The Inn(74)

Floor by floor, we followed the dark spots in the deep green light, a blood trail Susan had started when she grazed Cline’s temple and ear with her shot. She was with us as we followed, round and round, floor by floor, chasing the wolf up the stairs.

We were sweating as we reached the seventeenth floor, panting, every muscle ticking with tension. Only minutes had passed, but I felt like I’d followed Cline out of the depths of hell and up to the surface of the earth. We couldn’t let him get out among the people again. He was our curse to contain.

Malone stopped me at the eighteenth floor, his eyes searching the ground for the spots, finding nothing. The hand that pressed against my chest felt strangely cold. Malone was so thin I could see the tendons in his neck and shoulder moving as he worked his jaw. He dried his hand on his jeans and tested the door handle—it was wet with Cline’s sweat. Malone stepped back, and I kicked the fire door open from the side.

Gunshots ripped through the door as it swung, showering me in splinters. Malone fired into the dark and I threw myself into the room, rolled, fired wildly as Malone came in with me. I felt like Cline had fired from the north end of the huge room, but I couldn’t be sure. The space before me, outlined against the city lights, was a complicated maze of cubicles with desks and chairs and more furniture shrouded in plastic wrap.

All was silent save for the ringing in my ears and the whistling of the night wind through bullet holes in the distant windows.

Then Cline spoke.





CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR





“ROBINSON!” HE ROARED my name, the word trailing off into an exhausted, angry laugh. “You should have just moved!”

I locked eyes with Malone. He was huddled behind a desk across a short aisle. In the ticking seconds, my heightened senses registered strange, disconnected details. People had started to move into the office, even though it wasn’t finished. There was a pink afghan draped over a chair beside my partner. A framed photo on a desk. I saw a panel of lights on the wall, thought about turning them on. I knew I couldn’t trust what the reflections against the huge windows would reveal of me to Cline. Malone signaled, and we started moving slowly and silently toward where the voice was coming from.

“Why didn’t you leave town if you didn’t like what I was doing?” Cline shouted. “You stupid prick. You dug in. Now look at you. You’re drowning, boy. When the big bad storm rolls in, you head for the hills. Don’t you know that, you dumb fuck!”

I didn’t want to let Cline know where I was, but I couldn’t help myself. “You’re the one who better run, Cline!” I shouted. “This ends here!”

Predictably, my voice was met with a hail of bullets. I crouched between the desks and fired, caught a flash of Cline by the windows, a streak of shadow. I waited until the shooting stopped, then crawled on my hands and knees toward the last place I’d seen the man. I could see the icy white lights of Fenway Park in the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“I’m not scared of you, Robinson.” Cline laughed. I could hear him reloading his gun again. “You’re a good man. You’re a protector. You got caught up in that bullshit with your partner only because you thought you were protecting some girl.”

Malone’s sharp breath came from quite close to me. He was working his way along the ground in the next aisle of cubicles. Our eyes met, and I saw the pain in his face through the darkness.

“You’re not going to hunt me down like this. You’ll walk away and let me go. You know what you are, Robinson. You’re not a killer.”

Cline’s sales tactics again, trying to tell me what was good for me, trying to bring on the guilt and the pain. Because wasn’t that what I wanted to do? Of course I wanted to turn away from the horror that he had brought into my life. Forget it all. Leave town. Ignore the suffering of others. Let the people I loved defend themselves. I knew that if I had not pursued Cline in the first place, Marni might still be alive. Maybe Doc. I’d taken this mission on myself. Cline’s sales pitch was good. He was outnumbered two to one, so he was giving it all he had. I could let him go, save myself and my friends additional bloodshed. Hope someone else would bring him to justice.

But Cline was right. Another man might have headed for the hills when Cline moved into town. I was not that man.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I yelled. “And neither are you.”

I crept along the base of a cubicle divider and heard a shuffle near me; I peered through a crack and saw Malone taking aim.

He fired, blasting out one of the windows. The wind howled, lifting sheets of plastic, making them sail like ghosts through the air. Malone had been near the target, but not on point. He must have fired at Cline’s reflection, because the man popped up perpendicular to where Malone had hit, his shots flashing off the ceiling. I was so close that a cartridge from Cline’s gun sailed over the top of the cubicle beside me and bounced, red hot, off my shoulder.

Cline had been overzealous, firing where he was sure Malone was, in the cubicle next to me. But he was out of bullets. His gun clicked impotently, and as I felt a smile spread over my face, a sound rose up in the distance. It was a sound I had heard almost constantly for two decades, a sound that once filled me with excitement and now was like a cold hand reaching into my chest and gripping my heart.

The wail of police sirens.