Dozens of hands slapped against the windows as the passengers inside tried to brace themselves.
The driver hit the brakes and the bus shuddered to a stop, right in front of Eddie’s. Right where it had been in the vision. Exactly. Walter felt light-headed, anxiety spiraling like barbed wire in his gut. It was one thing to be tripping out on acid, to imagine that something like this might happen. Quite another to see the bizarre vision playing out in real time, just like any other ordinary series of events. Seeing the future might have once seemed compelling and exciting, the kind of thing he thought he would be thrilled to experience. Now, as he watched the horrible scene unspooling before his eyes—just the way it had happened in his vision—it only made him feel ill.
He shook his head, forcing himself to snap out of it and carry on. There was no other option. He ran as fast as he could down the alley, still puffing and breathless, cursing his sedentary lifestyle.
There was a door up ahead, heavy, banded with steel straps, and caged with mesh across its tiny window. But amazingly, it was minutely ajar, a quarter inch of frame showing in the crack.
Impossible luck.
But no. It wasn’t luck. It had been left open by the killer. This must have been the way he had entered, and the way he intended to leave. He had obviously left it open so that he could make a quick getaway.
“We have to go back to the bus,” Bell called as Walter shouldered through it. “We have to tell the passengers to stay inside!”
“No, we’d be shot before we made it across the street,” Walter replied. “We have to find a way to stop the killer from shooting them.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Bell asked as he caught up.
Walter ignored him and stepped into the space. It was nearly black, the only light filtering through the thick grime obscuring a row of narrow windows at the top of the back wall, far to their right. Where were the stairs? Walter peered around, frantic.
Strange angular shapes rose up in the gloom like the exo-skeletons of mechanical spiders, obstructing his view. He craned his neck, searching, but it was Nina who spotted them first.
“Straight across,” she said. “There, behind the looms.”
So that was what the hulking spiders were. Walter stumbled and wove around them, banging his shins and shoulders as he made his way toward the dark hole on the opposite wall. As he ran, his whole body cringed in anticipation of the terrible sound of another shot. A sound that would mean he’d been too late.
The hole became a doorway, with an all-steel stairway beyond it, and even less light. The three of them charged up the stairs as quickly as they could. Walter also made an effort to be as loud as he could, causing the metal treads to ring with every stomping step, then raising his voice to shout up the dark open well in the center of the stairs’ square spiral.
“Police!” he said, trying not to let his gasping exertion show in his voice “Put down your gun! You are surrounded.”
“Walter,” Bell hissed. “Are you insane?”
There was no response from above—at least none he could hear over the ringing of their feet on the metal treads—but that was good. No response. No shot. No dead woman. Maybe they already had changed the future. Changed the vision. Maybe they had saved the day after all.
It wasn’t until he got to the second landing that what they were actually doing sank in. They were running empty-handed to stop a man with a gun. There was a very good chance that they would be shot as soon as they ran through the door and into the third-floor space.
Walter found himself faltering on the stairs, icy fear suddenly crystallizing inside him, filling him with bitter black doubt.
Though he wanted to consider himself a rational man of science, Walter was at his core a passionate dreamer. He had followed his heart all his life, rarely if ever allowing practical considerations to get in the way.
Belly didn’t push manfully past Walter to confront the killer either. He hung back several steps down. He had probably been aware of their situation all along.
He was a good man, and by no means a coward, but he had never once let his heart make decisions for him. Although he had occasionally been led astray by the functions of a more vulgar, southward organ, when the time came to make decisions that really mattered, Bell relied solely on cold, clear logic. Logic that would never allow him do something as foolish as running blind into a room with an armed killer, no matter how many innocent lives were at stake.
Yet he’d put that logic aside and followed Walter on this headlong fool’s errand—one that might get them both killed. Nina, too. That knowledge weighed heavy on Walter in that moment, but he still couldn’t shake that haunting image from his head. The image that had driven him here, and eliminated all other considerations.
The image of Linda’s grandma in the fleeting moment before her death. Her red coat and her colorful scarf, her dark eyes silently asking why? Why did Walter let this happen?
To hell with practical considerations.
Walter threw himself through the third floor doorway without slowing, and charged the window, ready to do anything to save that woman.
9
Once he reached the window, he realized that there was nothing to do.
He skidded to a stop, confused. The space was exactly as he had seen it in his acid-induced vision, all those years ago. There was the Ridgid Tool calendar. There was the well-endowed pin-up with the feathered hair. There was the blacked out window grid with the single missing pane letting a square shaft of pale gray daylight into the far end of the room.
But the killer wasn’t there. The gun wasn’t there.
The only movement was the glittering swirl of dust that danced in the light from the open pane. He looked around the rest of the room. It was entirely empty, and entirely open. Bare concrete floors and rusting I-beam pillars all the way to the dusty back windows. There was no place for anyone to hide.
“He... he’s not here.” Walter looked back at Bell and Nina, hovering cautiously in the stairwell beyond the door. “He’s gone.”
They edged in, eyes scanning every inch of the space, then relaxed as they realized that he was right.
The killer was gone.
“We did it,” Bell said, disbelieving smile spreading across his face. “We chased him away.”
“Walter did it,” Nina said. “Good thinking there, Walter. I thought you were insane with all that shouting, but it worked.”
He hardly heard her. His eyes were drawn to the missing pane. He stepped to it. Looked through it, down at the street. The bus filled the frame as the harassed driver struggled to fix the flat. In front of it, a crowd of senior citizens, all chattering excitedly now that the big scare was behind them and no one had been hurt.
In the middle of the group, the old black woman in the red coat was laughing with the rest, gesturing at the flat tire with her cane.
Linda’s grandma.
She was all right.
Walter’s heart lurched as he watched her, and he had to fight back tears.
“She doesn’t even know what almost happened,” he said, half to himself. “None of them know.”
Bell put his hand on his shoulder.
“And we certainly aren’t going to tell them.” He looked past Walter and out the window at the crippled bus. “We’re going to leave it be, aren’t we? Let them all have whatever lives they were meant to live before we...”
Before Bell could finish, Nina cut him off, speaking between clenched teeth.
“Boys.”
Bell’s head snapped around.
“What?” He frowned. “What is it?”