A girl. Hutch could not know if she was the one he had seen in the Hummer. In fact, the group that had pursued him could be only a small contingent of a much larger force.Why hadn’t he considered that before? Wouldn’t it take more than the half dozen people he’d encountered to take over a town? No, he rationalized, not with the cannonthing they had at their disposal.
Hutch assessed the situation. Someone with a gun was about to burst through a door they were standing beside. There was no way to block it. They couldn’t run across the parking lot because doing so would expose them to Declan and his weapon. The only thing he could think of . . .
“Around the corner,” he said. “Go!”
But before anyone moved, the door banged open. The Hummer girl leaped through the opening. She landed in a crouch.The pistol in her hand seemed bigger than her head, both of which—the pistol and her head—were pointing toward the second rear exit, away from Hutch and the others. Pivoting at the hips, she swung her outstretched arm and the pistol in an arc that would eventually reach them.
The woman—Dillon’s mother—rushed past Hutch. He reached for her, but she was gone. She hit the girl in a full-body tackle that knocked them both off the concrete pad and into the dirt. The pistol pinwheeled into the parking lot, its nickel plating sparkling in the moonlight.
Hutch reached out and grabbed the door before it could swing shut again. He glanced in, down a long corridor. Empty . . . for now. He closed the door until it was opened only enough to accommodate his fingers.
The two women rolled toward the gun.Terry shot out, scooped it up. He backpedaled away from the tumbling fighters. He pointed the pistol, trying to keep it aimed at the girl.
“Terry!” Hutch called. Hutch shook his head no. It would be too easy for Terry to shoot the wrong person, and even if he could hit the girl, Hutch wasn’t so sure they wanted to. She was with killers, a part of them; she had been shooting at the woman and her son. No doubt she was troubled and possibly evil. But she was so young. He could not fathom killing a person that age and ever being able to look at his own reflection again. If he had seen her kill, then maybe. But he hadn’t. Not yet.
Something rolled out of the girl’s hand: a grenade!
“Terry!” Hutch yelled. Then he recognized the object as a gray walkie-talkie. His heart came out of his throat—but only a little.The communication device could prove as devastating as a grenade. Had she used it before exiting the building? Were the men even now converging on their location? Was Declan positioning his cannon on them at that moment?
The girl’s small, tight fists hammered at the woman.They pounded against her face, her neck, her ribs.The woman gave it right back. She swung wide, roundhouse punches at the girl’s head. Her knee rammed into the teen’s hip and upper thigh. Again and again.
27
Dillon did not need to see his mother fighting this girl. Hutch turned the boy in his arms away from the sight.
“Terry,” he said. He inclined his head at the combatants. “Do something.”
Terry approached them as hesitantly as he would have a stick of sweating dynamite.
Hutch backed into the corridor. He saw a wedge of wood on the floor—the doorstop he suspected they used to keep the place from getting stuffy and to allow entry from the back parking lot.
“You okay to walk?” he asked Dillon. He set him down and glanced out at the ongoing fight. Then he slipped the wedge between the door and the jamb as the door closed on it. He guided Dillon along the corridor. The woman had said she thought the girl and the boy she’d knocked unconscious were the only ones left in the building, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way she was wrong. He whispered, “What’s up this way, do you know?”
“An office . . . the room we were locked in . . .”
All the doors along the corridor were set into the right-hand wall. Hutch assumed the other wall separated the corridor from the big gymnasium-type room he believed was this building’s raison d’être. He walked with Dillon to the first door and peered in. It was a break room with kitchen counters and cabinets, a refrigerator, microwave, sink, and one long table surrounded by plastic chairs. Hutch hoped to find where the killers had stashed the items confiscated from the townsfolk—satellite phones, weapons. Evidently, that place was somewhere else. He wondered if they would have time to check each room before Declan’s gang returned.
“The next room is where they kept us,” Dillon said.
“Let’s get the others before we go on.”
