The building was stone quiet.
Groping along the walls with my hands, I made my way farther into the building, passing a battered water fountain, an inactive elevator, and the entrance to what had once been a barber shop, until I reached the end of the hallway and found the door leading to the stairwell.
The door squeaked as I pulled it open; I hesitated for a moment, listening intently to the darkness above me. I still couldn’t hear anything, but that meant nothing. For all I knew, the sniper could be at the top of the stairwell, waiting for my head to come into sight.
For a few moments I considered the safest option but almost immediately discarded that idea. Retreat only meant giving the sniper a chance to try again some other time … but now I had a slim chance of cornering the bastard and ending this game once and for all.
So I entered the stairwell, carefully let the door slide shut, then began to climb the stairs.
Light shining through unboarded windows at each landing guided me as I made my way upward, peering around each corner before I jogged up the next set of risers. Mice and cockroaches fled from my approach; the building smelled of old dust and the stale urine of evicted squatters. On the third-floor landing, I found a small pile of rubble from a collapsed ceiling. I picked a short length of iron rebar out of the mess and hefted it in my hands-remembering the crazy lawyer I had seen at the Muny a couple of nights earlier, I wondered if his firm’s offices had once been located here-then I continued my way upstairs.
No one was waiting for me on the fifth-floor landing.
Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I studied the door leading toward the end of the building from where the shots had originated. At first glance, it seemed undisturbed, until I noticed a straight line of dust and broken plaster leading away from the hinge at a right angle as if recently pushed aside by the bottom of door.
There was a window behind me, looking out over the rear of the building. I peered out and spotted a battered brown Toyota mini-van parked in the back alley, near the bottom of a fire escape. From what I could see, it looked as if the fire escape had a gravity ladder leading to the pavement. If that was the killer’s wheels, then he would probably be using the fire escape to make his getaway from the building.
I should have thought of that earlier. It wouldn’t have been quite as stupid or reckless to wait in the alley until he reached the bottom of the fire escape. No turning back now, though. I was here, and he was somewhere in there, and the time had come to take down the son of a bitch before he killed somebody else.
Gripping the iron bar in my left hand, I tiptoed to the door, grasped its handle, and slowly eased it open.
A short hallway led me past the defunct elevator and the door of the vacant office space; at the opposite end of the corridor was the fire-escape window. The window was raised, and the office door was propped open with a short piece of broken wood.
Through the door, I could hear vague, hurried movement: metal moving against metal, a zipper sliding down, then up again. The grunt of breath being exhaled. I inched my way toward the door, put my back against the wall, and peered through the doorframe.
The space beyond the doorway was completely vacant; even before the quake, all the interior drywalls had been knocked down, leaving open a large, empty room bordered only by the outer walls. Sullen midday sunlight, flecked with dust motes, streamed through the windows and the gaping hole in the ceiling where the roof had partially collapsed, leaving broken pipes, brick, and mortar strewn across the dirty tile floor.
On the opposite side of the room, the killer was packing up the tools of his trade.
He was nobody I recognized. In fact, he looked like nobody anyone would ever recognize. Average height, medium build, late thirties or early forties, wearing a beige workman’s jumpsuit. A wireless radio headset hung around his neck. Sunlight reflected dully off a receding hairline, which had already left him half bald, and the wire-rimmed glasses on his plain face. People talk about the banality of evil; I was looking right at it. This dude could have been a janitor, an electrician, an exterminator cruising for rats … anything but a professional assassin.
He moved quickly as he dismantled his weapon: a small compressed-gas tank, a contraption that looked like a compact piston-driven pump, a pair of storage batteries attached by slender cables to a long, cumbersome instrument that vaguely resembled a World War II vintage bazooka, itself mounted on a tripod with an infrared telescopic sight above its barrel. All of it was being stripped down and loaded into a two-wheeled golf caddie.
You think “laser rifle” and the first thing you imagine is something from a late-show SF movie-small, sleek, no larger than an AK-47-but this thing resembled nothing more or less than an industrial welding rig from Chevy Dick’s garage. Of course two people had been shot from a van, I thought. You’d need a van just to haul all this shit around.
Never mind that now. His back was turned to me. His target was gone, and he only wanted to get out of here while the getting was good. Man, was he in for a surprise.
He had disconnected one of the batteries and had bent over the caddie to shove it in place when I moved through the doorway as quietly as I could, carefully stepping around the broken stuff littering the floor, the rebar grasped in both hands. I paused as he stood up and turned toward the laser itself, pulling an electric screwdriver from the back pocket of his jumpsuit. He fitted it into the base of the tripod; there was a thin mechanical whine as his thumb pressed against the button.
I took a deep breath, hefted the rebar in my hands, and then I charged across the room toward him.
Halfway across the room, my boots stamped through some debris. His head snapped up at the sound; he dropped the screwdriver and began to twist around, his right hand whipping for the front breast pocket of his jumpsuit as he turned toward the figure hurtling at him.
I screamed at the top of my lungs as I hauled the iron bar above my head. The.45 automatic was out of his pocket, but he didn’t have a chance to aim before I swung the rebar.
It slammed straight across his chest and lifted him off his feet; the gun sailed out of his hand, hitting the floor ten feet away from where his ass landed.
He lashed out at me with his right leg, catching me on the side of my left ankle. I yelped and danced away; he rolled over and began to scramble toward his gun.
“Fuck you!” I yelled as I raised the slender iron bar again and brought it straight like an ax against the back of his right arm.
He screamed at the same instant as I heard the dry snap of his elbow being shattered. He clutched at his arm as he rolled over on his back, losing his glasses as he howled in agony.
“I said, ‘Fuck you!’” I yelled again as I raised the bar and swung it down square between his legs.
His scream could have shattered a wineglass. A dark blotch spread against his pulverized groin as he grabbed at it. I didn’t care. “Didn’t you hear me, asshole?” I snarled. “Are you deaf? I said, ‘Fuck you!’”
I swung the rebar down across his right knee. The breaking of bone and cartilage, like fine porcelain shattering beneath a hammer, trembled through the bar into my hands.
God help me, but I loved it.
He howled as tears streamed from his eyes, his face turning stark red. I bent over him, savoring his agony, the high animalistic keening of his voice.
“Still can’t hear you, cocksucker!” I bellowed at him, then I stood up and lifted the iron bar above my head again. “I said-”
“I hear you!” he gasped, his voice ragged and hoarse. “I hear you! Please don’t …”