The blow wasn’t as hard as Bud Spritzer packed, but it did the job. A sideways kick, with the thick-soled boot, it took my knee out. My leg buckled and I went down, falling hard on one of the rusted rails. Before I could rise, she stomped me down with her foot. I managed to turn my head sideways, my brain swarming with firefly light and bewildering questions, chief among them: Just what the hell was going on?
She stood over me, her gun pointed at my head. “I want the goods.”
The goods? By some miracle, the ace I’d held before, I still held. My face was in the weeds, my body wracked with pain, and yet she believed I had taken evidence from Martin Travani’s sex chamber—evidence that could implicate not Duross but her.
“We had an arrangement,” I managed. “It stands. Where’s Nicole?”
Neither her gun nor her cold expression wavered. “Sok!” she called.
Vanthan Sok came over. He had the weapon that Duross had been carrying, frowning at it, and I saw that I’d been mistaken in thinking it was a firearm. It was a Taser. Duross had been expecting that he might have to arrest me, nothing more. When he’d seemed bewildered by what I’d said to him, he wasn’t acting.
I managed to change position slightly, turning onto my side, and looked at Loftis. “That was you on the phone?” I asked.
“Fooled you, huh? The department has a voice-altering machine we sometimes use for taking testimony from reluctant witnesses.”
“And you called Duross and tipped him that I’d be here.”
“I told him you were ranting about him, wanted to meet him.” She shrugged. “It was your idea that Duross was dirty.”
I looked at Vanthan Sok. “Is he dead?”
Sok paid no attention. He was still marveling at the Taser. “It’s a fucking zap gun. Stupid fucker had his nine holstered the whole fucking time.”
He stood over me, and I got my first close look at him. He was short, wiry, with high cheekbones and long dark hair. Under the green sport coat, which was made of some crinkly synthetic material, he wore a pink Polo shirt, with the crisscrossing straps of a double shoulder rig for his guns. He had one of his shiny automatics in his hand, a nickel-plated SIG-Sauer. St. Onge had called him a cowboy His face was unmarked by anything he’d done—he could have been eighteen or eighty—none of it mattered to him.
“He’s got what you couldn’t find,” Loftis told him. “I want you to get it.”
He put his automatic into the double shoulder rig and stepped closer. He probably knew who I was. At least, he’d known enough to send gunfire through my kitchen window, no doubt at Loftis’s suggestion. He kicked hard at the sole of my foot, and I saw his work boot and realized that the bloody print I’d seen in the judge’s house most likely had been left by Sok, sent there to snip loose ends when Carly Ouellette had chickened and run.
Without warning, Sok pointed the Taser at me, worked the safety slide, and shot me.
I convulsed as the charge hit my chest. I fell back, limp. It was a nonlethal hit, the charge generated by a nine-volt battery, but it had the effect of knocking the body’s electro-muscular system out of pulse—weakening an opponent enough to allow the shooter to apprehend even the most unruly combatant.
Loftis didn’t seem to approve or disapprove. “Where is it?” she demanded.
I tried to get up, but I could barely move. I wasn’t sure that I could even speak.
Sok tossed the Taser aside and with a fancy cross-armed move straight from DiNiro, drew his pair of SIGs. I had no doubt that he would shoot me where I lay. This is it, I thought. This is how I’m going to die. And I knew how it would play: “Blood Feud in the Mill Yard”—both Duross and me found dead. Loftis was likely thinking along the same lines, making strategy.
“No,” she said. “Get Duross’s nine.”
I swallowed hard at the sick dread in my core and forced my gaze past Sok to Loftis. “You want the evidence I’ve got,” I rasped. “Where’s Nicole?”
“Close by. Your turn.”
I propped myself onto an elbow. The effects of the shock were fading. “I’ve got Travani’s files in my car.”
Just then someone shouted, “Police!” It was followed by a boom.
The three of us looked toward the tunnel and there was Stinson, fifty feet away. He had his .44 pointed in the air, the barrel as long as his forearm. I didn’t waste time noting anything else. Summoning strength I wasn’t sure I had, I drew one leg up and kicked out hard, crashing the sole of my foot against Sok’s shin with force enough to shatter the bone. He yelped a high, screeching cry and staggered back. But he didn’t drop his SIGs. He pointed one at my head.
His chest broke apart like a watermelon kicked by a Clydesdale, the insides vaporizing in a pale red penumbra. The concussion from Stinson’s .44 reached me an instant before Sok’s corpse hit the ground.
Loftis didn’t even turn. She bolted.
