He lifted the weapon. I pulled as tight into myself as possible. Heard muttered cursing. I peeked around the cart in time to see him banging the gun against the wall, then pulling the trigger. Still nothing.
A jam.
“FUCKING CHEAP-ASS SHIT!” he roared, throwing the weapon to the floor. “FUCKING JEW GUN!”
“STOP!” Harry yelled. He stepped out into the hall, his gun aimed, hands quivering, unable to do anything with the baby tight to the man’s chest.
The guy’s wild eyes turned to Harry. “Oh, wouldn’t you just know it,” he said, almost to himself. I stood from behind the cart, my weapon double-gripped.
“It’s over,” I said. “Set the kid aside and you get to live.”
For a moment, the guy seemed to retreat inside himself. For a couple of seconds the madness in his eyes was overtaken by sadness. He seemed, in that moment, almost sane, almost human.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“Come on, partner,” Harry said, taking a step down the hall. “Put the kid on the floor now, and you end the day breathing. Whatever’s bothering you, we can get it fixed.”
“No,” he said. “Nothing fixes what I got.”
The guy crouched lower and kept Noelle before him like a shield. He snuck a glance at the window behind him. Five stories up. He studied the window again and started giggling, like he’d had a great thought.
“Oh Jesus,” Harry whispered, “not the window.”
The man pulled Noelle even tighter. He looked behind him again, gauging the steps to the glass.
“Let’s see if your goddamn mutant can fly.”
“NO!” Harry yelled. “DON’T DO IT!”
The guy yelled “EIGHTY-EIGHT!” then spun and launched himself at the center of the window, a screaming baby beneath his tattooed arm. We froze in horror as the scene unfurled in slow motion: the laugh, the spin, the lunge toward the center of the glass…
The dull thump as the man bounced backwards to the floor, scrambling on the white tiles. He recovered instantly, wrapping his hands around the kid’s throat, lifting her in front of him, half of the madman’s grinning face hidden behind the child.
Harry squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 13
Dr Lee Hsiung, professor emeritus of Biology, University of Hong Kong, creaked in his office chair. Hsiung’s walls were a photo gallery of the professor with preeminent scientists from around the world. Highlighted was a black-and-white photograph of a young Hsiung receiving a hand-shake and a plaque from Francis Crick. Beside it was a photo of an older Hsiung beside Dr Kurt Matthias. Hsiung was smiling, Matthias, dour and distracted.
Hsiung leaned forward, smiling at his visitor. “Markets are everywhere in Hong Kong, Dr Matthias. They’re a potent stew of humanity.”
Matthias sat on an ornate teak and silk couch, briefcase at his side.
“That was what I was looking for, Dr Hsiung,” Matthias said. “A potent stew.”
“I don’t recall you as interested in travel, Doctor. You were always a man of the laboratory. It was a big event when you’d leave the US for a symposium. Of course, given your reputation, the world’s geneticists came to you. May I ask why you’ve become such a seasoned traveler?”
Matthias waved the question away. “New projects, new horizons. I have, in the past few years, become very interested in fieldwork.”
Hsiung lifted an eyebrow. “The past eight years, perhaps?”
Matthias’s eyes turned dark. “Something like that.”
Hsiung shook his head. “Your views were not much accepted, old friend.”
“Not accepted?” Matthias’s eyes tightened to slits. “My views were misread. Spat on. Misused by the most disgusting creatures. A moronic Afrocentric politician in New York used his opposition to me to run for Congress. He won.”
“You never managed to elucidate your –”
Matthias’s hand slapped the desk in anger. He stood and walked to the window, silently watching a hundred students walking the commons below.
“I don’t explain myself to the gibbering masses. Certainly not to liberal spearthrowers, self-appointed centurions of political correctness. Damn them all.”
“You were vilified, Kurt,” Professor Hsiung said quietly. “I’ve not beheld such an uproar since The Bell Curve.”
“What does not kill us makes us stronger, Lee.”
Hsiung reached in his desk and produced a stack of computer readouts, the research Matthias had asked for. Hsiung studied his visitor with sad eyes.
“Yes, Dr Matthias. I would expect you to say something like that.”
The kid was gone; the screaming, terrified child had been handed off to Doc Norlin, summoned as soon as we kicked the weapon away from the abductor’s hands. We figured he was dead – Harry had aimed as far from Noelle as he could, tagging the perp on the outside rim of his eye socket. The slug had taken the inside track, removing a handful of head meat as it exited the rear of the skull at the end of its brief but potent visit.
People had started arriving. Hospital security. EMTs. Terrified staffers peeking around the corner before moving in our direction. Harry and I were still catching our breath. I stepped over the body to the window. Looked down five stories to the parking lot.
“He ran at the window like a rabid gazelle,” I said. “Dove into it full force. What happened?”
Harry tapped the pane with the muzzle of his .40. It didn’t tick like glass but thonked.
“Hurricane glass,” a security guard behind me said. “In all the windows. You might as well try to jump through steel plate.”
Forensics arrived to process the scene. Harry put uniforms to work taking statements. Before the upper-departmental types arrived for our own statements, Harry and I hustled to the paediatrics unit where Doc Norlin had just returned from the kid’s body scan and was getting her re-hooked to the various tubes and monitors.
“How is she?” Harry asked.
“Outside of abrasions and contusions, she appears unharmed, thank God. Not a bone out of place. I’m about to have the blood work updated, but she seems fine.”
Harry let loose a sigh that sounded like a dam breaking. He leaned against the wall for support. The doc started drawing blood for work-ups and we returned to the murder scene. The air smelled like a shooting range. We found the guard who had been furiously trying to save his colleague’s life. It had been, as suspected, futile. The guy, young, dressed in a blue uniform, looked beat down, eyes red, knees unsteady. The body had been collected but the floor was bright with blood.
“What happened?” Harry asked, leading the shaky guard to a chair at the nurses’ station. I found a coffee machine, brought him a cup.
The guard wiped his eyes, sucked down half the coffee. “Homer was in the monitoring station, watching the six cams. I was up from the first floor, on break, asking if Homer wanted to go bass fishing next Saturday. He said ‘Hold on,’ ’cause he spotted some guy in a suit creeping down the hall, a backpack in one hand, a parcel in the other. Homer called for the guy to stop. The guy turned and shot with a pistol. Homer shot back. Then the guy pulled something heavyweight out of his pack, turned and fired a burst.” The guard nodded at the glass, the pocked walls. “Everything fell apart.”
“Can we see the security footage from the camera upstairs? The one at the end of the hall?”
“The roof-door unit? Sure.”
We followed him to the security station. He dialed up the camera in question, racked the recording to just before the event, started it forward. We watched the door open at the end of the hall. The abductor approached, running. He’d slung the backpack over a large shoulder, holding Noelle cradled down his forearm like a football. The lens had a fish-eye configuration, giving the psychologically warped scene a visual warp as well, a funhouse mirror at a psychotic carnival. He started to go beneath the camera – entering the door to the roof – but looked up and saw the device. He backed up and stared directly into the lens. His face was distorted, not by the lens, but by a defect or injury, a lopsided face that probably scared the hell out of kids.