Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

With the detonation of the ordnance, he believed Hope’s chances greatly diminished. With the compound now under attack, any extra baggage would be dealt with quickly. He might have believed her already dead had it not been for the second message from the BlackBerry:

MM, 3rd Fl.

Meriden Manor, Third Floor. It had arrived just before the first explosions. It at least gave him faint hope that she’d escaped or had bought herself time.

“Firefly!” he heard from behind him.

Two black-clad SWAT operatives converged on Larson from behind. One took the horse’s reins from him. The other, wielding a semiautomatic rifle, continued sweeping the surroundings, forward and back in constant motion.

“As far away as possible,” Larson instructed, “as quickly as you can.”

“Copy that.”

He reached up and touched Penny’s small hand. “You’re doing great,” he said.

“But where’s Mommy?” she said. The two kids had held up amazingly well, Penny a leader throughout.

“I’m gonna go get her,” Larson said.

The SWAT guy took off at a jog, leading the horse. The kids hung on.

Larson turned back down the trail, and started to run.

LaMoia waited at the estate’s back gate, waited for the driver of the Navigator to climb out and unlock it. He waited for the exact moment the man inserted the key into the padlock and twisted. Waited for the lock to pop open and the man to remove it and the chain from the gate.

Then he stepped out of shadow and calmly announced, “Police.”

The driver jerked from the surprise and reached for a weapon. From just over three feet away, LaMoia squeezed the trigger and blew the man’s kneecap away. As the driver spun around, screamed, and fell to the ground, LaMoia saw someone inside lunge from the backseat up into the driver’s seat. He could have fired on the man, but until a gun came out either window, he had a better option.

Instead, he counted silently in his head-singing, actually-to exercise the proper patience. Right when the man slipped in behind the wheel, LaMoia fired repeated rounds directly at the car’s front bumper. One, two, three, four… With the fifth round, he hit the G spot and the front airbags deployed, inflating and snapping the driver’s head and body back into the seat like a sixteen-ounce glove on the fist of Muhammad Ali.

He strode forward then, the gun trained right into the face of the would-be driver, ready to send the first person who twitched to his Maker.

He tore the driver’s door open, not seeing the woman in the far back until the interior lights came on. That one needed medical attention. He might drive her himself-the Navigator was a nice ride.

He recognized the man behind the wheel as Ricardo Romero. He’d been doing his homework.

“Sorry,” LaMoia said. “Road closed.”

Larson had no craving to run headlong into a firefight, but he accepted it as a necessary evil as he chugged uphill with a pronounced limp.

He reached a gridlock of confusion as a stable of black vehicles battled for position. One car backed up onto the grass and shot off in twin rooster tails of mud. Another followed. Both came within a matter of feet of Larson, nearly running him over, yet no one bothered with him. Perhaps no one saw him. Perhaps he wasn’t there. Maybe he’d died beneath the double-wide and was now living out a final fantasy that was nowhere but in his head.

Rotem had orchestrated quite the show. To look at it, to hear it, one would think a hundred agents had stormed the compound, when Larson knew it had to be many, many fewer. Lacking any organized defense, shots were returned sporadically, with many of the estate’s guards already apparently AWOL.

Amid this hellfire, Larson made directly for the mansion’s front door. Once inside, he left behind what looked, smelled, and sounded like a small war and entered a world of opulence and grandeur. In their seclusion within this estate, the Romeros and others had spared little expense.

He glimpsed himself in the entranceway’s oversize, gilded mirror, wondering at the walking horror there, and turning away from it. He didn’t recognize himself. His sleeves and pant legs shredded, blood darkening even the black windbreaker he wore, Larson entered the grand staircase and climbed, his legs dragging, barely willing to cooperate, unmoved by the desperation that drove him.

He marched toward the third floor, another man’s gun in hand.

The lack of electricity was no doubt Rotem’s doing. Close to the manor house now, several percussive stun grenades exploded, rattling windows and shaking the foundation. Designed to throw shock waves meant to rupture sinuses and puncture eardrums inside enclosed spaces, the use of the grenades outside, where they were less effective but impressive as pyrotechnics, smacked of Hampton and Stubblefield and his squad’s methods of overwhelming a fugitive prior to a final strike.

The harsh white light from those flares burned through windows and lit the upstairs hallways. He climbed beneath the ostentation of a dozen portraits of jowly old men looking proudly officious with their golf clubs.

In the distance now, the first whine of approaching sirens. Backup. A stupid tactic, given Hope’s captivity. The sirens would panic Hope’s captors and shorten her life considerably. If she wasn’t dead already.

The man held her in a one-armed necklock, swinging first toward the room’s windows and then the door, back and forth like a drunken dancer.

It sounded like Normandy Beach out there.

His words muddled, he spoke aloud for the sake of hearing himself reason. “All this time of wanting you dead for what it is you claim to know…” A half minute or so passed before he completed the thought. “… and here you are, more valuable to me alive.”

She knew better than to try to speak, for each time she opened her mouth he cinched down harder on her windpipe and drove her toward unconsciousness. In these brief few minutes under siege, Hope had come to understand that she would not die the overpowered victim. Though overpowered, she playacted now, offering no physical resistance while she searched for opportunity, the tendrils of her training as a protected witness creeping back into her consciousness. Elbows. The heels of her feet. The opponent’s groin. His windpipe. She’d been told it took less than twenty pounds of upward pressure to tear a human ear away from the head, to grip it by the lobe and work it like a stuck zipper. Flooded with such thoughts, her mind had reached an uneasy calm, where time and sound and action seemed to slow, and during which time confidence grew in her. She had come this far on her own.

You shouldn’t have let me live , she thought.

Her moment came sooner than she’d expected, and when it arrived she knew it, she saw it as a gift, and she had no intention of allowing it to pass. It came as a one-two punch. First, a blinding flash, much more vivid, more present than what had come before. A ball of light so bright it flooded the room in a bluish tint that went beyond pure white. This was followed, nearly instantaneously, by a concussive sound wave that found its way deep inside her bones while shattering two of the windows and cracking the third. Glass rained down, sounding like a waiter’s misfortune. Hope rocked forward, using her bottom as a fulcrum, and then snapped to attention, catching the man’s jaw with the crown of her skull. She spun to her right, away from the elbow that clamped down on her throat and broke the viselike grip, never hesitating for a moment as she sped to the first of the shattered windows and paused only long enough to clear the jagged mouth of broken glass that rimmed the now-lopsided frame. She went out through that window like a hurdler, one leg stretched before the other, bent over toward her extended thigh like a diver, three stories up and falling, arms flailing now as she saw the two Dumpsters slightly to her left and realized she’d misjudged and chosen the wrong window. But no matter, she was free of him, in freefall, hands out swirling like a teenager leaping from a high rock into the pristine lake below. Her lake was asphalt, and her landing, horrific.