The long upstairs corridor was windowless and must have been night-black before the explosion. But the grenade had blown one door off its hinges and had torn holes in another. Some daylight filtered through the windows of unseen rooms and into the hallway.
Damage from the explosion was extensive. The building was old enough to have lath and plaster construction instead of drywall, and in places the lath showed through like brittle bones between ragged gaps in the desiccated flesh of some ancient pharaoh’s mummified body. Splintered floorboards had torn loose; they were scattered half the length of the corridor, revealing the subfloor and in some places the charred beams beneath.
No flames had sprung up. The snuffing force of the blast had prevented anything from catching fire. The thin haze of smoke from the explosion didn’t reduce visibility, except that it stung his eyes and made them water.
The perp was not in sight.
Harry breathed through his mouth to avoid sneezing. The acrid haze was a bitterness on his tongue.
Eight doors opened off the hall, four on each side, including the one that had been blown entirely from its hinges. With no more direct communication than a glance, Harry and Connie moved in concert from the top of the stairs, careful not to step in any of the holes in the floor, heading toward the open doorway. They had to inspect the second level quickly. Every window was potentially an escape route, and the building might have back stairs.
“Elvis!”
The shout came from the doorless room they were approaching.
Harry glanced at Connie, and they both hesitated because there was a weirdness about the moment that was unsettling.
“Elvis!”
Though other people might have been on the second floor before the perp had arrived, somehow Harry knew it was the perp shouting.
“The King! The Master of Memphis!”
They flanked the doorway as they had done at the foot of the stairs.
The perp began shouting titles of Presley hits: “Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, Money Honey, Jailhouse Rock….”
Harry looked at Connie, raised one eyebrow. She shrugged.
“Stuck on You, Little Sister, Good Luck Charm…”
Harry signaled to Connie that he would go through the door first, staying low, relying on her to lay down a suppressing fire over his head as he crossed the threshold.
“Are You Lonesome Tonight, A Mess of Blues, In the Ghetto!”
As Harry was about to make his move, a grenade arced out of the room. It bounced on the hall floor between him and Connie, rolled, and disappeared into one of the holes made by the first explosion.
No time to fish for it under the floorboards. No time to get back to the stairs. If they delayed, the corridor would blow up around them.
Contrary to Harry’s plan, Connie rushed first through the blasted doorway into the room with the perp, staying low, squeezing off a couple of rounds. He followed her, firing twice over her head, and both of them clattered across the shattered door that had been torn off its hinges and blown down in the first explosion. Boxes. Supplies. Stacked everywhere. No sign of the perp. They both dropped to the floor, threw themselves down and between piles of boxes.
They were still dropping, scrambling, when the hallway went to pieces in a flash and a crash behind them. Harry tucked his head under his arm and tried to protect his face.
A brief hot wind brought a storm of debris through the doorway, and a lighting fixture on the ceiling dissolved into glass hail.
Breathing the fireworks stink again, Harry raised his head. A wicked-looking piece of wooden shrapnel — as big as the blade of a butcher’s knife, thicker, almost as sharp — had missed him by two inches and embedded itself in a large carton of paper napkins.
The thin film of sweat on his face was as cold as ice-water.
He tipped the expended cartridges from the revolver, fumbled the speedloader from its pouch and slipped it in, twisted it, dropped it, snapped the cylinder shut.
“Return to Sender, Suspicious Minds, Surrender!”
Harry was pierced by a longing for the simple, direct, and comprehensible villains of the Brothers Grimm, like the evil queen who ate the heart of a wild boar, thinking it was really the heart of her stepdaughter, Snow White, whose beauty she envied and whose life she had ordered forfeited.
5
Connie raised her head and glanced at Harry, who was lying beside her. He was covered with dust, chips of wood, and glimmering bits of glass, as she no doubt was herself.
She could see that he wasn’t getting off on this the way she was. Harry liked being a cop; to him a cop was a symbol of order and justice. Madness like this pained him because order could be imposed only through violence equal to what the perpetrator dealt out. And real justice for the victims could never be extracted from a perp who was so far gone that he couldn’t feel remorse or fear retribution.
The geek shouted again. “Long Legged Girl, All Shook Up, Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me!”
Connie whispered: “Elvis Presley didn’t sing ‘Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.’”
Harry blinked. “What?”
“That was Mac Davis, for God’s sake.”
“Rock-a-Hula Baby, Kentucky Rain, Flaming Star, I Feel So Bad!”
The geek’s voice seemed to be coming from overhead.
Cautiously Connie eased up from the floor, revolver in hand. She peered between the stacked boxes, then over them.
At the far end of the room, near the corner, a ceiling trapdoor was open. A folding ladder extended from it.
“A Big Hunk o’ Love, Kiss Me Quick, Guitar Man!”
The walking piece of dog vomit had gone up that ladder. He was shouting at them from the dark attic above.
She wanted to get hold of the geek and smash his face in, which was not a measured police response, perhaps, but heartfelt.
Harry spotted the ladder when she did, and as she rose to her feet, he stood beside her. She was tense, ready to hit the floor again fast if another grenade dropped out of that overhead trap.
“Any Way You Want Me, Poor Boy, Running Bear!”
“Hell, that wasn’t Elvis, either,” Connie said, not bothering to whisper any more. “Johnny Preston sang ‘Running Bear.’”
“What does it matter?”
“The guy’s an asshole,” she said angrily, which was not exactly an answer. But the truth was, she didn’t know why it bothered her that this loser couldn’t get his Elvis trivia correct.
“You’re the Devil in Disguise, Don’t Cry Daddy, Do the Clam!”
‘“Do the Clam’?” Harry said.
Connie winced. “Yeah, I’m afraid that was Elvis.”
As sparks squirted from the shorting wires in the damaged light fixture overhead, they crossed the room on opposite sides of a long waist-high row of boxes, closing in on the attic access.
From the world beyond the dust-streaked window, faraway sirens wailed. Backup and ambulances.
Connie hesitated. Now that the geek had gone into the attic, it might be best to flush him out with tear gas, lob up a concussion grenade to stun him senseless, and just wait for reinforcements.