He let go of her neck and used both hands to try to wrestle the gun away from her. It didn’t work. He looked up, saw me heading toward him, and realized he had lost.
He let go of the gun and started to turn to run. But the muzzle velocity of a bullet from a.38 is eight hundred and fifty feet per second. Since I was now less than twenty feet from him, the round I fired reached him in about one-fortieth of a second, give or take. Which turned out to be slightly faster than he could move out of the way. The bullet caught him in the face. He spun around from the impact and stumbled back toward the railing. I followed him, focusing on his torso, ready to finish him off.
I heard two more shots from alongside me. They caught Al-Jib in the side. In my peripheral vision I saw Delilah walk past me, holding the Kimber in a two-handed grip, as implacable as the angel of death.
Al-Jib tried to straighten. Delilah kept moving in. She shot him twice in the head. His hands flew up and he went over the railing, into the dark water below.
For a long second, I looked at her. I was still holding the gun in a combat grip.
She stood panting for a moment, returning my look, but not in a focused way. She lowered the Kimber.
I hesitated for a moment, grappling with the knowledge that she had called Gil. Then something in her eyes, her posture, made the decision for me. I lowered the.38 and stuck it in my waistband.
I looked toward the bow. The lights of Tsim Sha Tsui were less than a minute away.
A few wordless seconds passed. Then Delilah handed me the Kimber. “Here,” she said. “I’ve got no place to conceal this, like you said. And we might need it.”
I stuck the second gun in my waistband and looked at her, trying to find words.
She said, “I had to. For you, too.”
“What do you mean, for me?”
“One day, Al-Jib and his type will detonate a nuclear weapon inside a city. A half-million people are going to die. Innocent people-families, children, babies. When that happens, it won’t be because I could have stopped it but didn’t. And you couldn’t bear that burden any more than I could. I won’t let you.”
I realized there was a lot of shouting and commotion around the side of the boat where the passengers would be exiting any minute. While we were engaging Al-Jib, I’d been too focused to notice.
Delilah and I walked forward, into the crowd. The people closest to us recognized that we had been involved in what just happened, and gave us wide berth. The farther forward we moved into the crowd, though, the less we encountered that kind of courtesy. The people closer to the front hadn’t seen what happened. They didn’t know who we were and they didn’t care. They had heard shooting and a commotion, and just wanted to get the hell off the ferry as soon as it docked. We reached a point where the crowd was so dense that we were lost in it, just two more scared passengers. We couldn’t move farther forward. We simply had to wait, along with everyone else.
A few seconds later, we were docking. The moment the boat was in position, people started surging off it. There was a lot of shouting in Chinese and I wasn’t sure what was being said. I did know that we wanted to get out of there before anyone started pointing at us.
We headed out of the pier building, past the clock tower and the crowds shopping in the area. We cut through the underpass below Salisbury Road, then headed east to the impossibly dense and crowded shopping districts around Nathan. An Asian man and a gorgeous blonde-we would be easy to pick up from a description of what had happened on the ferry, and at the China Club just before that. But I didn’t want us to split up yet. I wanted to finish this.
We reached the southeast corner of Kowloon Park and went inside. The park, set on a sprawling knoll above the streets below, was dark and, at this hour, reasonably deserted. We walked past the skeletal aviary and the silhouetted Chinese-style gardens to the Sculpture Walk, where we sat on the steps of a small amphitheater beside one of the Walk’s silent statues. I took out the prepaid cell phone, turned it on, and called Dox on the throwaway he was carrying.
He picked up immediately. “Hey, partner, I hope that’s you.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the sound of his voice. “It’s me. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m here at the bug-out point. Where are you?”
“Kowloon.”
“Pardon me for asking, but isn’t that the wrong direction?”
“Unfortunately. Delilah and I chased Al-Jib onto the Star Ferry.”
“How’d that turn out?”
“With Al-Jib dead.”
“Well, that’s a happy outcome. Another victory for the good guys, and a blow to the forces of evil. What about Delilah?”
“She’s fine. She’s right here with me.”
“Ah-ha, so that’s why you hightailed it to Kowloon. You sure we have time for that sort of thing right now?”
“I’m sure we don’t. What happened with Hilger and Gil?”
“If you’re talking about the guy who was shooting at Hilger, he’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“Hilger shot him, and when Delilah went to help, old Ali just about fucking flew over them and headed down the stairs. After that, Gil was doing a damn fine job of returning Hilger’s fire upside down and on his back from the stairs, but eventually Hilger put another round in him and then imitated Ali’s levitation trick. He paused just long enough to turn and shoot the sumbitch point-blank in the head.”
“Goddamn, I wish we’d managed to get you a gun.”
“Yeah, I would have liked to shoot him, and the opportunity was there. I did manage to sling a chair at him from the landing as he made his getaway, at least. It knocked him down, but he kept going after that.”
“You and the chairs,” I said. “You ought to market it. ‘ Chair-fung-do.’ ”
He laughed. “Yeah, the odd piece of furniture can come in handy from time to time, I’ve discovered. Anyway, I couldn’t get to Hilger in time after he was down, seeing as he was armed and dangerous and I was only dangerous. These jobs can be awkward without a proper rifle at hand. I don’t know how you do it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Hilger’s known in the club. Hell, he had reservations there tonight. The police are going to pick him up for sure. And then we’ll see if we were right about him running his own operation.”
“Think the powers that be will disown him?”
I paused and considered. “I’m getting the feeling he has… enemies. People who might like to see that happen, yeah.”
“What gives you that feeling?”
“I’m not sure. I want to check something out, and then I’ll let you know.”
“All right. Finish your quickie, and let’s meet at the airport. The old City of Life just doesn’t feel as welcoming now as it did this morning.”
“Give me an hour.”
“Sure, take as much time as you need. I don’t see any reason to hurry. It’s not like half the Hong Kong police force would be looking for someone of your description or anything like that.”
“All right,” I said, “I see your point.” I told him where he could retrieve the bug-out kit I’d put in place. He said he would grab it and be on the way.
I clicked off and looked at Delilah.
“Gil’s dead,” I said. “Dox saw Hilger shoot him in the head, point-blank.”
She nodded, her jaw set, then said, “What else?”
I briefed her on the rest of what Dox had told me.
“I’m going to meet him at the airport now,” I said. “You coming?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. I don’t have my passport.”
I didn’t say anything. I was still pissed that she had called Gil. I was trying to let it go.
“Anyway,” she said, “I need to brief my people on what just happened here. There are going to be a lot of questions.”
“You going to be able to weather it?”