The 5th Horseman - James Patterson [92]
Cloaked in twilight, we trotted toward the aircraft.
My adrenaline flowed as Mendez, Jacobi, and a sharp team of young cops followed me up the stairs, the soles of our shoes ringing on metal as we climbed skyward.
I tapped on the aft door with my gun butt, and it slid open.
I signaled to the flight attendant to be quiet and to step aside. We entered the first-class cabin from the rear.
I saw the back of Dennis Garza’s head right away. He was in the third row, right side, aisle seat, an ugly red gash blazing through his hair.
A redheaded woman sat beside him at the window.
Maureen O’Mara.
And I saw a problem. A big one.
Two hundred pounds of beverage cart filled the aisle from one side to the other. That cart and two flight attendants stood between us and Garza.
Garza heard us approach, turned his head, and squinted at me.
“You,” he said.
O’Mara patted his hand, said, “Be cool, Dennis. Everything’s okay.”
“Dennis Garza. Maureen O’Mara,” I called out. “I have warrants to take you both into custody as material witnesses.”
“Like hell,” Garza shouted. He fumbled in his jacket pocket. Then he rose out of his seat, stepped into the aisle.
O’Mara yelled out, “Dennis. No!”
Moving with the sudden-strike swiftness of a snake, Garza grabbed the flight attendant closest to him, wrapping her streaked hair around his hand, pulling her head back hard so that it was only inches from his face.
I saw something glint in his hand. It was a syringe!
He had his thumb on the plunger, the needle already piercing the taut skin of the flight attendant’s neck.
The young woman screamed, the sound of her terror filling the cabin, reverberating off the walls.
“I want safe passage out of here. Or I’ll shoot her full of insulin. She’ll be dead before she hits the floor,” Garza threatened.
Garza’s once handsome face was almost unrecognizable. His features were bruised and twisted, his lips curled back, pupils huge, eyes darting.
He looked every bit the maniac I believed him to be.
“It’s up to you,” he said. “I don’t care if she lives or dies.”
I finally spoke back to Garza. “That much I already knew.”
Chapter 132
I WENT COLD INSIDE, staring into Garza’s dark, thoroughly crazy eyes. Maureen O’Mara was kneeling on her seat, staring at Garza in horror, as if she didn’t know who he was, either.
Sweat beaded on my upper lip as panic drove shrieking passengers to push past the cops and clear the rear half of the cabin.
In front of me, the remaining first-class passengers hunched forward, covering their heads as sharpshooters formed a wall behind me, using the seat backs as gun rests.
Garza’s back was to the cockpit. He couldn’t move forward or back, but he could endanger everyone on the aircraft.
And he could kill the flight attendant on his way down.
Garza tightened his painful grip on the attendant’s hair. A drop of blood at the girl’s neck fell, spotting the collar of her starched white blouse. She whimpered, stretched up onto her toes.
I read her name stamped into the gold wings pinned to her vest. “It’s going to be okay, Krista,” I said, making eye contact, watching the tears slide out of her eyes.
“Let her go, Dennis. No one is putting away their guns,” I said in a steady voice. “And you’re not going to kill anyone. We’re all getting out of here alive.”
Just then, the cockpit door opened behind Garza with a sound like a vacuum seal breaking. A young flight officer stepped into the cabin, a baton cocked like a baseball bat over his shoulder.
Garza turned his head, only slightly loosening his hold on the flight attendant. She wriggled and tried to wrench herself free.
The split second I needed was there, in the grip of my hand. I aimed and squeezed the Taser gun trigger, sending fifty thousand volts into Garza’s shoulder. It was enough juice to stun a rhino.
Garza choked out a scream and dropped to the cabin floor, curling into a fetal position. I stood over him, Taser pointed at his head as Jacobi cuffed him.
“You’re under arrest for reckless endangerment,” I said as Garza groaned and writhed at my feet.