Killer Instinct (Instinct #2)(43)

Now!

My father sprang to his feet with the key, finding the cylinder on the first try. With a twist and a shove, he threw open the door. All I had to do was follow him in. That’s all I had to do.

Take it away, Robert Burns.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.





CHAPTER 59


ALL AT once came a cacophony of sounds I didn’t want to hear. Not then. Not there. What are you doing, Mrs. Jones?

The sliding of the security chain on her door. The snap of the dead bolt. The squeaking of a turning doorknob that probably hadn’t been oiled since the last time the Mets actually won the World Series.

The hallway was about to have company.

Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Irma Jones, had just submitted her application to the infamous Darwin Awards by hearing gunshots outside her apartment and somehow deciding that the smartest move for survival’s sake was to get a closer look. Then again, she was in her eighties. Who knows what she thought she heard?

She sure didn’t hear me. As soon as her door opened, I tried to tell her to go back inside. I couldn’t yell, though. Yelling would’ve been the same as grabbing a bullhorn to announce to the shooter that I was distracted. In other words, fire away.

After looking down the hall, Irma turned and saw me flat on the ground behind her. She was about to do the one thing worse than peeking her head out. She was about to come all the way out.

“Are you okay, Dylan?” she asked, squinting.

Irma had maybe an inch on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, if that. She was tiny. And she was about to get body-slammed.

I pushed up off the carpet, launching myself toward her like a sprinter out of the blocks. I had one eye on her and the other over her shoulder, and before I could even blink, it went from bad to worse.

There was no decoying us this time. No trickery with the Mets cap. He jumped out from around the corner with a two-handed grip. He had no intention of missing me twice.

Irma screamed.

Irma never saw him. She had her back to him. She was screaming because of the gun I had pointed at her head while charging at her. At least, that’s what it surely looked like to her eyes. Her neighbor, one of those two nice gay men from next door, was about to kill her. That had to be against the co-op board’s rules, right?

My move was straight out of Ringling Bros. I dove for Irma, leaping through the air while getting off one shot over her head, my other arm wrapping around her shoulders so I could spin and hit the ground first to break her fall.

One bullet whizzed by my ear. There aren’t enough words to accurately describe the terror of that, except to say that it could always be worse. You could hear the bullet hit you instead.

Not today, though.

He got off two more shots. There wasn’t a third. My father made sure of that. He returned fire from my apartment, buying me just enough time to pull Irma into hers. Was I trying to kill her? Save her? She had no idea as we fell into her foyer.

Shit. What’s that noise?

My head whipped back to the hallway. Irma’s door was still wide open. The sound heading our way was the worst one yet. It was the sound of a good idea.

The clever bastard had grabbed a fire extinguisher, removing any sight line we could have on him. He wasn’t going to be denied, which meant he wasn’t a contract killer. If he were, he would’ve fled. Catch you on the flip side. He’d simply wait for a more opportune time to hold up his end of the deal.

No, this guy wasn’t a hit man at all. He was a soldier. Not military, but terrorist. A guy who had been given his orders. Kill or be killed.

He was firing again as he continued spraying the hallway with the extinguisher, moving toward us through a cloud of white. I could see the edges of it reach the doorway as the shots got closer.

There was only one word for this. Chaos.

And there was only one way to respond.





CHAPTER 60


CIA OPERATIVES aren’t given an official how-to handbook. But if we were, the section dedicated to getting your ass out of almost any jam could be summed up with one sentence.

When chaos reigns, create more chaos.

I scooped up Irma in my arms and carried her behind the counter in her kitchen. My telling her not to move as I put her down would’ve been redundant. The poor woman was still in shock.

Everything I needed was in my eyeline. The gas stove. The dish towel on the counter next to it. The bottle of vodka on the credenza near the window. Good thing Irma wasn’t a teetotaler.

The secret of a good Molotov cocktail is saturation. It’s not enough that the fuse—a.k.a. the dish towel—is in contact with the alcohol. It needs to be soaked from top to bottom. Of course, that takes some time. Time was the one thing I didn’t have.

To hell with saturation.

I flipped on the front burner of the stove, grabbed the vodka, and jammed the dish towel as far as I could into the bottle before giving it a couple of quick shakes. I was staying low, keeping my head clear of the top of the counter. The shots outside the hallway had stopped. That’s because he wasn’t in the hallway anymore. The sound of his closing the door behind him was all I needed to hear. He was inside Irma’s apartment.

C’mon, asshole, reach for that lock …

It wasn’t about keeping me in. It was about keeping my father out. This guy wanted a fair fight, one-on-one. I could practically feel his eyes scanning left and right, waiting for me to make my move. But he still had to lock that door behind him. He had to look away if only for a split second.