Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(88)

It was nearly done. In an hour, we would have the Beacon, answers, and—shortly thereafter—peace. It was about time.

For a long while, nothing stirred in the warehouse, and some of my excitement began to drain away as I put all my effort into keeping still. When a door somewhere finally creaked open, it did so loudly, clumsily, and with it came the sound of conversation and a bark of laughter. They were either very confident or out of their depth.

I rolled slowly onto my stomach, feeling the slight sway of the catwalk as I shifted, staring through the welded footplates to the little pool of bluish light below. I recognized Fevel, the black man who had chased me the night I was taken to Willinghouse’s place, and two others whose faces I couldn’t see from above.

It was those two who were carrying the crate. When they set it down, Fevel sat on it, as if to prove his nonchalance, and lit a cigar. I saw the yellow flare of his match, and the tiny red glow as he drew on it. My mouth was dry. Fevel had sentenced me to die in the tower and was prepared to finish the job when I’d survived.

I felt the weight of the loaded revolver in my satchel, as I watched him from above like a perching eagle. He was no more than fifty or sixty feet away, and after a few moments, I could smell the smoke from his cigar, but I was invisible to him in the shadows of the roof. I thought of the Lani myth of the angel of death, who swoops unseen to carry off the departed, then of Gritt, the devil-man the Mahweni called Tchanka. Would he make an appearance tonight? It would be tidy if he did, and would make his conviction easier, but I had no desire to see him. The man’s reputation had worked itself into the dark places of my head.

I thought of the tap of the cane between the footsteps in the fog the night Billy had died. Had that been him, or Morlak? I was as sure as I could be that it hadn’t been Mnenga, and that was a bigger relief than I had expected.

On the warehouse floor, the big Mahweni had a shotgun, which he cracked and checked. Fevel produced a pistol and toyed with it. The other boys had crowbars and knives, and they fidgeted with them, putting on a show of strength they didn’t quite believe.

The Westsiders arrived five minutes later, led by Deveril himself, complete with his feathered top hat. He had another four with him, big men armed with rifles and boat hooks. They looked to be Lani, and they moved with the splayed, rolling gait of men used to being onboard ship. Fevel and the boys instinctively clustered, outgunned and outmanned in every sense of the term.

Up there in the roof, I could feel the tension, the menace, as if it were drifting up to me on the cigar smoke.

The Westsiders spread out, creating a wide circle around Fevel and the box, but the conversation, when it started, was so low that I couldn’t catch what was said. One of them threw a bag of coins to the floor at Fevel’s feet, but he did not move from his seat, waiting instead for one of the boys to stoop to it, check it, and pronounce it acceptable. It was only when the boy tipped his face up to speak that I realized who it was.

Tanish.

I gasped and began, against all reason, all judgment, to get to my feet. A sudden hollowness gripped my stomach, and my chest and throat tightened, as if some great vise were crushing the air from my body. I hadn’t thought they would involve him in this, hadn’t thought they trusted him. He had probably asked for the job to prove his loyalty.

Stupid, I thought. Both of us. I should have seen this coming.

And in that instant, I caught a flicker of movement, not down on the warehouse floor but from the observation booth in the roof. Someone had raised the blind carefully, and I could see two figures working by the light of a dim oil lamp: two uniformed figures and a piece of equipment with a hopper and a long, hefty barrel like a sawn log.

I stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, catching the chink of metal as one of the men in the booth upended a bag into the hopper and the other took hold of a pair of handles, so that he sat like a mantis, aiming the barrel down in the warehouse.

It can’t be.

I had never seen one before, but I recognized the machine gun for what it was moments before it opened up with a blaze of flame and a stream of deafening bangs.

I leapt to my feet, shouting at Tanish to get down, that it was a trap, but my words were lost in the chaos as the bullets rained down. All the muted panic and anxiety were swept away as everyone down below ran for cover and returned fire. The machine gun didn’t stop, its huge barrel revolving with each shot, each yard-long spurt of fire, and I knew what I had to do.

No one down below could stop it. I drew my pistol and ran toward the shuttered window.

Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam went the relentless machine gun, splintering crates, carving up the concrete, punching through corrugated metal. And flesh.

I heard the screams.

Tanish …

I sighted along the hexagonal barrel of my revolver toward the shadowy figure who was turning the machine gun’s crank, and fired. The gun almost kicked out of my hand, but I held on to it, drew back the hammer, and fired again. The report was deafening and fire seemed to flash out of the side of the cylinder as well as from the muzzle, but I had just enough composure to move through the smoke, cocking the pistol and aim afresh before squeezing the trigger a third time.

The gunner—who was wearing the silver and navy of a policeman—slumped to one side, clutching his shoulder, and his companion snatched the handle from him, dragging the barrel of the weapon up and around toward me, still spewing fire and noise all along its deadly arc, perforating the metal walls and roof as he tried to get me in his sights.