The Night Is Deep (A Liam Dempsey Thriller Book 2) (22 page)

“Owen!” Liam yelled, a dozen steps separating them.

A snarling crack filled the air and Davis’s head snapped to the side, his skull exploding in a spray of bone and brain matter. The bullet whined off the road beside Liam.

Owen looked up in a daze, still clutching the twitching corpse.

“What?” Liam heard him say.

Owen’s head rocked back as the second shot ripped through his left eye and out the back of his skull.

“No!” Liam yelled, managing to snag the collar of Owen’s shirt as he tipped backward. Liam knew he was dead before he began to drag him to the side of the street, but he did so anyway, the whole while keeping his eyes on the bridge, watching for movement. A shot ricocheted off the blacktop beside him, buzzing furiously away. He’d seen the muzzle flash. It was coming from the pilothouse built into the upper middle portion of the lift bridge. A door swung closed on the small building’s side as
The Mare
’s horn bleated again.

The entire middle section of the bridge began to rise.

Liam looked down at the ruined face of his friend. Gently, he laid Owen on his back, making sure he was completely on the sidewalk and out of the street. He rose, rivers of adrenaline flowing through his veins, sweat pouring from his skin in waves. He raced along the sidewalk while trying to stay out of the pilothouse’s line of sight in case the shooter was still inside. The bridge trundled up. A ten-foot gap between it and the road.

Twelve.

Fourteen.

Liam reached the restricted area where the bridge’s structure footing began. He crouched but continued moving until he reached a set of stairs. The stairs ran in switchback fashion within the outer frame of the bridge all the way to its top. Above him enormous chains rattled and a gargantuan counterweight composed of concrete descended.
The Mare
chugged ahead, nearly drawing even with the bridge.

Liam lunged forward and up the first set of stairs, his knee clipping a guardrail painfully. His feet clanged on the steel as he ascended, turning at each platform before rushing up the next stairway. The bridge and its walkway glided upward above him. He would have to get above it and then leap to it before it passed. It would be his only chance to get onto the bridge. Vertigo made grabs for him at each turn, the elevation increasing until the ground became a shrinking pinwheel below him.

Still he climbed.

The walkway was barely above his head.

Up another flight.

Directly beside him.

Another flight. He was above it.

Without thinking he swung himself over the side of the next platform, the steel railing so cold in his hand.

Then he was in a free fall. Iron girders flew past as the rising walkway barreled toward him, the wind howling in his ears. He landed with a force that jarred his teeth and sent lightning strikes of pain shooting through his feet and up his shins, detonating in his ribs. He rolled forward, the concrete biting into his shoulder as he flipped onto his feet and skidded to a stop.

Ahead, halfway across the rising bridge, a figure stood on the walkway. He was garbed in the same dark, bulky body armor as before. In his hands was a contraption composed of a spool and two handles. From its bottom a bulbous object protruded. Beneath the bridge,
The Mare
chugged through the channel slowly. When it was almost directly below them, the figure twisted the handles of the apparatus and the oblong object dropped free of its casing. Liam watched as it fell, connected to the device by a thin strand of cable. It banged loudly onto the deck of
The Mare
, skidding backward as the boat continued through the water.

As the opposite end neared the canvas bag, it leapt up, snapping together hard with the neodymium magnet. The man on the bridge twisted his hands again and a loud whirring came from the mechanism.

The bag of money rose off the boat’s deck and glided upward, the spool humming as it was reeled in.

“Stop!” Liam yelled, rushing forward, gun outstretched.

The man didn’t turn. Instead he produced a pistol from thin air and fired a shot down the walkway without taking his eyes off of the approaching bag.

The bullet buzzed past Liam’s shoulder and he dropped into a crouch, firing twice. Sparks flew from the handrail beside the figure as the canvas bag came into view. The man drew the bag over the side and in one deft movement, uncoupling the two magnets from one another. He dropped the reeling apparatus on the walkway, firing shots as he backpedaled. Liam rolled to the side, returning fire as the gunman turned and fled.