I rolled to my feet, not easy to do on a bad knee. I picked up the Taser, which lay beside Sok’s body. I wasn’t even sure it could be reused. But I didn’t want Loftis dead. Waving Stinson off, I went after her.
She was a runner, and I felt dead-legged, but I gimped along after her. Although the courtyard was the size of the Roman Coliseum, there really wasn’t anyplace she could get to that I couldn’t reach, too, in my
own time. She turned to look back, still running, and stumbled on some debris, but she didn’t go down. I saw again how fit she was, how strong. Even after all the destruction and violent death, there was something strangely alluring about her. That didn’t blind me to her danger.
She was running toward the far end of the courtyard, and it occurred to me that if she could reach the far wall of the Lawrence mill, she might get through a spillway gate, or scale a low fence, and be gone. I pushed myself harder—but so did she. I was too far away to use the Taser, which might work at twenty feet, though six or eight would be better.
All at once, she appeared to try to stop, skidding slightly in the weeds—and I realized that she had suddenly come upon the canal. Too late to stop, she changed her mind. She surged ahead, stepped on the granite sill of the canal, like a long jumper hitting the board, and launched herself into the air.
It wasn’t too wide—twenty feet or a little more—but she wasn’t Marion Jones. She would fall. She put her hands out, to try to break the impact or catch hold some way, but she was moving fast. She slammed into the granite wall on the other side with a sickening thud that I heard from ten paces away, a long whip of blood and broken teeth lashing away from her mouth and nose. But she hung on, clinging to the wall. I got there, totally winded.
“Where’s Nicole?” I called.
She half turned, and the sight was ghastly. She appeared to be wearing a red mask. Her entire face was slick with blood, and one of her eyes had come out of the socket. Bits of shattered teeth flecked her chin.
“Hold on!” I cried, hoarse with panic. I looked around for some way to reach her. Or for something to extend for her to grab on to. Unlike many of the canals that crisscrossed the city, which were stagnant, this was flowing fast, rushing the final fifty or so yards to the Merrimack.
Her grip failed, or she simply let go. She dropped ten feet and hit the water with a clumsy splash. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared. She may have been conscious, ready to struggle, but the current took her. She banged limply through the heavy, corroded timbers of the locks and was swept headfirst down a stone spillway, gathering speed as the water tore her toward the river. I lost sight of her.
Stinson’s shout drew me back.
“This one’s alive!”
He was crouched beside Duross. I limped back. “I’m calling for help,” he said. He got the walkie-talkie from Duross’s belt. I opened my mouth to instruct him, then shut up. Stinson had been a cop a lot more recently than I had. He activated the unit and said the right things—an officer down, a man dead, gave the locations …
“Tell them about Loftis, too,” I said.
He did. He never offered his own name, or mine. When he’d finished, we stayed beside Duross awhile. He was unconscious and bleeding, but breathing. He’d been smart enough to wear his vest. In the weeds nearby, Vanthan Sok was already drawing flies. Stinson had made an amazing shot, and it had saved my life.
“Have you got paper for the howitzer?” I asked him.
“Kind of not. I think I’d better get myself gone.”
We rose, both of us still adrenalized. “It’d be a good idea. Take my car. I’ll catch a ride with someone.”
He looked at me and tugged his black windbreaker down and pushed a hand through his hair, as if getting ready to meet his public. “Later, then.” He started off.
“Stinson,” I called. He turned. “Thanks.”
He tipped a finger to his head, in an old cowboy salute, I guess, and headed for the tunnel, walking fast. In another minute, in the distance came the whining of sirens. I looked around, a sudden hollow feeling overcoming the pain I’d begun to feel, and I remembered that I didn’t know what had happened to Nicole. Then a glint of light from the roof of one of the mill buildings gave me an idea.
Randy Nguyen was waiting as I opened the freight elevator and stepped into his world. “Holy smokes!” he exclaimed, waving excitedly at his bank of monitors. “What was that?”
It answered my first question, unasked. The old hosiery mill was one of the properties his company did security for. “You said these keep a taped record.”
“Yeah, three days.”
“The woman officer—”
“Jill Loftis. I checked her out in the PD files. There’s a story there.”
I cut him off. “I believe she brought someone with her.”
“Yeah, the hoodie with the shiny bang-bangs.”
“Earlier, back around three this morning.” My God, that was how many hours ago?
He instructed the system with voice commands. “It won’t take long,” he told me.
Fifteen minutes later we hacked a padlock off an old storage shed at the north end of the mill yard. Nicole squinted into the light and saw me and started grinning like a bridesmaid who’s just caught the bouquet. “I knew you’d find me,” she said, plunging into my arms, the feather weight of her nearly buckling my left leg. “I just knew it.”