Deadly Interest (45 page)

“
Look,” I said, my voice
barely audible. I pointed to another door, immediately above the
end of the ladder, just after “twelve,” the top floor doors. “Where
does that lead?”

She and I moved faster as David made a
telltale whump below. He’d hoisted himself onto the car’s roof, and
would surely be on his feet in a moment.

Maya’s face told me she didn’t know.

“
Go,” I said.

She did.

I watched her grab the set-in handle and
thrust forward with all her might, the hatch opening with rusty,
shrill shrieks. She toppled outward. I didn’t know where, but I
couldn’t wait to get there.

Seconds later, I followed, just as I heard
David’s feet hit the first rungs.

He called to us, but I jumped out the small
doorway, I found myself hit by a cold wind outside on the
building’s roof and a warm flush of relief for getting out of that
shaft. Maya and I spun, shutting the door behind us. There was no
lock on the outside.

I searched the flat area for something big
to use as a brace, but there was nothing.

The city surrounded us, taller on every
side. I had a wild hope that someone looking out their tall
apartment window would see us and call the police. But these
weren’t apartment buildings; these were offices. And I couldn’t
imagine anyone working this late on a Sunday night.

I tried to think.

The door we held was set into a square
rooftop structure, about six feet high, and the same dimensions on
each of its sides. It was an extension of the shaft below.
Stretching slightly, I could see four other similar structures in
places that matched up with the three other elevators below, plus
one extra. That meant that there must be other doors leading back
down. If only we could keep him here long enough for an escape.

“
Hold tight,” I said. I
ran around to where I’d detected a shadow that didn’t ‘fit.’ Bingo.
A piece of machinery—I was unsure what it was—stood against one of
the nearby walls. It looked like a steel construction horse, but
much heavier.

Wind whipped hair into my face, sent icy
stings into my eyes. I dragged the metal horse, using every bit of
untapped energy I didn’t know I had. Every step felt like an hour,
and as I drew nearer to Maya, pushing hard against the door, I felt
as though I was being pulled further away. I grunted with the
effort, finally coming around the rear, and pushing it into
place.

We shoved it tight, wedging it as best we
could, making it harder for him to break through. We needed time to
find a way out.

“
Shh,” I said, holding my
finger to my lips. I pressed my ear against the cold metal door,
the iciness against the tender skin making me grimace. I
listened.

I couldn’t hear him coming. I heard nothing
at all.

Maya listened, too. We stared at each other,
faces inches apart, the steam from our breath curling upward toward
the night sky. Nothing.

“
Come on,” I said,
grabbing Maya, throwing one last hopeful look at the barricade we’d
set up. “We gotta go.”

I made my way to the closest shaft
structure, feeling my way around it in the dark, in search of the
access door. Much is said about big city lights, but here, up on
the twelfth-floor roof of a building dwarfed by neighboring
superstructures, there was only the light from the sliver of moon
above and leftover Chicago brightness from tall metal and glass
walls. The sides of these upper shaft things were painted black,
the door black, too, so I relied on my touch to find the
opening.

We’d only been up here for minutes—three,
maybe five at most—but my fingers already felt the paralysis of
chill. “Go check that other one,” I said, in a whisper. Maya raced
around me to the third shaft and set to work. I didn’t want to
crawl through another shaft, but I knew now I could do it if we had
to.

Moments later I heard her frustrated cry of
effort. “I . . . can’t . . . get . . . it.”

Neither could I.

I tried squeezing my frozen fingertips into
the narrow door indentation, running along the length of the
perimeter by touch, trying to find some place where the door would
give. Flat-handed I covered the door itself in a concentric-circle
search, knowing there had to be some knob, or other device capable
of providing access. “Damn,” I said, pounding my angry fist against
the metal panel. I glanced to my left; our barricade on the other
shaft remained in place.

Something was wrong.

I moved back to the metal horse, leaned
against the cold metal wall again. I heard nothing. No movement up
the ladder, no sound of exertion from inside.

