cars were full, six kids in each, and it was too many, it would take too long.
“Please,” Jackie said. “Please. Sorry I yelled. I’m in an awful hurry. Please move.”
“See, politeness works,” the loudmouth said. The car inched up enough to let Jackie roar past.
Jackie yanked up his pants leg, pulled the eight-inch steel knife from its sheath. If Pilgrim lay hurt on the ground, he’d dispatch him with the knife. Quiet and it wouldn’t draw the attention a gun would. If there were witnesses helping Pilgrim, the knife was fast—he’d killed a quartet of late-paying drug dealers in a small Dublin room once with the knife, in under thirty seconds.
Nicky, I’m going to make it right, he thought.
Ben sprinted down the stairwell again, hands skimming the railing. He hit the exit, and the cool night air washed over his filthy and bloodied face. He turned the corner and Pilgrim was trying to stand, favoring his leg. Bleeding, shot in the shoulder.