Max Collins - Before the Dawn

The owner of the lovely face punched him in the side of the head and he lay back, out cold.

“You say somethin’?” Jackson asked.

When he got no answer, Jackson straightened, eyes tightening, finally interested enough to turn and look. But all he saw was Max’s boots as she flew over the top of the car with martial-arts grace and dropkicked him in the face. Jackson toppled over, spitting bloody teeth like seeds, then tried to rise, clenching what was left of his smile... and Max decked him with a short left.

Rain drummed on the tin overhead.

Back when the Needle had been a family-fun destination, three elevators had been in service here, and though Max didn’t plan on taking one, she did want to know whether or not the things were up and running. If Sterling used the Needle as a regular drop point for his dirty deals, it didn’t even seem like a stretch to her that the art collector might arrange having power supplied to the building that only his people knew how to activate.

Max stepped through a broken-out window in the gift shop and surveyed the store; the only sound she was making came from the moisture dripping off her leather. Access to the power had to be on this floor somewhere. Dust blanketed the floor and the counter, too; she could make out where the cash register had been before it had been ripped out.

She paused, listened intently, heard nothing... and crept forward.

To the left, a doorway led to a hallway off of which were the three elevators. That hall curved back, and out of sight, so Max decided to start here. Behind the counter, another opening led to a back room. Again listening carefully, and still hearing nothing, she edged into the room — pitch-black... even Max had trouble seeing. After slowly scanning for any other doors, the X5 backed out into the relative light of the empty store, illuminated completely, now and then, by lightning.

Max got to one side of the store door and peered down the elevator hallway, saw nothing. Moving forward, she could make out the elevators on her right. She also could see the lighted-up floor indicator, above the elevator doors — they were working.

The nearest car was up on the observation deck, the other two were here at ground level. The left side of the hall had once been the glass wall of the pavilion, but now was mostly just metal framing and random shards. Six feet beyond the last elevator door, another doorway beckoned, this one with a small shaft of light shining out of it.

She slipped across the open space, peeked in... and saw one of Sterling’s men inside the small room.

A naked lightbulb, hanging like electric fruit, provided the only light. Several large circuit boxes lined one wall and Sterling’s stooge sat on a folding chair against the other wall, reading a sports magazine with a bikinied woman on the cover. This guy she hadn’t encountered before, a redhead with a wide chest and a sharply angular face; he wore a zippered brown jacket and darker brown slacks.

Stepping in quickly, she said, “Can I see that when you’re through with it?”

He looked up in blank confusion and she hit him with a right, a left, and another right. The magazine slipped from his hand and he and the chair tumbled; she caught them, setting both man and chair down gently, avoiding the clatter. She considered using the coil of rope on her belt to tie the guy up; but decided it might be put to a better use later on, and secured his hands behind him with his belt.

Taking the elevator up would tip them that she was coming.

She would just have to climb the stairs to the tower, where an evil prince and assorted vile advisers of his would surely await.

Around the corner from the elevators, Max came to a door marked STAIRWAY; it had been padlocked, but now the lock lay broken, a plucked metal flower on the detritus-strewn floor. This seemed recent work, not the ancient mischief of vandals.

She opened the door cautiously, and looked inside, up the well of stairs winding their way into darkness that swallowed them; the pounding rain echoed down like a disorganized drum and bugle corps. On the stairs themselves, however, she could easily see a pattern of wet footprints.

Seemed Max was not the only tourist who’d come to the Space Needle tonight...

Gazing up into the blackness, with the drumming of rain hiding any footsteps, she had no way to tell whether the person who’d taken these stairs was half a flight ahead of her, or already long since at the top...

As the storm flailed away outside, Max viewed her five-hundred-foot climb as a chance, at least, to dry out for a while. Her hair hung to her shoulders in wet clumps, those clothes of hers that weren’t leather were soaked, and if she hadn’t had her special gifts, she would have been freezing; all Max experienced, however, was a slight chill. As silently as possible, clinging to the outside wall of the narrow staircase (following the example of those wet footsteps), Max started her ascent.

One hundred and sixty steps later, not winded in the least, she entered a banquet room that had suffered less vandalism than the main floor, the benefit of being one hundred feet up from ground level. The lights of the city were muted by the slashing storm, but her catlike vision allowed her to take in these surroundings...

The room held more tables than Max cared to count, many overturned, some still covered with white tablecloths, others covered instead with a thickness of dust. Purple chairs were scattered everywhere and any smaller items — china, silverware, water glasses, even table lamps — seemed, for the most part, long gone. The windows at this level had survived better, some but not all knocked out, normally allowing in a tiny amount of light — though tonight that meager illumination was confined to strange shadows dancing wildly in the downpour.

Listening carefully for any sign of that intruder who’d preceded her, Max heard nothing... only howling wind and hammering rain.

She still had a very long way to go to the top, but resisted the urge to rush, even with her superior stamina, she did not want to risk wearing herself out — after all, she could not be sure what battle awaited her at the Needle’s point, and needed to be as fresh as possible after so rigorous a climb. Wasting her energy getting there could prove tactical suicide, and her next opportunity to rest would be in the sky-view restaurant, four hundred feet above her. Between here and there, it was just her and the stairs...

... and, perhaps, the other “tourist” who had come up this way ahead of her.

As she continued her ascent, she considered: the only estimate she could make about what awaited her upstairs came from the size of the vehicles — the Lexus could hold six, the Hummer maybe a couple more than that. So, that was what? Fourteen guys, at the most... and she’d already dispatched three.

That left a potential army of eleven for her to face, assuming one of them was the person on the stairs, ahead of her. If the other stair-climber was an interloper, like herself — with an agenda as yet unknown — there could be a dozen guys... a dozen guns... waiting for her.

Before she’d started this climb, the floor indicator on the lobby level had shown the elevator stopping at the observation deck; in this weather, she wondered if the art-for-cash exchange might not have reconvened to the restaurant floor. So she prepared herself for what might await beyond the door...

... but only silence and more dust and darkness greeted her. Apparently, rain and wind or not, the deal was going down where all had agreed it would — perhaps only out in the relative open, even in a storm, could these untrustworthy men trust each other.