Lisa Gardner - Catch Me

I didn’t think anymore, I moved. Crabbing around, trying desperately to find the top rung of the descending metal ladder in the dark. I banged my head against another set of metal rungs, the ones heading up, staggered back, and a meaty fist clamped onto my shoulder.

Stan thrust his massive head and shoulders through the window and held tight.

“Gotcha! Gonna make you hurt, girl. Gonna get my ax, gonna get my hammer, gonna get my knife. Gonna make you pay.”

Which was a funny thing for him to say, given that I was the one holding a gun. One small twist, and I had the barrel of my. 22 pressed against his temple.

Stan stilled. His eyes rounded. His mouth formed the proverbial O and he sucked in a breath, as I dug the barrel of my gun harder against his fat head. Big ol’ Stan had made a mistake. He’d grabbed me with his left hand, and given the width of his massive shoulders wedged through the narrow window frame, his right hand, the one holding his own gun, was trapped uselessly in the bedroom. He’d need to release me and bring his left shoulder back inside the apartment, in order to get his right arm through again.

Battles are won in the first two seconds, or in the final two minutes.

The fire escape swayed unsteadily, making me feel as if I were surfing on air. I smiled at Stan. I exhaled and watched my frosty breath mist in the cold night.

The scene felt exactly right.

Shoot. Pull the trigger. For Tomika and Michael and Mica.

For Stan’s hammer and his family’s fingers and their long, terrified nights.

I wanted to. I needed to.

For that little boy in Colorado, whom I still couldn’t forget. For all the crying kids, all the terrified women who called 911, except they had problems too big for any dispatch operator or patrol officer to help.

Pull the trigger.

Baby. Crying down the hall. I could hear her again, so close, so clear. Baby, in my mother’s house, crying down the hall.

Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of.

Sugar and spice and broken glass, I should’ve told the nurse. If only I’d told the nurse. Why hadn’t I told that nice nurse?

PULL THE TRIGGER!

Pull the fucking trigger!

But I couldn’t do it. I stared at Stan Miller, peered into the whites of his eyes, pressed my nickel-plated semiauto deeper and deeper into his temple…and I couldn’t do it. My hand shook too badly.

I pulled back my arm and pistol-whipped him instead.

Stan howled. Let go. Stumbled back through the window.

I bolted. Down the ancient fire escape, rusty metal rungs shaking, whole structure swaying from my rat-a-tat impact, as I half slid, half jumped from metal decking down to metal decking, desperate to hit the street five stories below.

Stan was gonna get his right arm out now. Stan was gonna hunt me down. And Stan would shoot a woman in cold blood.

I felt the fire escape groan again. Heard, more than saw, Stan squirm and heave and twist his considerable homicidal bulk onto the narrow fifth-story decking.

Faster, faster. Not much time now. Gotta move, move, move.

As the fire escape heaved, sighed, gave an ominous creak.

“Gonna get you, girl,” Stan bellowed from above. “Big Stan gonna run you down. What’d ya do to my family? Where’s my Tomika? Tell me now, girl. Talk, or I’ll shoot out your damn bitch brains.”

The first metal bolt attaching the fifth-story decking to the crumbling brick building went ping. Then the second, third, fourth.

Go, go, go I urged myself. No time to lose. Jack, racing the giant down the beanstalk. Run!

The whole fire escape swayed above me. Making the sharp corner two flights below, I knew the moment Stan figured out what was happening, because he dropped his gun. It went sailing by me, just missing my head. Stan didn’t need his pistol anymore. He’d grabbed for the railing instead.

Except that wouldn’t help him any. I knew, because I was the one who’d ratcheted loose all the bolts attaching the rickety fifth-story fire escape to the ancient bricks of the dilapidated building.

A precaution built into a precaution built into a precaution.

I’m only a hundred and five pounds. Too small to fight a giant like Stan. But lighter and faster to beat him down a collapsing fire escape.

The wobbly metal ladder was shaking beneath my feet now. Above me, I heard a terrible screech as the fifth story decking swung out into midair, then felt it, like a giant chain, start ripping the corresponding layers of decks and ladders from the side of the cheaply constructed housing unit. Ping. Ping. Ping.

Stan screamed.

Metal groaned. People inside the building began to yell at the unexpected commotion, while the ladder beneath my own feet suddenly lurched down and away. One story above street level. Wasn’t gonna make it.

I jumped, dropped, and rolled. To the side, away from the collapsing metal structure thundering down and across the street.

More screaming. More yelling. More groaning.

Stan Miller plunged five stories to the frozen pavement below.

Then the screaming stopped. Gritty sand and dirty snow ballooned up, settled back down.

I staggered to my feet, cleared my eyes, registered a pain in my ankle. Now was not the time. People pouring out. Residents of the unit who’d been immune to gunfire and screaming, but not this. No one, no how, had seen anything like this. They gathered on the street, yapping, dialing cell phones, shaking their heads, and then, when they spotted Stan’s hulking body, skewered on multiple shorn metal rungs, the first woman screeched in horror, before several more joined her.

I stared at the carnage, the twisted heap of wreckage, the blood pooling on the front of Stan’s shirt.

Then, I ran.

I didn’t look back. Not for the screaming women. Not for the growing cries, not for the startled exclamation from the lone kid who spotted my escape.

I ran and I ran and I ran, my body shaking uncontrollably.

Round the block, I paused long enough to grab my messenger bag from beneath a snowy bush. Then I was off and running again.

9:56 P.M.

Seventy hours left to live.

What would you have done?

BABY JACK WAS CRYING AGAIN. He was not a happy camper and he wanted everyone to feel his pain.

“He gets that from me,” D.D. said. It was 9 P.M. Jack had been crying off and on ever since she picked him up from day care, where apparently he’d spent a very fussy day. No temperature. No spitting up. But he scrunched his face and fisted his hands and churned his legs as if he were jogging a marathon.

So far, they’d given him droplets specially designed to relieve baby gas. Not particularly effective droplets, D.D. thought.

“We could call the pediatrician,” Alex said. He was sitting on the couch, while she attempted to soothe Jack in the rocking chair.

“And admit we don’t know what we’re doing?” D.D. said.

Alex regarded her strangely. “We don’t know what we’re doing. And we’re not the first new parents who harassed their doctors with middle-of-the-night questions. For heaven’s sake, that’s what they’re there for!”

Alex’s unexpected display of emotion finally caught D.D.’s attention. She took in his salt-and-pepper hair, currently standing on end. The dark shadows beneath his eyes. The gaunt lines of his face.

He looked like hell, a man who hadn’t slept in years. Did she look that bad? Come to think of it, Phil had clapped her on the shoulder four times today with clear sympathy. Suddenly, she got it.

“The baby’s winning!” D.D. burst out.

“That would seem a fair assessment of the situation,” Alex agreed tiredly.

“He’s only ten weeks old. How can he be beating us already?”