He skidded to a halt at the door, kicked it, and instantly jumped to one side, expecting an answering hail of bullets.
But the door slammed inward, swung back out, and no gunfire followed. So when it swung inward again, Connie burst past him and went into the kitchen with it. He followed her, cursing under his breath, which was the only way he ever cursed.
In the humid, claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, burgers sizzled on a grill and fat bubbled in a deep-fryer. Pots of water boiled on a stovetop. Gas ovens creaked and popped from the intense heat they contained, and a bank of microwave ovens hummed softly.
Half a dozen cooks and other employees, dressed in white slacks and T-shirts, their hair tucked under white string-tied caps, pale as dead men, stood or cowered midst the culinary equipment. They were wrapped by curling tendrils of steam and meat smoke, looking less like real people than like ghosts. Almost as one they turned toward Connie and Harry.
“Where?” Harry whispered.
One of the employees pointed toward a half-open door at the back of the kitchen.
Harry led the way along a narrow aisle flanked on the left by racks of pots and utensils. On the right was a series of butcher blocks, a machine used to cut well-scrubbed potatoes into raw french fries, and another that shredded lettuce.
The aisle widened into a clear space with deep sinks and heavy-duty commercial dishwashers along the wall to the left. The half-open door was about twenty feet directly ahead, past the sinks.
Connie moved up to his side as they drew near the door. She kept enough distance between them to assure they couldn’t both be taken out by one burst of gunfire.
The darkness past that threshold bothered Harry. A windowless storeroom probably lay beyond. The smiling, moon-faced perp would be even more dangerous once cornered.
After flanking the door, they hesitated, taking a moment to think. Harry would gladly have taken half the day to think, giving the perp plenty of time to stew in there. But that wasn’t how it-worked. Cops were expected to act rather than react. If there was a way out of the storeroom, any delay on their part would allow the perp to escape.
Besides, when your partner was Connie Gulliver, you did not have the luxury of dawdling or ruminating. She was never reckless, always professional and cautious — but so quick and aggressive that it seemed sometimes as if she had come to homicide investigations by way of a SWAT team.
Connie snatched up a broom that was leaning against the wall. Holding it near the base, she poked the handle against the half-open door, which swung inward with a protracted squeak. When the door was all the way open, she threw the broom aside. It clattered like old bones on the tile floor.
They regarded each other tensely from opposite sides of the doorway.
Silence in the storeroom.
Without exposing himself to the perp, Harry could see just a narrow wedge of darkness beyond the threshold.
The only sounds were the chuckling and sputtering of the pots and deep fryers in the kitchen, the hum of the exhaust fans overhead.
As Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom beyond the door, he saw geometric forms, dark gray in the threatening black. Suddenly he realized it wasn’t a storeroom. It was the bottom of a stairwell.
He cursed under his breath again.
Connie whispered: “What?”
“Stairs.”
He crossed the threshold, as heedless of his safety as Connie was of hers, because there was no other way to do it. Stairways were narrow traps in which you couldn’t easily dodge a bullet, and dark stairways were worse. The gloom above was such that he couldn’t see if the perp was up there, but he figured he made a perfect target with the backlighting from the kitchen. He would have preferred to blockade the stairwell door and find another route onto the second floor, but by then the perp would be long gone or barricaded so well that it might cost a couple of other cops’ lives to root him out.
Once committed, he took the stairs as fast as he dared, slowed only by the need to stay to one side, against the wall, where the floorboards would be the tightest and the least likely to sag and squeak underfoot. He reached a narrow landing, moving blindly with his back to the wall.
Squinting up into utter lightlessness, he wondered how a second floor could be as perfectly dark as a basement.
From above came soft laughter.
Harry froze on the landing. He was confident that he was no longer backlit. He pressed tighter to the wall.
Connie bumped into him and also froze.
Harry waited for the queer laugh to come again. He hoped to get a fix precise enough to make it worth risking a shot and revealing his own location.
Nothing.
He held his breath.
Then something thumped. Rattled. Thumped again. Rattled. Thumped again.
He realized some object was rolling and bouncing down the steps toward them. What? He had no idea. His imagination deserted him.
Thump. Rattle. Thump.
Intuitively he knew that whatever was coming down the stairs was not good. That’s why the perp had laughed. Something small from the sound of it, but deadly in spite of being small. He was infuriated with himself for being unable to think, to visualize. He felt stupid and useless. A foul sweat suddenly sheathed him.
The object hit the landing and rolled to a stop against his left foot. It bumped his shoe. He jerked back, then immediately squatted, blindly felt the floor, found the damn thing. Larger than an egg but roughly egg-shaped. With the intricate geometric surface of a pinecone. Heavier than a pinecone. With a lever on top.
“Get down!” He stood and threw the hand grenade back into the upper hall before following his own advice and dropping as flat as possible on the landing.
He heard the grenade clatter against something above.
He hoped his throw had sent the damn thing all the way into the second-floor hall. But maybe it bounced off a stairwell wall and was arcing down even now, the timer ticking off the last second or two before detonation. Or maybe it had barely landed in the upstairs hall and the perp had kicked it back at him.
The explosion was loud, bright, cataclysmic. His ears rang painfully, every bone seemed to vibrate as the blast wave passed through him, and his heartbeat accelerated even though it had been racing already. Chunks of wood, plaster, and other debris rained over him, and the stairwell was filled with the acrid stench of burnt powder like a Fourth of July night after a big fireworks display.
He had a vivid mental picture of what might have happened if he had been two seconds slower: his hand dissolving in a spray of blood as he gripped the grenade upon detonation, his arm tearing loose of his body, his face crumpling in on itself….
“What the hell?” Connie demanded, her voice close yet far away, distorted because Harry’s ears were still ringing.
“Grenade,” he said, scrambling to his feet.
“Grenade? Who is this bozo?”
Harry had no clue as to the guy’s identity or motivation, but he now knew why the Ultrasuede jacket had hung so lumpily. If the perp had been packing one grenade, why not two? Or three?
After the brief flash of the explosion, the darkness on the stairs was as deep as ever.
Harry discarded caution and clambered up the second flight, aware that Connie was coming close behind him. Caution didn’t seem prudent under the circumstances. You always had a chance of dodging a bullet, but if the perp was carrying grenades, all the caution in the world wouldn’t count when the blast hit.
Not that they were accustomed to dealing with grenades. This was a first.
He hoped the lunatic had been waiting to hear them die in the explosion — and had instead been caught unawares when the grenade boomeranged on him. Any time a cop killed a perp, the paperwork was horrendous, but Harry was willing to sit at a typewriter happily for days if only the guy in the Ultrasuede coat had been transformed into wet wallpaper.