Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [19]
“A lookout,” Littlemore whispered. “On a chair. End of the hall.”
“Can you take him?” Younger whispered back.
“Sure, I can take him, but then what? The guys inside the room hear the noise. Colette and the kid become hostages—or dead.”
A girl’s voice cried out, muffled by the walls. Only one word was intelligible—“No.” It was a female voice, with a French accent. Then something substantial, perhaps a body, fell to the floor.
Littlemore had to restrain Younger: “You’ll get her shot,” whispered the detective. “Listen to me. I need a distraction. Noise out in the street. Throw something at their window. Break it. Something loud enough to pull that guy from the chair back inside the room.”
“I’ll give you a distraction,” said Younger. But instead of returning down to the street, he went up, mounting a narrow stairway that led to the roof.
Colette had been forced to her knees, half on and half off a thin, soiled mattress. She lay cheek-first against the hard wood floor, hands tied at the small of her back. Miljan, in his oversized checked suit, was behind her, gun in hand.
She smelled his reeking breath and felt one of his hands groping at her waist. Blindly, she kicked out and made satisfying contact with the man’s knee. Miljan stifled a cry and hopped in pain on one leg. Rolling over, Colette kicked his other leg. He fell to his knees, and she kicked the gun right out of his hand. Surprised and furious, he chased the pistol, which clattered to the floor near Luc. Just as Miljan reached for it, Luc—still tied to a radiator pipe—kicked it away from him, so that it slid along the floor back toward Colette.
She had worked her tied wrists to the side of her body. Guided by fortune or providence, the sliding gun found its way right into her hands. She had already closed her fingers around it when Miljan stepped on her knuckles as he might have stepped on a cockroach.
She cried out. Even as Miljan ground her hands with the sole of his shoe, still she tried to get a finger onto the pistol’s trigger. It was in vain. He ripped the gun away and put it to her temple.
At the top of the stairs, Younger pushed open a rickety door and emerged in the moonlight. He could make out a clothesline hung with sheets; a tipped-over table; a brick chimney at the far end. He went to the edge of the roof overlooking the street. There was no parapet, no rail. The chimney was right next to him. He was, he judged, directly above the room in which Colette and Luc were being held. He tore the curtain rod free from his radiation device, broke the glass tube, and used the jagged glass to hack down the clothesline.
Colette felt a jerk at the back of her dress, followed by a skittering sound: a button, bouncing on the wood floor. Miljan was behind her again. He tore open the top of her dress; more buttons flew loose. Miljan caressed the white skin between her shoulder blades with the muzzle of his pistol. A little clear button twirled like a spinning coin next to Luc. Whatever the boy felt, he didn’t show.
Younger stood at the edge of the rooftop, his back to the open air, directly above the window he wanted. He had tied one end of the clothesline to the chimney. Tucked beneath one of his arms was the curtain rod, which, with its broken glass end, had turned into a weapon quite familiar to him: a bayonet. He gave the rope a good tug as a test; it held.
Younger took a deep breath and jumped backward and outward. For a split second he let the rope slip through his fingers. Then he gripped again, the rope went taut, and he swung toward the window. He smashed through it, feet first, in a splintering of dingy glass and brittle pine.