I knew.

“
Maya,” I
shouted.

She was next to me in a second. “He’s not
coming up this way.” I pointed toward the door that had given us
roof access. My gaze swept the area. Four additional structures.
Two wouldn’t open for us. That left two more.

“
Come on,” I
said.

Maya’s teeth chattered; she hugged herself,
knees bending up and down to keep warm. “Where is he?”

I shook my head.

“
We’ll go down the way we
came,” I said, starting to drag the horse barricade back, away from
the door. I had a moment’s terror thinking that he might just be
waiting behind the metal door for us to open it. But I’d gotten to
know the man. He waited for no one. He was on his way up here, from
some other direction.

Together we pulled the heavy piece of
machinery, moving it as fast as we could. So much easier with both
of us handling it, we heaved it just far enough to give us clear
access to the hatch. We wrenched at the squeaking metal door, and
the hairs on the back of my neck zinged to attention.

I couldn’t climb back into a shaft. I
couldn’t.

I had to.

“
Go ahead,” I said,
keeping a shivering arm on the open door, lifting my head from our
efforts, intending to keep a terse eye on the remaining empty areas
of the roof. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“
No you won’t,” David
said.

I whirled.

He’d come up from behind me, and now pointed
the gun at Maya, who’d just begun to lower her right foot behind
her. “Get back up here.”

David’s eyes reflected the lights around us
with an angry glitter. There were yellow streaks of firefighting
chemicals on his clothes and in patches across his face. Grimacing,
he blinked repeatedly, inching fingers under his glasses, to rub at
his eyes, one at a time, never shifting his stare from us. I looked
around the lonely expanse. How had he gotten here? As if in answer
to my unasked question, he lifted his chin, tilted it sideways; I
glanced that way. He’d come through the spare access door that led
up from the stairway.

With the visceral impact of a body blow, the
realization hit me that I had nothing left with which to fight.

“
Did you really kill a
man, Alex?” David shook his head, as though in appreciation. “You
promised to tell me all about it. You promised me a ride on the
Ferris wheel too.” He sighed. “I’m very disappointed.”

He was backlit by the thousands of pinpoint
lights from nearby buildings, the crisp night wind lifting the
short tufts of his hair. In another situation, I could have been
enjoying the view, and the feel of freedom up here. Another
flashback, this one of his mustache grazing the side of my face as
we gazed outward over the lake at Navy Pier. This time when my body
shuddered, it shook with disgust.

Maya stood close to me, we stared together
at the barrel of the weapon that seemed uncertain as to whom to
kill first. My chin trembled from the cold and from fear; David
words taking me back to the moment I’d pushed a man into the path
of an oncoming train.

“
You’re not going to be
able to kill me,” he said with a curious lightness to his tone.
“I’m indestructible.”

I didn’t have anything to say.

“
But there’s no other way
out, is there?”

I shook my head, tried to keep my legs from
giving out. The image of Owen’s head taking the point-blank shot
ricocheted through my mind and I saw my own head, a bullet in its
center, jerking back with the impact of my last life experience. I
tried to speak, cleared my throat, and tried again. “What now?”

He smiled. “Back downstairs.” He wiped at
his nose, and coughed. “This way ladies,” he said, stepping
backward as though to allow us passage in front of him and
indicating our direction with the gun. We didn’t move.

“
I am sorry about this,
Alex,” he said. The wind whipped his words from his lips, but I
heard them.

In an instant I saw how it would go down.
He’d kill me, then Maya, and somehow make it look like some tragic
murder-suicide. George would know better. George would put it
together.

But that gave me little comfort. I’d still
be dead.

Desperation clawed through my paralysis of
fear—and took over.

I couldn’t stop myself. I leapt at David,
swiping the glasses from his face with my left hand and scratching
at his eyes with my right. The gun went off with a loud, powerful
blast that made me clamp my teeth together in pained
anticipation.

