SIX

“STAY inside, Clare!” Quinn shouted as he flew out the front door.

I ignored the command. If someone was hurt, I wanted to help, so I pushed through right behind him—and stopped dead.

After a chilly morning in a shuttered coffeehouse, I was blinded by the dazzling poststorm sunshine. Before my eyes could adjust, a powerful tug yanked me to the sidewalk.

“You should have stayed inside.” Quinn’s tone was not gentle.

I blinked away stars, to focus on the very large gun in his hands.

Quinn was down on one knee, crouched inside the Village Blend’s recessed doorway. I was tucked behind him, squashed against the door.

“What do you see?”

Quinn didn’t answer. He was too busy calling out a string of police codes into his smartphone. So I peeked above the broad shoulder of my human shield, at the scene on the street.

At first I saw only pedestrians, cowering behind parked cars, a trash can, even a mailbox.

Vehicular traffic flowed rush-hour normal along all four lanes of Hudson. But on the side street next to the Village Blend, a delivery van blocked traffic. The driver’s side door hung open, and the driver himself was taking cover in a doorway, just like me.

In front of that van, a figure in an NYPD jacket was sprawled on the pavement. I could see red pooling around him.

“It’s Sully,” Quinn hissed, his white-knuckle grip tightening on his weapon.

Oh, God . . . I tried to rise higher for a better view, but Quinn dragged me down.

“The sniper is still out there.” His hard gaze remained on the high windows and rooftops around us.

“Sully’s hurt. He’s bleeding,” I rasped. “We have to do something!”

“I’ve called for backup, Clare, paramedics and SWAT. And if the shooter gives his position away, I’ll take him out.”

I could hear a siren. Police? An ambulance? Whatever it was, it seemed very far away.

Then someone cried out, and we instantly saw the reason: a young woman in a rose pink jogging suit was exiting a building. Eyes fixed on her smartphone, earphones muting the shouted warnings, she blithely walked into the line of fire. Even worse, when the jogger finally noticed the bleeding cop lying in the street, she froze like a mouse at last spotting the cobra.

“She’s going to get killed—”

Quinn instinctively moved out of the doorway, and a bullet immediately shattered our front window frame beside his head. As he threw himself backward again, splinters peppered us both.

The shot snapped the jogger out of her paralysis. The young woman turned and ran back to her building at a speed that would do any Olympian proud.

An easy target, I thought, so why didn’t the sniper pull the trigger?

I flashed on the newspaper headline, and knew the answer.

Because this shooter’s one and only goal is to target cops!

I glanced at Sully. The man hadn’t budged, but there was more blood pooling on the concrete.

That’s when I made the decision. Praying I’d jumped to the right conclusion, I told Mike—

“Don’t move. You’re the target. Not me.”

Then I ran into the street.