Gregg Hurwitz: The Tower

With a click of the button, he lowered the elevator platform to roof level, then pushed the big drum onto it. He walked back and kicked the guard once in the side as hard as he could. The guard gasped as he rolled onto the platform, his head clanging against the drum.

Jade still inched up the ladder, rung by rung, ignoring the pain through his cramped arms. He had to make it. He had to get his hands on Allander, but he was still a good twenty yards away.

Allander pushed the red button and the platform started to descend into the Hole. They'd done an admirable job of repairing the elevator, he thought with a snicker.

Claude watched the bomb and the wheezing guard descend past him, his expression unchanged. He scratched himself, then looked up at Allander with unfrightened interest. The guard's rasps echoed inside the Tower, bouncing off the hard stone walls.

The platform clicked to a halt when it hit Level One. Now it was all set. Once he was a safe distance away, Allander would call in with the cell phone in his pocket, and the current would trip the primer, which would trip the dynamite. With the diesel drum containing the initial explosion, the whole thing would go. The shock wave should blast the walls right off the Tower. And Claude and the guard along with them.

A squeal rose in his throat, and he ran back to the edge, looking down at Jade.

"The dance ends here, Marlow!" he shouted. "We bring this show to a close upon the same stage on which it began." He screamed his words to be heard over the crash of the waves. "There are three things I have on you right now, Marlow," he yelled. "Just three."

Jade looked up at him, but couldn't muster the strength to speak.

"A bomb… a detonator"-Allander held his arms up to the moon, the cell phone glinting in his hand-"and your gun." He pulled out the Glock and waved it in the air.

Jade clenched his eyes until he saw white dots dancing across the darkness. Of course. Blasting caps and dynamite to blow out the rock from the cranes back at Maingate. Fuel from the water pump. The fertilizer scattered by the stairs back at the house. A Timothy McVeigh special. How could he have missed it?

They had practically given Allander all the pieces of the bomb right here. Right at the prison.

He glanced down and saw the speedboat knocking against the base of the Tower. Allander could dive in, swim to the boat, and dial in to detonate once he was a safe distance away. And Jade was too weak to do anything but watch him.

Allander stepped from the parapet to the top rung of the ladder, fanning his arms to balance himself. "I am Allander Atlasia!" he yelled. He lowered the pistol so it was pointing at Jade's forehead, taking a long, last look into Jade's eyes. "Hope you said your prayers."

A wave of terror flooded Jade's body for the first time since he had begun the case. Allander was going to shoot Jade and escape. He'd be free, leaving nothing behind but a watery blast. Jade looked up into the bore of the pistol, tightening his hands around the steel railings until his biceps felt as if they were going to burst. Shoving with his legs and arms, he jerked back on the loose ladder with all his might. It shifted, rolling under Allander's feet.

Allander screamed, his arms flailing madly. The pistol fired once up into the air, kicking from his grasp and falling away. He tottered on the rung, trying desperately to throw his weight back toward the Tower. When he'd resigned himself to the fall, a calm washed over him. He tapped the bulge of the cell phone in his pocket, smiled, and leaned forward in a dive.

Jade roared as the body flew toward him, Allander's eyes open, a serene smile curling his lips. Jade could tell he would pass inches out of his reach from the ladder and would land in the water mere yards from the boat.

Seeing Allander escape was too much agony for Jade to bear, and before he was aware of what he was doing, he had wedged his leg against the stone behind a steel rung and had pushed his torso away from the Tower.

Allander's eyes went wild with fear as he saw the impossibly outstretched arms and clutching fingers shoot at him as he neared. He let out a high-pitched scream as Jade caught him, his fingers grasping Allander's shirt and pants. Jade's torso was extended horizontally from the Tower wall, his leg the only thing keeping him from dropping to death by water below.

Jade held Allander weightlessly for a moment, savoring the feel of the fabric between his fingers. Then, as the force of Allander's fall pulled them downward, Jade tightened his leg with all his might and rotated both their bodies around the point of his wedged knee. Bellowing, he let Allander's momentum carry him down and into the stone wall.

Allander's face met the stone of the Tower and came apart instantly, his nose driven back through its hole, his cheekbones shattering, his forehead giving way to the cracking lines of his skull.

The moment Allander's face struck the Tower, Jade's leg snapped. He heard it before he felt it, heard it even over the dull thud of Allander's head imploding, and the pain was unlike anything he had ever felt. He released his grip on Allander's body and it drifted away from him, down to the ocean.

For a moment, the ocean buoyed Allander on its breast, his shirt flapping in the wind like a wounded bird. A pool of crimson flowered from his head. Then, with excruciating slowness, the body sank from view until, from his upside-down perch near the top of the Tower, Jade could no longer discern where its outline ended and the ocean began. Dangling from one grotesquely bent limb, he watched even the body's wake disappear into the swells.

He was suddenly struck with an overwhelming exhaustion that left him too weak to consider moving. He prayed that his leg would not give way entirely. Every time his body swayed in the wet wind, a pain beyond description tightened its grasp on his insides.

He hung from one thin steel rung for over ten minutes before, through the thick haze clouding his mind, he heard the chopping approach of a helicopter.

Darby woke up alone in bed for one of the first times in thirty-eight years. She instinctively turned to her left to extend her arm across Thomas's chest before she remembered he wasn't there.

She rose from her bed with the routinized motions of a woman living alone, and pulled on a robe. She went to the kitchen, put coffee on, and called the hospital, just as she had done every day this week.

"Good morning, love. How are you feeling?"

Thomas's voice was not quite right. It would never be right again, never the voice that had wooed her and carried her in sickness and in health. But that seemed a small price to pay to have her husband alive, so she buried her sorrow beneath her gratitude.

His larynx had been severely injured, and it had taken a delicate surgery to get him to the point where he could speak at all. But he had remained optimistic all the way through, reassuring her with his eyes when he couldn't with his words.

"Oh, great. Or should I say, stable?" Thomas laughed a dry, croaking laugh. "Just three more weeks in, love."

Darby smiled. "And one more operation."

Thomas tried to laugh, but it came out a dull wheeze. "Oh yeah. Nose job, right?"

Darby laughed softly and tears moistened her eyes. "I'm leaving in five."

"Okay. I love you."

Her voice cracked and she struggled to keep it from shaking. "I love you too."

She hung up and sat on the couch in the living room, sipping her coffee. The very couch where they had met Jade time and time again, she realized, where he had helped them in his own guarded way.

She had come to care greatly for Jade. She had come to respect him and almost love him. She knew that some part of her emotions had to do with his role in protecting them, and some part had to do with her son. Though she didn't understand, entirely, her feelings for Jade, she sensed them, as if through a fog that wouldn't lift. It saddened her that they would never see Jade again. There was too much there for her, too much there for them. He had freed them, finally and painfully, from a lifelong ache, but she could never forgive him for it.