The Quickie - James Patterson [37]
I cuffed the unconscious bouncer to one of the boiler’s pipes. His glasses were shattered and his leaking face was now the color of his suit. Just a little cop humor, I felt like telling him as I ran into the corridor after my partner.
I heard the sound of a door slamming ahead of me.
Where the hell had Mike and Ordonez gone? I banged my shin on some unseen stairs and jogged up them, my Glock leading the way.
The door I finally found, pretty much with my face, exited onto a field with high weeds and garbage and broken glass. Now where was I?
I blinked in the sudden, blinding daylight. I saw Mike already halfway across the abandoned lot. A half block in front of him, a figure in a white suit was sprinting along 140th Street. It was either Victor Ordonez or an ice-cream man training for the marathon.
I began closing the distance as Mike chased Victor east for two blocks. At the end of the third intersection, they went under an el and in through the gate of a junkyard. Would Ordonez get away? I guess I hoped so. If it were up to me, he could keep running until he got back to Santo Domingo.
Unfortunately, Mike kept up his pursuit, rushing hell-bent for glory around an obstacle course of crushed boxes and piled metal. All Ordonez had to do was wait and fire, and Mike would be toast. But it didn’t happen that way.
Approaching a rusted tin wall at the rear of the junkyard, I heard a loud metal screech. Then a metal-on-metal boom. What the hell was that?
Half a block away in the farthest corner of the yard, I spotted Ordonez scrambling off the forklift he’d just crashed into the fence.
He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled out of sight through a crack that he’d made in the fence.
A second or two later, Mike appeared from a wall of pipes and dove through the same hole in the fence, still chasing Ordonez.
When I finally got there, huffing and puffing, I could see trains. Lots of trains. Ordonez had fled from a junkyard into a subway rail yard.
And I forgot to fill my MetroCard, I thought as I crawled through the fence, keeping my eyes peeled for the deadly third rail.
Chapter 54
I WAS RUNNING through a narrow space between two parked number 4 trains, searching frantically for Mike and Ordonez, when I heard a sharp crack. Shit! The window above my head shattered. “Hey, white girl! Catch!”
I turned in time to watch Victor Ordonez, who was leaning out the conductor’s window two cars away, fire again. I felt something zip past my ear and then heard a sound like thin ice breaking.
I started emptying my Glock in Victor’s direction.
I ejected the empty clip before I realized something warm was running down my neck. My legs dematerialized suddenly, and I found myself lying on gravel. There was something wrong with the side of my face.
God, I’d been hit! I felt dizzy. Like I was sliding out of myself, watching myself from a distance.
Don’t go into shock, Lauren. Move! Do something! Right now! I scrambled upright and began retreating as fast as my shaky legs would carry me. I pressed the sleeve of my jacket to my head where it was bleeding.
I fell to my knees one more time and had to pick myself up again before I reached the end of the train.
I spotted an open door at the end of the last car. I climbed up, pulled myself inside on my stomach, and rolled under some seats.
That’s when the shooting really got started! Two or three cars away, a shotgun blasted three times in quick succession. Then it went off again almost on top of me, and the window glass of the car I was in shattered.
I was lying there, curled up on the filthy floor, bleeding and shivering, when I suddenly heard Ordonez scream in the next car. I couldn’t see him from where I lay, but I could hear him as clearly as if he were in the same room.
“Okay! Okay! I give up!” Victor Ordonez yelled at somebody.
There was the sound of something heavy dropping against the floor. Scott’s gun?
“I want my lawyer,” Ordonez said.
For a second, everything was quiet. Too quiet. What was happening