They took a step toward the rear door when an explosion knocked them off their feet. Hutch was momentarily disoriented. A chorus of voices came to him—an indistinct mumble punctuated by screams. He got to his hands and knees and shook the echoing blast out of his head.The voices were coming through the wall: Hutch suddenly realized why this building was Declan’s headquarters and where all the townsfolk had gone.
The boy was sitting flat on his rump, legs splayed out in front of him. He was wiping dust out of his eyes.
“You okay?” Hutch asked.
Dillon nodded, blinking. His eyes found a stunning sight that dropped his jaw.
Hutch followed his gaze toward the back door. Through smoke and dust that hung in the air like sediment in a pond, he could see the steel door had been punched inward and knocked out of alignment with its frame.The walls around it were cracked and bulged.The floor directly in front of the door had risen four inches like a tectonic plate. Linoleum squares had been jarred loose and sat askew. Several tiles had been blown twenty feet into the corridor.
Declan had evidently bombed the area just outside the door, where Terry had been attempting to break up the fight between the girl and Dillon’s mother.
“Mom!” Dillon screamed. He scrambled to get up, already starting to cry. “Mommy!”
Hutch grabbed him and forced him back down. Locking eyes with him, he said, “Stay here.”
He rose and ran to the door. Dillon came up right behind him. He pushed on the door. It didn’t budge. Finding a gap, he gripped the door and pulled. It had been wedged in place, pushed back by the explosion. It was as solid as the brick wall defining the building’s perimeter. Where the door bulged, a gap of about eight inches allowed Hutch to look out on the destruction. A giant bite had been taken out of the concrete slab’s outside edge. The rest of it had crumbled into gravel. The epicenter of the crater lay just beyond the pad. Hutch could not see the bottom of it—either because it was too deep or because the swirling witch’s brew of smoke obscured it.
“Terry!” he yelled through the gap. His voice cracked on the second syllable.“Ter—” he tried again, but it came out a quiet plea.When he and Dillon had entered the building less than a minute ago, he—they—had been right there. He could not see how anyone could have survived.
Terry’s voice reached him. “Hutch!”
“Terry.”
Terry appeared from out of the darkness.The moonlight had seemed so bright when they were keeping clear of it; but now that his eyes had grown accustomed to the glare of fluorescents, everything outside looked dark, with no difference between shadow and moonlit night.
Hutch laughed. “How—”
“The girl . . . her walkie-talkie squawked something. I didn’t hear what. She broke away from the woman and ran.We were chasing her when . . . this happened.” He held his hands open to the crater.
Dillon’s mother appeared beside Terry. Her cheek was bruised; an open laceration on her forehead glistened.
Hutch laughed, despite everything.
“Wait, wait.” He backed away from the gap and pushed Dillon up to it.
“Mommy,” the boy called, elation making both syllables sound like musical notes.
She called his name, and a moment later her face and fingers appeared in the gap. He leaned close, letting her touch his cheek.
“Baby, are you okay?” she asked.
He nodded enthusiastically. Her fingers tightened on the edge of the door, becoming white. Hutch cou
ld tell she was trying to move it.
“It’s wedged in there tight,” he said.
She looked past Dillon to Hutch. “Go around to the other rear door. It’s like a big horseshoe. On the other side of the auditorium, through the vestibule.”
Hutch grabbed Dillon’s arm.
Dillon gripped the edge of the door with one hand and reached out to his mother with the other.
“Mom,” he said quietly, sadly.
“Do it, honey. I’ll be right here.”
Hutch called past them.“Terry! Stay with—” He found the woman’s eyes. “I don’t know your name,” he said.
“Laura.”
“I’m Hutch.”
“Take care of my boy, Hutch.”
“Absolutely.Terry!”
“Yeah?” Just a voice beyond the door.
“Stay with Laura. If we don’t meet you at the other back door in a few minutes, find Phil.”
“Got it!”
“And get back in the shadows!”