The center of the bridge lurched to a stop, well over a hundred feet above the canal. Somewhere in the distance sirens began to wail.

Liam regained his feet and ran after the figure who had reached the far end of the bridge. He fired another running shot that clipped the gunman’s right shoulder, making him stagger forward.

Without faltering, the figure leapt into open air toward the nearest bridge support platform.

He landed on its edge, colliding with a guardrail before flipping over it. Liam reached the end of the bridge just as the gunman swung over and hooked his hands and feet onto the sides of a steel ladder that ran the length of the structure. The man gazed up at him for a split second, eyes peering through two slits in the mask. Liam fired, cutting the air where the man’s head had been a moment before.

He stepped to the end of the walkway and looked down. The gunman had slid most of the hundred feet down in seconds using his gloves and boots as buffers against the friction of the ladder’s sides.

“Dammit,” he swore before taking a step back and launching himself across the gap. He landed solidly but the hand that grasped the rail slipped free as if it had been doused in oil.

Liam teetered above the hundred feet between him and the canal, stomach slopping with the surety of death.

As he began to tip backward into nothing, he snagged the rail again, this time his fingers holding fast. He dragged himself to safety, not giving in to the weakness that buffeted his legs. There would be time later to consider how close he had come to dying.

He threw a look over the side of the platform and caught movement below. The gunman had jumped the last ten feet to the street on the Park Point side, the bag still clutched in one hand. Liam spun away and sped down the steps. How many flights until he reached the bottom? How much time would he lose? A thought dawned on him then, Perring’s words coming back to him from their first visit to the peninsula. There was nowhere to go. The bridge was no longer a viable route onto or off the island the killer had created.

He had played them, right from the beginning until now. The concerto of violence as well as the false exchange for Valerie’s life had been brilliantly composed. But now he had trapped himself in the process, and Liam would make him pay for the mistake.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Dizziness buzzed in the top of his skull and he tried to control his breathing as he came closer and closer to the bottom, throwing looks over the railings whenever he came to a vantage that gave him a view of where the killer had dropped. When he was thirty feet above the street, the rough howl of a small engine met his ears and he stopped, peering over the platform.

A compact dirt bike shot out from a small side street beside the bridge, the man garbed in black astride it. He swung a right and raced away toward the far end of the island. Liam cursed again and rushed down the last flights as a sickening realization hit him like a hammer to the stomach.

There was an airport at the end of the point.

He was going to fly away.

Liam leapt down the last flight of stairs and hopped the guardrail beside the street. The long road stretched away from him, the fading form on the bike growing smaller and smaller with each second. The neighborhood was quiet, sidewalks empty. Nothing moved. Liam glanced to his left, seeing that only one vehicle had gotten “bridged,” as Perring had put it, when the lift went up. It was a small truck, possibly a Ford Courier, with fender wells rusted so high he could see the engine behind the front wheels. A teenager with rampant acne stared out at him, first at his face, then at the gun in his hand. Liam ran to the driver’s door and yanked it open.

“D-d-don’t kill me!” the kid said, hands up and eyes bulging behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

“Get out,” Liam said. The kid slowly unbuckled himself as if at any moment Liam would change his mind and put a bullet through him right there in the middle of the street.

Liam leapt into the driver’s seat, dropping his gun in his lap, and threw the truck into reverse. He made a quick turn and hammered the rattling truck into first gear, rear wheels screaming beneath the rotted bed. The window was a crank and after two revolutions the glass lodged and wouldn’t go down any farther. With a yell of frustration, Liam jammed his elbow into the gap and shoved as hard as he could. Something clunked inside the door and the window dropped out of sight. In the distance he heard the teenager screech a curse.

The bike was already out of sight around the first bend in the road, but Liam poured on the speed, shoving the gas pedal to the floor each time he switched gears. Houses flew by, parked cars tight to the curbs became blurs of color. He glanced down at the speedometer but wasn’t surprised that it was broken, the needle pinned at zero.

