The Inn(73)

“It’s going to be okay,” Susan told him, pulling his coat closed over the wound in his stomach. Her hands were instantly drenched in blood that looked purple in the gold light of the apartment building. “You’re okay. You’re okay. It’s nothing.”

Sweet lies from a beautiful woman. There were worse ways to die, I thought. The old man’s feet scraped against the sidewalk. I looked down the street and saw Malone and Nick running toward us.

“Are you all right?” I grabbed Nick. His jaw was clenched, and he was panting hard. Malone tossed me an extra clip for my gun. Nick’s shirt was wet with blood, but he hardly seemed to notice the wound, that strange manic electricity taking hold of him quickly, making him shiver under my grasp.

“We’ve gotta go! We’ve gotta go!” He tried to drag me down the street. “They ran that way!”

“I’ll stay here.” Susan knelt over the doctor, pressing hard on his wound. Every cell in my body was telling me to stay with her, to be here for the moments that my friend lay dying on the ground, to somehow try to stop the life from draining from his worn body.

“Go, Bill.” Susan pushed at me. “You’ve got to stop Cline.”





CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE





MALONE WAS AHEAD of me. He turned the corner of a closed and silent bank and a gunshot clapped overhead; the concrete corner of an ornate pillar just by his face exploded, forcing him back. We ran into each other, then pressed against the wall. I saw movement to my side and noticed a couple who had been out for a late-night walk cowering between two cars, their big spotted dog twisting and tugging on a leash, terrified. Malone rushed forward into the alley between the streets, but when I looked back to find Nick, who I thought was following us, he was nowhere to be seen. Cline rose from behind a dumpster at the end of the alley, fired off a couple of shots, and sprinted into the dark.

“Nick’s not with us!” I grabbed Malone’s arm. “I have to go back.”

“He’ll be fine!” Malone dragged me forward. “We’ve got to get this bastard off the street!”

We ran across the road, causing a car to slam on its brakes, the hood halting inches from my knees, the headlights blinding. In a courtyard, the water in a large square fountain set into the pavement was so still that Malone didn’t see it; he sprinted in, tripped, and splashed to the other side. We crouched against a post as bullets popped into a low garden wall beside me.

Across the courtyard, Cline and Squid met, two frantic silhouettes against the reflective glass of an office building.

Cline turned, and for a moment I thought it was his reflection that stepped out and raised the gun and pumped Squid’s frail, lean frame full of bullets. But it was a bigger, stronger man, a shape I recognized, gunning the kid down with the precise motions of a machine. Nick didn’t even seem to see Cline, who shot out the glass door beside him and ran into the dark. Nick looked down at his victim, then up at me as I ran to his side.

“Jesus,” he said. His eyes were wild, flicking between realities, over Squid’s body and then to the gun in his hand. “I killed him. I killed a kid.”





CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO





NICK DROPPED HIS weapon and gripped his head, trying to blink away whatever he was seeing. He flinched at a noise or a movement that wasn’t there, grabbed his weapon, and pushed it into my hands.

“I can’t … I can’t … I can’t do this. Is … is this real? Did I—”

“He’s dead.” Malone had his fingers against Squid’s motionless carotid. He looked at me. “Cline’s alone. This is our chance.”

“I can’t come with you.” Nick backed away from me. “I’m sorry, Bill. I don’t know what’s … I just shot a kid! Christ!”

I thought about going with Nick. But Malone had run through the automatic doors beside me. One friend was facing Cline alone, and the other was facing his nightmares. I stuffed Nick’s pistol down the back of my jeans and ran into the dark building.





CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE





IT WAS AN unfinished office building of some sort, belonged to a big corporation. Expensive chrome and marble, light fixtures hanging from their housings, and transparent plastic sheets draped over furniture. Malone was covering the elevators, where a bloody smear on the up button was as stark as a brushstroke of black ink against the white wall. A ruse. Cline wouldn’t wait for the elevator. He wouldn’t put himself in a box with only one way in and one way out no matter how fast it moved away from where his enemies were. Malone crept to the stairs and I followed. In the eerie green light of an exit sign hanging over the fire door, he pointed to a nickel-size drop of blood on the floor.

Time circling, looping back. I remembered days earlier, before Marni, before Doc, before I really knew what darkness had come into my life, Nick and I breaching Winley Minnow’s house together. Malone and I going through apartment buildings like this, floor by floor, a hundred or a thousand times across the years. My brothers in arms. It had been a mistake for Cline to think he could come back to our city and best us. We knew this place. Even if we’d been thrown out as guardians of these streets, these buildings, we had never put down our shields.