Hutch pulled Dillon back a step.
“Mom—”
“I love you.”
She disappeared from the gap, and Hutch gave her credit for that, for temporarily breaking away from her son in hopes of a permanent reunion. He wasn’t sure under similar circumstances whether he’d be able to take his eyes off his children even for a few moments.
“Come on. Let’s go see her.” They began to half run toward the front of the building. There they would cross through the vestibule, then down the opposite corridor.
Noises issued from the front of the building. Hutch and Dillon stopped.Voices, angry, excited.
A female voice—the girl: “You couldn’t have known I was clear!”
“I saw you run. I warned you.”
“Yeah, ‘Fire in the hole’!”
The voices were getting louder, clearer. They were headed for the corridor. Hutch pushed Dillon into the break room. He looked around, moved to the cabinets under the countertop. He opened doors: cans of coffee, coffee filters, glassware, silverware, napkins, paper plates, plastic cups. In a large double-doored cabinet he found two huge coffee urns. The cabinet contained no shelves because of the size of the urns stored within. He hefted them out and lined them against the wall. He hoped no one noticed. He held his finger to his lips, then helped Dillon climb in.
“Let me have that thing and see how you like it!” In the hall now, echoing, loud. “Look what you did to the door!”
Hutch had no time to consider the practicality of his joining the boy in the cabinet. He leaned in to set his bow against its back wall. Dillon held it in place. Hutch bent low, swung in his left leg so it was on the far side of the kid. He pushed his rump into the cabinet. He ducked his head, got it inside, then positioned his right leg on the other side of Dillon. He reached out to shut the doors.
His back was against the right-hand side of the cabinet. Dillon’s back was against the left side. They faced each other, though Dillon could sit somewhat normally, and Hutch had to slouch and press his face into his shoulder.
The binoculars, held by harness to his chest, pushed painfully on his chin. He unclipped them and set them near the bow.
A thread of light defined the cabinet doors: a big rectangle and a vertical line right up the center. Hutch tried to remember if he had turned the light on when he first inspected the break room.The memory was gone now. Didn’t matter. He thought these punks would not subscribe to a system of either energy conservation or headquarter security so meticulous that they would know or care about such things.
The voices grew louder, not because they were drawing nearer, but in excitement.
“Hey! Hey!” Declan said, genuine anger in his voice.
“I told you.”
By the thin threads of light, Dillon must have read Hutch’s expression; he whispered in the smallest of voices, “They found the boy. Mom knocked him out.”
Hutch nodded awkwardly, his head nearly horizontal. Feet came down the corridor quickly and into the break room. A cupboard door opened and closed, fast. Then another, closer to their position. Another, closer.
Hutch braced himself to jump out. Dillon would probably suffer a good kick in the process, but he didn’t see any way to prevent it. He believed the person in the break room was searching for something, but not for them. When the door opened, the person would be bent to look into the cabinet. His or her face would be close. Hutch imagined swinging his arm out of the opening and then immediately up for as solid of a head shot as he could summon. He would then propel himself out of the cupboard, pushing with his foot off the back wall. He would go for the knees, grabbing both and bringing the person down. In a perfect universe he would cup his hand over the mouth before it cried out. He’d swing for a KO in the first round. But in a perfect universe, he wouldn’t have had to.
Another cupboard door: open, shut.Very close now.
The rustling of plastic packaging, and instantly Hutch got an image of the napkins he had seen.That’s what they’d been after. More steps, right past their hiding place, and a faucet turned on, then off. The steps went toward the door, paused, returned. More doors opened and closed, but this time the sounds emanated from higher up—the overcounter cabinets.The clatter of dishes, metal pans.The water came on again, filling a basin. The feet left the room more slowly. Hutch knew the person was carrying a pot or bowl of water and a handful of napkins. He remembered Laura saying, The boy’s okay.
He dared to whisper, “Was he bleeding, the boy?”
