Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [20]
Littlemore, waiting inside, heard the crash and saw Zelko leap from his chair at the end of the corridor. Zelko lumbered into the room. Littlemore ran down the now-empty hall.
Younger hit the floor rolling and came to his feet, bayonet in hand, spitting paint and wood chips. What he saw surprised him: a frail old man in a nightgown, gap-toothed and gape-mouthed, wisps of gray about his head. Younger had broken into the wrong apartment.
Littlemore broke into the right one. The detective, counting on Younger’s distraction, had hoped to surprise the men in the room with their backs to him, looking out the window. Instead, as he charged through the door, Miljan and Zelko were staring straight at him. It took them only a second before they opened fire, but that second was enough for Littlemore. Barreling into the room, he dropped to his knees: their shots missed high while he skidded forward on the hardwood floor.
Littlemore knew better than to try for both men, which would have had him wagging his gun back and forth, probably missing both. He had immediately sized up Zelko as the one to worry about, and the detective sent three bullets into that man’s chest, driving him backward into the fireplace.
Miljan kept shooting as Littlemore slid toward him, but he was too frantic. He pulled the trigger too quickly, failing each time to compensate for the gun’s recoil. The result was that he missed repeatedly over the detective’s head until Littlemore slammed into him, the two of them tumbling down over Zelko’s corpse. There was no tussle: Littlemore brought his gun down on Miljan’s head, knocking him unconscious, and handcuffed him to an iron ring that jutted out from the fireplace.
Younger sprang into the room, pine chips embedded in his hair, fiercely brandishing his bayonet—which sadly was no longer a bayonet, but only a curtain rod, having been denuded of its glass spike at some point during his crash through the window. Colette and Luc looked up at him. The phonograph filled the room with a swing tune.
“Nice distraction, Doc,” said Littlemore, keeping his eyes off Colette, whose dress had fallen off her shoulders, and going instead to Luc to untie him.
Younger went to Colette. A little shake of her head and a tiny smile told him she was all right. He pulled her dress over her shoulders, saw the bruise above her eye, and wanted, inappropriately, to embrace her.
“Do you think you could untie me?” she asked.
“Right.”
“The other man, the one with the beard,” she added. “Did you catch him?”
Younger and Littlemore looked at each other; then they sensed that someone else was watching them from the doorway. Littlemore moved first. He jumped to his feet, trying to turn and draw his gun in one motion, but he never had a chance. From the open door, Drobac fired a single shot, which sent Littlemore spinning, blood spattering, banging into the table, his gun sailing across the room.
Younger rose much more slowly, back to the door, hands raised to indicate that he had no firearm—although his right hand held the curtain rod. Littlemore lay on the floor, clutching a bloody left shoulder. The gramophone had gone dead when Littlemore crashed into the table. The only sound in the room now was that of a large test tube, on its side, rolling slowly along the tabletop.
Drobac barked something unintelligible at Miljan, who, still handcuffed in the fireplace, gave an answer, equally unintelligible. “You turn round,” Drobac ordered Younger, in a thick Eastern European accent Younger couldn’t identify. “Before I kill you.”
Younger noticed Luc gesturing solemnly toward the table. The boy’s eyes were fixed on the gently rolling, stoppered test tube, which was filled with a crystalline black powder and would in a moment fall off the table right at the feet of the prostrate Littlemore. That black powder was, as Luc evidently knew, uranium dioxide, a substance not only radioactive but pyrophoric, meaning it spontaneously combusts on contact with air.
“Catch that,” Younger said quietly to Littlemore.
“What?” asked the detective.
“Catch that tube.