“Couldn’t have been a beamer,” he muttered, slamming the shifter into the highest gear. The engine rose to a vibrating scream beneath the hood and steam began to pour from beneath the wheel wells. He took a sharp bend hard, rubber shrieking against blacktop. Ahead the dirt bike came into view, rounding a corner and out of sight again. Liam gripped the Sig in his left hand and punched the clutch, tagging the brake with his other foot as he skidded around the bend. When the bike came into sight again it was much closer, and the killer threw a look over one shoulder as Liam brought the gun out the window and pulled the trigger.

The shot was deafening and the bike wobbled. The figure hunched lower, pouring on speed again as he leaned into a curve.

Ahead the land widened, the trees expertly placed in yards and surrounding properties vanishing. Superior became visible on either side, large swaths of sand running from its edge up to the street and a parking lot set before a chain-link fence. Sodium arc lights were lit high above several low buildings behind a gate that was open a few feet. Beyond, the outlines of planes stood dormant and dark, like scattered and forgotten playthings of some giant child. The single brake light on the bike flared for an instant then went dark as the killer raced forward through the narrow opening in the gate.

“Ah shit,” Liam said resignedly as he punched the gas and braced himself.

The Ford slammed into the gate.

Metal shrieked and glass peppered his face and arms as he closed his eyes. When he opened them, the truck had whipped sideways, the gate conformed to the front end as if it had been welded there. He jammed the brake pedal down and the vehicle shuddered to a stop, inches before the sidewall of the closest building. Liam shook himself, sending glass cascading to the floor from the shattered windshield, and wrenched his door open.

The tarmac was cool and wet with patches of oil between cracks in the concrete teeming with quack grass. He stepped behind the truck’s bed in time to see the bike and its rider coast around the side of a large hangar and out of sight.

Liam rounded the quiet vehicle and ran as fast as he could past the building on his left, the windows lit but without movement behind them. He swung left into a broad alley between what appeared to be a maintenance building and a tall hangar. Besides the sound of his breathing and footsteps, there was only silence. A wind sock snapped atop a pole as he came even with the end of the hangar and he drew a bead on it out of instinct before running on. The sound of sirens still keened behind him, but much fainter now so far away from the bridge. He sprinted down another narrow passage between two lower hangars and paused at the end. Trying to quiet his breathing and hammering heart, he leaned out, one eye peeking from behind the hangar’s corner.

The dirt bike lay on its side a dozen yards away before a small, streamlined single-engine plane. The aircraft’s closest door was open and the gunman hung half-in, half-out of the fuselage. He turned suddenly back toward the path he had taken around the largest hangar, seemed to listen for a beat, but there was no sound beside the wind caressing the beach beyond the airport fences. The gunman focused again on his task.

Liam stepped out from behind the hangar and made his way silently across the space separating them.

Forty feet.

Thirty.

Twenty.

He stopped, raising his pistol, and the killer stiffened, straightening in the doorway.

“Why’d you do it, Valerie? Why’d you kill Owen?” Liam said.

The figure turned slowly, head cocked to one side, and took a step forward away from the shadow thrown by the plane’s wing. One gloved hand reached up and shoved the mask away, revealing the angular lines and blond hair framing Valerie Farrow’s somber face.

“I thought my warning would mean something to you, Liam, being that I was threatening the life of your friend’s wife.”

“It did mean something. It meant I was getting closer to the truth.”

“You don’t have even the slightest perception of the truth. When did you realize it was me?”

“The moment Owen took Davis’s hood off on the bridge.”

“Then the guise worked pretty well, even against you,” Valerie said, unzipping the coat she wore. Liam aimed down the barrel of his pistol and took a step forward, but she merely let the coat fall to the ground with a heavy clunk. She stood tall and straight, wearing only a dark, long-sleeved T-shirt above the bulk of her armored pants. “You gave me quite a few bruises the other day at Rowe’s house. Even with the armor, bullets still hurt. But that’s true of everything, isn’t it? No matter how well we guard ourselves, something always manages to get through and cause damage.”