It knocked the detainee back maybe half a step. His arms went wide, the rebar whistling through the air, still clutched in one big hand.
Chapel had bought himself a split second. His head was swimming and he really wanted to lie down, but his work wasn’t finished.
He raised the pistol again, this time aiming at the maniac’s eye. He might have too many eyelids, but Chapel doubted they could stop a 9 mm slug.
Before he could take the shot, though, the rebar connected with Chapel’s hand and sent the handgun flying. Pain lanced up Chapel’s arm as far as his shoulder, like a vein of magma had opened under his flesh. He cried out — he couldn’t help it — and brought his hand up close to his chest. It didn’t feel broken but it was starting to go numb, which was never a good sign.
Not that it mattered, particularly.
He was face-to-face with a superstrong madman. He was unarmed. The lunatic had a length of steel bar hard enough and heavy enough to stove in a human rib cage.
Anyone else would have known that was the moment of his death.
Anyone without Chapel’s training might have been forgiven for breaking down then and begging for his life.
But Chapel had trained with the Army Rangers. Some of the most elite warfighters on earth. And that training had included an intense course in hand-to-hand combatives.
“Bye, bye,” the detainee said, and he brought the rebar around in a swinging arc.
Chapel shot out his good hand and grabbed the rebar in midair, not trying to stop it or even slow it down. Just getting a grip, letting his arm be carried along by its momentum. His artificial hand shot out and grabbed hold of the detainee’s elbow.
The Rangers had taught Chapel that when he had a pistol in his hand, that was his best weapon. But when he didn’t have a pistol, his best weapon was his enemy’s own weight. Swinging the rebar forced the detainee to commit to the bar’s inertia, shifting his own center of balance away from his feet. Chapel yanked him forward, adding all his own strength to the moving bar.
The detainee went somersaulting forward, carried along by his own follow-through, and went down face-first into the floor. Chapel heard the peculiar wet snap of cartilage breaking and knew the detainee’s nose had shattered on impact.
The detainee moaned like an injured cow.
Maybe I got lucky and cracked his skull, too, Chapel thought. Maybe I got really lucky and dazed him for a second.
Chapel had never been that lucky. “Are you ready to talk?” he asked the detainee, just in case. He moved around behind the fallen maniac, his eyes scanning the floor.
“I’m ready to kill you,” the detainee said, his voice distorted by his broken nose. “I’m ready to tear you a new asshole, you little—”
“Yeah. I kind of thought you’d say that,” Chapel said. He found his pistol on the floor. He picked it up, took careful aim, and put two bullets in the back of the lunatic’s head.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:19
Chapel’s legs felt like they were made of Jell-O. He really wanted to sit down.
He wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “I think I might have a concussion.”
He was suddenly on the floor, looking up at the dark ceiling. He couldn’t remember how he got there. His head was ringing like a bell. The detainee had smacked him in the head with the rebar, he remembered. He’d taken a blow to the head.
That didn’t fill him with confidence.
“Chapel!” Angel shouted in his ear. “Chapel! You have to stay awake, honey. You have to! If you go to sleep now, you won’t wake up!”
“I’ll be okay,” Chapel told her, not because he believed it but because he wanted to reassure her. “Don’t you worry about me, sexy ghost voice.”
“You’re losing it,” Angel said. “Your pulse is all over the place, and your blood pressure is falling. I’m calling the paramedics.”
“No!” Chapel said. “This is a secret mission. No para… no doctors, no hospitals. They’ll have too many questions. I just need to walk this off.”
“Captain Chapel?” someone asked. Someone new.
This voice wasn’t in his head.
“Captain Chapel? Can you open your eyes?” A soft hand was on his cheek. Fingers pried his eyes open. He looked up into a beautiful face, the face of… well, not an angel. He didn’t know what Angel looked like. He knew this face, though. It was surrounded by red hair.
Voices were clamoring near his ear, but he could barely hear them. The earpiece had fallen partially out of his ear, he realized. He tried to reach to put it back in, but his arms felt like they were made of lead.
“Captain Chapel, you need medical attention,” Julia Taggart said.
“You should see the other guy.”
“The man who killed my mother? He’s dead. Definitely dead. Not much left of his cerebrum, it looks like. I suppose it’s funny to say this, but thank you. I appreciate it.”
“Sure thing,” Chapel told her. “Will you help me up? I’m having trouble standing, and I need to get out of here.”
“You need to go to a hospital.”
“I can’t do that. Just get me into a cab or something.”
He saw Julia bite her lip. “Maybe I can do better than that,” she said.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: APRIL 12, T+9:31
Arash Borhan did not need this shit. No, not at all.
Earlier that day he’d gotten a call from some sexy-sounding woman who said his cab was needed for a special fare, and that he stood to make a lot of money if he went to some address in Brighton Beach. Normally he didn’t work that far south in Brooklyn, but the money the woman promised him would more than make it worth his while. So he drove down there, he picked up a man and a woman who were arguing on the sidewalk, and he drove them to Bushwick. That had all been fine. The man got out to go into a house there, while the woman stayed in his cab and the meter kept ticking away.
Then everything had gone to hell.
Some crazy mother had come rushing out of the house and jumped in the back of the cab, and when Arash demanded to know what was going on, the maniac had nearly ripped his ear off. The maniac told him to drive, to break so many laws. And then this other maniac, the man who was his original fare, had driven him right off the road.
Now his cab was wedged into a wooden construction barrier. The paint was scratched to hell, and he was missing a wing mirror. He would be lucky if the front fender could be saved at all.
He touched the side of his head. He was still bleeding, too.
“Motherf—” Arash shook his head. He would not say the swear out loud. He was a decent man. But this was just too much.
Arash had come to America in 1979 to escape the Iranian Revolution. He’d thought he was getting away from violence, that he could be safe in the States. He’d worked hard to get this cab, to become a naturalized citizen. He loved America and everything it stood for.
Except — everybody here had guns. And he had seen more violence in New York City than he’d ever witnessed in Tehran. Twice he had been robbed at gunpoint, just because he was a cabdriver and had some cash on him. This was the first time he’d actually been hurt. He found he did not like it at all.
As he stood there, wondering what to do, his fare and the woman came out of the closed-down store. He was leaning on her shoulder like he could barely walk under his own power. What was the meaning of this? “Hey! Hey, you!” he called to them. “Who’s going to pay for this mess?”
The woman stared at him like he was crazy. Like he was crazy. “This man is hurt,” she said. “He needs help.” They were walking away.