Run for Your Life - James Patterson [3]
My breath had been locked in my throat. I let it out with a whoosh and started sucking air into my starving lungs. But my joy warped into shock when I realized that they all had their arms linked to form a circle.
They were making themselves into a protective human shield, with D-Ray crouching in the center.
“Don’t you shoot my baby!” Miss Carol screeched, loud and clear in the sudden stillness.
Unreal—even more unreal than the crowd making a hero of D-Ray! His hostages were actually protecting him. First, insane role models, and now, double-insane Stockholm syndrome.
I gestured toward Commander Hunt to stand down the rooftop snipers as I shoved my radio earphone in place and hurried toward the bizarre human chain making its way along the brownstone steps.
“It’s me, D-Ray, I’m Mike Bennett,” I called to them. “You’re doing the right thing, D-Ray. You’re making everybody proud of you. Now we need your family to move aside.”
“Don’t you hurt him!” Miss Carol cried out again. I could see the glimmer of tears in her eyes.
“He’ll be safe with me, I promise.” I held my hands up high and open to show that they were empty, and as I lowered them, I repeated my stand-down gesture to the nervous cops. “D-Ray, if you have any guns, throw them out on the ground,” I said, putting a little more authority in my voice. “You’ll be fine, don’t worry.”
There was another pause that seemed endless before a flat gray pistol clattered out from inside the human circle and onto the sidewalk. It looked like a Glock, probably a .40 or .45 caliber, with a ten- to thirteen-round clip—a whole lot of death in a package smaller than a paperback.
“Good man, D-Ray,” I said. “Now I’m coming in there to you, and we’re going to walk together to a car.”
Miss Carol and the others unlinked their arms and parted, revealing a stocky young man wearing below-the-knee athletic shorts and a baseball cap turned to the side. I stepped over the barricade sawhorse and walked toward him.
Then came a terrible sound that almost made me jump out of my shoes: the boom of a gunshot from somewhere behind me.
D-Ray fell into the gutter like a chainsawed tree while his family watched, frozen with horror.
In the next instant, everything changed. Cops tackled asphalt with their weapons ready, and the crowds started milling and shoving in panic.
“Cease fire!” I yelled, and I piled into Miss Carol, knocking her back into the others so they all went down like dominoes. Then I scrambled on my knees to D-Ray.
But neither I nor anybody else would be able to help him. There was a bullet hole, trickling blood, neatly centered between his open eyes.
“Not us, Mike! Stay down!” It was Lieutenant Steve Reno from the ESU tactical squad, calling into my radio earphone.
“Then who?!” I shouted back.
“We think it came from the crowd near Frederick Doug-lass. We’re sending a team in there now.”
A sniper in the crowd—not a cop? Christ! What was going on?
“Get EMS over here,” I told Reno over the radio squawk. Then I stood up. I knew he was right, that the sniper might be looking for more targets, but I couldn’t just lie there with the chaos erupting around me.
Instantly I felt like I was swimming in quicksand. The crowd had seen D-Ray fall, and they assumed that the police had shot him. They were turning ugly, jamming up against the barricades, their faces contorted in rage. Other cops were on their feet now, too, running to this area and forming a line to hold them back.
“They killed that boy! They murdered him!” some woman kept screaming.
A surge of human beings sent one of the sawhorses tumbling over, knocking down a female NYPD officer. Her partners leaped in to drag her to safety, while others charged along beside them, swinging nightsticks. The earsplitting chatter of sirens ripped