Though it took a split-second, time
decelerated for me. My body went through a quick checklist of pain
sensors even as I kicked and strove to deliver brutal blows—my
single goal, to grab the gun.

I hadn’t been hit.

But Maya had.

She fell backward—I was aware of her long
nails grasping at David, trying to help me. Now they pulled away
almost elegantly as gravity drew her body downward. I didn’t know
where she’d been hit. I couldn’t take the time to find out. Fight
or flight had kicked in, my instincts taken over by some wild
animal within. The part of myself that remained human, begged me to
stop fighting, to try to help her—futile an effort as that may
be.

Instead, I set into him with nothing more
than blind, deaf, determination. I felt nothing, I heard nothing.
The world had taken on a high-pitched wail that might have been
coming from my soul. I attacked. Moving, writhing, biting,
kicking—aware of nothing more than staying alive.

He twisted, turned, dragging me with him,
then bumped into the open metal door, causing him to stumble, his
grip on me to loosen.

The sound of the gun clanking to the rooftop
floor near my foot was what finally broke into my screaming.
David’s voice, repeating my name as he struggled to subdue my
flailing extremities, sounded like an echo from far away. He
couldn’t stop me because he didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t
know what I was doing. Sheer impulse urged me to drive hard against
his bulk with the shaft yawning behind him.

Imbalance. His.

I sensed it as he tottered at the brink of
the opening.

One more push.

I backed up a half step and then rammed my
shoulder into his chest.

His arms flailed, his back jutted into the
darkness behind him, but at the very last second his hands caught
the sides of the door—suspending him there, his breath panting in
labored grunts. I could almost see the rage gather in his chest as
he dragged himself forward, bellowing, deep with effort. His
knuckles whitened, he hauled himself up, about to stand.

I twisted, reaching down, and whisked the
revolver from the ground, knowing this was the moment of decision.
In the half-second it took to right myself, and steady the gun with
both hands, I knew I was ready. With a deep hatred in my heart I’d
never encountered before, I squeezed that trigger. Hard.

Light and sound burst forward in the night,
as I felt the impact from a recoil I hadn’t anticipated.

As though meant only for me to hear, over
the din of screams and exploding gunpowder, the bullet made a quiet
chunk into the meat of David’s flesh. I opened my eyes long enough
to watch the soles of his feet tumble away.

“
Maya?” I dropped the
weapon to lean over her body, lying prone—face-up where she’d
fallen. I tapped my fingers along the side of her cheek, trying to
determine, in the dark, where she’d taken the hit. Faint curls of
breath wisped out of her mouth and nose at regular intervals. Thank
God. She was still alive.

She’d fallen close to the shaft structure.
In its shadow, with her wearing dark clothing, and my mind still
processing David’s attack, I had a difficult time finding the site
of the bullet’s entry. I didn’t want to move her, but neither did I
want to leave her alone, if there was anything I could do to keep
her alive.

I needed to get help.

Pulling my jacket off, I used it as a
blanket, to cover her till I got back. “It doesn’t look bad at
all,” I lied, still not seeing where she’d taken the bullet.
“You’re going to be fine,” I added, then headed back down the
shaft.

Facing fears makes them go away.

I’d heard that enough times, seen enough
reality shows, and read enough psychobabble to believe there might
be some truth in that, but I hadn’t ever seen the need to test the
theory myself.

Now, as I made my way down the ladder, I
found that my elevator shaft nightmare had less power to intimidate
me. The fear of the unknown, the strange ominous feel I’d always
had not knowing what loomed above, didn’t paralyze me. I was at the
top. I was here. And there was nothing but me and the sense that
I’d made it.

I processed all this even as I made my
careful way down the same ladder we’d climbed only short minutes
ago. David’s body had hit the top of the car below me, and he lay
on his back, arms and legs spread like a fully-clothed version of
the DaVinci depiction of man in a pentacle except for the tilt
where his left thigh had impaled itself on an upright piece of
metal. My stomach gave a queasy pitch at the sight; I breathed out
my mouth and turned away.