Dillon nodded and drew a line with his finger across his forehead.
Had to be Julian, he decided. The only one of the bunch who had not exhibited outright hostile behavior, at least toward him.
Dillon said, “He was nice to me.”
Yeah, Hutch thought, Julian.Wouldn’t you know. He had always told his kids, “Gotta watch who you hang with.” Julian should have watched. He didn’t seem like the kind of boy who had set out to find trouble, but trouble certainly had found him. They were taking care of him in the other room. He hoped they did a good job.
He smiled at Dillon. The boy had sad eyes. Hutch couldn’t tell whether it was because they were big and almond shaped or because they had ample reason to be sad. Blue sparkles came from them as Dillon watched the man charged with his care. Hutch ached for what the boy should have been doing at that moment instead—tossing a ball to his dog, wrestling with his dad, taking a bath, for crying out loud. Anything but hiding from people intent on killing him. A cut ran from just under his right eye to near the corner of his mouth. Fresh, not yet scabbed over. Its edges were red, sore.
Dillon returned a thin-lipped smile. Hutch could tell the boy’s mouth wanted to bend upward, probably from habit. It must have been a balm to his parents’ spirits on tough days.
Julian had been nice to him. Their age difference did not seem so great that Hutch couldn’t imagine the two playing together, instead of being kidnapper and victim. It was as though hell had vented nauseous fumes, skewing the way things ought to be and creating humandemons like Declan and his gang.
Despite recently chiding himself for assuming that the six people he had first seen in the Hummer were all he had to worry about, he now believed that was an accurate assessment. He had seen Declan, Bad, and Kyrill out front. Oh, and that camera guy—Pruitt, he remembered. The girl had been inside and had chased Laura and Dillon. Julian, he now knew, had been unconscious.When he first entered the building with Dillon, he had believed it to be empty of bad guys.There had been no voices, nobody running around—and considering the excitement of Declan’s attack on them, including an explosion that had rocked this building, he believed there would have been.
Loud moans came from way outside the break room. They were too deep to come from Julian. The same voice said, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Someone else said, “Stop wiggling around, you baby.”
A third voice added, “Just faint already. I’m about to, looking at it.”
Satisfac
tion pushed Hutch’s lips into a different kind of smile from the one had offered Dillon. They had finally gotten around to bringing in Bad. The gang’s all here, he thought. And that meant they weren’t still out there, chasing Terry, Phil, and Laura. A phrase his father used to say came to mind, but it wasn’t quite right, so he changed it and thought, Thank God for really, really big favors.
He rolled his head to rest it on the other shoulder. He already felt a cramp in his neck. He hoped he would be able to move when he finally departed the cabinet.
He didn’t know what they would do with Bad and didn’t care. As long as they didn’t stretch him out on the break room table and use this room as a makeshift hospital.
He smiled at Dillon. He wanted to give the boy a pleasant expression or a kind word. Then he realized he was asleep. He himself was beat, having awoken this morning at four to hunt. He envied the child’s ability to sleep in the midst of chaos.
Before long, he, too, was fast asleep.
28
When the other rear door had not opened after twenty minutes, Laura’s panic felt as explosive and destructive as Declan’s weapon.
“Hutch would never let anything happen to him,”Terry said.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t, if he could help it. Neither would Dillon’s father, and he’s gone. Dead.” The top of her chest grew tight and cold, as though her heart were pumping Freon instead of blood. She cupped her hands over her face, but not to hide tears she would not yet let loose. She stared into the darkness of her hands and thought of her husband. She pushed the thought away. She remembered the hours she and Dillon had spent in the storage room, the fear and desperation. She pushed it away. She thought of her son. His smile, his eyes that always appeared trusting and loving. She recalled his voice: “tiny,”Tom had called it.To her, it sounded like sunshine in a cloudless sky. Even his slight lisp was perfect, like rounding the edges of a fresh-cut plank. His tongue just got in the way, and she found it adorable.