Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [72]
Carroll crashed two and three steps at a time up a twisty flight of darkened stairs. Please God no!
He was fighting against rage, and an even worse fear building inside him. He kept the machine gun cupped off automatic fire. There were civilians swarming inside the tenement house.
Apartment doors kept opening, then rapidly slamming shut. Carroll felt their wind in his face. There were hostile looks and abusive screams.
As Carroll finally reached the top landing, the fourth floor of the building, he saw the dingy yellow door of an apartment thrown open.
His brain clenched unbelievably tight, filled to exploding with unnatural heat. Suddenly he knew what he was going to find there. Carroll knew it.
He could see inside the doorway already. Then he could see her lying there, still in her overcoat. Her striped muffler was off casually to one side. She lay thrown up against a fallen wooden chair where she had apparently been questioned.
The IRA henchmen were gone, up to the roof, up over other roofs, gone, escaped somewhere.
“Oh God no.” Carroll choked back a sob, a desperate, hopeless prayer. He experienced that awful, hollow bitterness of death all over again. He felt terrible hurt, from some infinite store of pain.
Slowly then, Caitlin rolled over. She rolled just a few inches. Then Caitlin struggled to sit up and Carroll ran for ward …. Her face was a blank, dazed stare …. But she was alive.
Carroll held Caitlin. He cradled her like an injured child in his arms.
Then she suddenly drew her face away from him; she stared at something that terrified her across the room.
Carroll followed the line of her eyes to an inert shape that lay on the other side of the barren room. The body seemed to be that of a young man, except you couldn’t really tell. Half the head had been blown away. The darkish hair was matted with blood. The figure was shrouded with the dark blue uniform of a Belfast policeman.
“Who is he?” Carroll asked.
Caitlin slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. I only know that if it hadn’t been for him coming when he did, I’d be dead. He came through that doorway. He started shooting at them.”
Carroll couldn’t take his eyes away from the murdered policeman. A hero, Carroll thought A hero with no name or face anymore. Police work in all its glory.
Caitlin was sobbing, almost without any sound.
“Shhh, now, shhh,” Carroll whispered.
Then Caitlin couldn’t help herself anymore. The sobbing became uncontrollable. She cried into Carroll’s chest. She held him with her remaining strength.
They were enfolded that way, holding one another, when the teams of British Special Branch men and Irish police arrived.
Once again, Green Band was nowhere to be found.
Chapter 52
BY THE EVENING of December 12, the letters, stuffed inside eight-by-eleven manila envelopes, had finally arrived. Over three thousand bulky letters had been mailed to every region across the United States.
The letters had come to the strangest, the most unlikely places. To Sedona, Arizona; to Dohren, Alabama; Totowa, New Jersey; Buena Vista, California; Iowa City, Iowa; Stowe, Vermont; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Boulder, Colorado; Scarborough, New York.
Kenny Sherwood in Erie, Pennsylvania, was one of the chosen few.
Sherwood was home from work that day, because if he went to the mill, he’d just say something dumb and get his ass either chewed out, or fired. For nine years he’d been a machine operator with Hammond Tool and Dye.
He made almost twenty-nine thousand, thirty-five hundred of which went for shrink sessions with a psychologist in Pittsburgh, little goateed fellow who treated him for his recurrent war dreams.
There was a neatly typed cover letter inside the envelope; it looked official, a little scary even.
Dear Mr. Sherwood,
During the years 1968 to 1972, you served your country proudly as a Specialist in the U.S. Army. You were a POW from January 1970 to June of 1972. You received a purple heart in Viet Nam.
Please consider the enclosed, a token of our appreciation for your services, a chance