Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“Go, Bill.” Susan pushed at me. “You’ve got to stop Cline.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

MALONE WAS AHEAD of me. He turned the corner of a closed and silent bank and a gunshot clapped overhead; the concrete corner of an ornate pillar just by his face exploded, forcing him back. We ran into each other, then pressed against the wall. I saw movement to my side and noticed a couple who had been out for a late-night walk cowering between two cars, their big spotted dog twisting and tugging on a leash, terrified. Malone rushed forward into the alley between the streets, but when I looked back to find Nick, who I thought was following us, he was nowhere to be seen. Cline rose from behind a dumpster at the end of the alley, fired off a couple of shots, and sprinted into the dark.

“Nick’s not with us!” I grabbed Malone’s arm. “I have to go back.”

“He’ll be fine!” Malone dragged me forward. “We’ve got to get this bastard off the street!”

We ran across the road, causing a car to slam on its brakes, the hood halting inches from my knees, the headlights blinding. In a courtyard, the water in a large square fountain set into the pavement was so still that Malone didn’t see it; he sprinted in, tripped, and splashed to the other side. We crouched against a post as bullets popped into a low garden wall beside me.

Across the courtyard, Cline and Squid met, two frantic silhouettes against the reflective glass of an office building.

Cline turned, and for a moment I thought it was his reflection that stepped out and raised the gun and pumped Squid’s frail, lean frame full of bullets. But it was a bigger, stronger man, a shape I recognized, gunning the kid down with the precise motions of a machine. Nick didn’t even seem to see Cline, who shot out the glass door beside him and ran into the dark. Nick looked down at his victim, then up at me as I ran to his side.

“Jesus,” he said. His eyes were wild, flicking between realities, over Squid’s body and then to the gun in his hand. “I killed him. I killed a kid.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

NICK DROPPED HIS weapon and gripped his head, trying to blink away whatever he was seeing. He flinched at a noise or a movement that wasn’t there, grabbed his weapon, and pushed it into my hands.

“I can’t … I can’t … I can’t do this. Is … is this real? Did I—”

“He’s dead.” Malone had his fingers against Squid’s motionless carotid. He looked at me. “Cline’s alone. This is our chance.”

“I can’t come with you.” Nick backed away from me. “I’m sorry, Bill. I don’t know what’s … I just shot a kid! Christ!”

I thought about going with Nick. But Malone had run through the automatic doors beside me. One friend was facing Cline alone, and the other was facing his nightmares. I stuffed Nick’s pistol down the back of my jeans and ran into the dark building.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

IT WAS AN unfinished office building of some sort, belonged to a big corporation. Expensive chrome and marble, light fixtures hanging from their housings, and transparent plastic sheets draped over furniture. Malone was covering the elevators, where a bloody smear on the up button was as stark as a brushstroke of black ink against the white wall. A ruse. Cline wouldn’t wait for the elevator. He wouldn’t put himself in a box with only one way in and one way out no matter how fast it moved away from where his enemies were. Malone crept to the stairs and I followed. In the eerie green light of an exit sign hanging over the fire door, he pointed to a nickel-size drop of blood on the floor.

Time circling, looping back. I remembered days earlier, before Marni, before Doc, before I really knew what darkness had come into my life, Nick and I breaching Winley Minnow’s house together. Malone and I going through apartment buildings like this, floor by floor, a hundred or a thousand times across the years. My brothers in arms. It had been a mistake for Cline to think he could come back to our city and best us. We knew this place. Even if we’d been thrown out as guardians of these streets, these buildings, we had never put down our shields.

Floor by floor, we followed the dark spots in the deep green light, a blood trail Susan had started when she grazed Cline’s temple and ear with her shot. She was with us as we followed, round and round, floor by floor, chasing the wolf up the stairs.

We were sweating as we reached the seventeenth floor, panting, every muscle ticking with tension. Only minutes had passed, but I felt like I’d followed Cline out of the depths of hell and up to the surface of the earth. We couldn’t let him get out among the people again. He was our curse to contain.

Malone stopped me at the eighteenth floor, his eyes searching the ground for the spots, finding nothing. The hand that pressed against my chest felt strangely cold. Malone was so thin I could see the tendons in his neck and shoulder moving as he worked his jaw. He dried his hand on his jeans and tested the door handle—it was wet with Cline’s sweat. Malone stepped back, and I kicked the fire door open from the side.

Gunshots ripped through the door as it swung, showering me in splinters. Malone fired into the dark and I threw myself into the room, rolled, fired wildly as Malone came in with me. I felt like Cline had fired from the north end of the huge room, but I couldn’t be sure. The space before me, outlined against the city lights, was a complicated maze of cubicles with desks and chairs and more furniture shrouded in plastic wrap.

All was silent save for the ringing in my ears and the whistling of the night wind through bullet holes in the distant windows.

Then Cline spoke.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

“ROBINSON!” HE ROARED my name, the word trailing off into an exhausted, angry laugh. “You should have just moved!”

I locked eyes with Malone. He was huddled behind a desk across a short aisle. In the ticking seconds, my heightened senses registered strange, disconnected details. People had started to move into the office, even though it wasn’t finished. There was a pink afghan draped over a chair beside my partner. A framed photo on a desk. I saw a panel of lights on the wall, thought about turning them on. I knew I couldn’t trust what the reflections against the huge windows would reveal of me to Cline. Malone signaled, and we started moving slowly and silently toward where the voice was coming from.

“Why didn’t you leave town if you didn’t like what I was doing?” Cline shouted. “You stupid prick. You dug in. Now look at you. You’re drowning, boy. When the big bad storm rolls in, you head for the hills. Don’t you know that, you dumb fuck!”

I didn’t want to let Cline know where I was, but I couldn’t help myself. “You’re the one who better run, Cline!” I shouted. “This ends here!”

Predictably, my voice was met with a hail of bullets. I crouched between the desks and fired, caught a flash of Cline by the windows, a streak of shadow. I waited until the shooting stopped, then crawled on my hands and knees toward the last place I’d seen the man. I could see the icy white lights of Fenway Park in the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“I’m not scared of you, Robinson.” Cline laughed. I could hear him reloading his gun again. “You’re a good man. You’re a protector. You got caught up in that bullshit with your partner only because you thought you were protecting some girl.”

Malone’s sharp breath came from quite close to me. He was working his way along the ground in the next aisle of cubicles. Our eyes met, and I saw the pain in his face through the darkness.

“You’re not going to hunt me down like this. You’ll walk away and let me go. You know what you are, Robinson. You’re not a killer.”