A beam of light speared him, narrowing quickly; one of those little pocket Maglites, naturally, and he was caught crouching with his hands open. “I can just kill you now if this is how it’s going to be,” said the gunman. Gary tried to grin but failed, and flicked on the room lights knowing he’d used up all the hero in him.
Gary led the way to the stairs, hearing the tiny creaks of the metal as he moved upward to the upstairs door, the one that unlocked automatically with the fire alarm circuit but, as only the guards and Ben Ullmer knew, would also open with a guard’s ID card. It had been installed as an internal fire escape for personnel in the Snake Pit library. “I’m gonna turn the lights off now,” Gary said.
“Not ‘til you tell me why.”
“You can see light through a little crack under this door,” Gary explained. “The library night lights aren’t bright, but when we make our rounds we snap on the overheads for a looksee. We’ll know when Trotti goes by.”
“And wait a half hour or more?”
“Sometimes,” Gary agreed.
“I’m double-parked,” the gunman said wryly. “We go in now and take our chances.”
“Yeah, what’s it to you if I get killed,” Gary muttered, but he inserted his card, took a deep breath, and pushed through into the big, dimly-lit room with its steel shelves, holding the very apex of a century’s flight technology, that towered to the ceiling. They moved quickly to the main door with its wire-embedded window, and only a blind man would have missed the sudden flare of light from the hallway outside. Footsteps. A door open down the hall.
“Does he come in here?”
“Always, to hit the lights. He’s supposed to,” Gary said, as if justifying what was about to happen.
The man stepped back, hauling the roll of tape from his jacket fast enough to make Gary flinch again, and Gary might have just possibly had time for his move as the tape ripped, but then that instant was gone forever and the tape went across his mouth. It smelled like chewing gum.
“Lie flat against the wall here,” the man ordered, barely above a whisper, and Gary followed orders again, now more frightened for Trotti than for himself. They weren’t close friends, didn’t even have the same politics; but it was almost worse watching this happen to a colleague you trusted, and who trusted you, than to get it yourself. Almost. Should he kick against the wall? Don’t even think about it…
Another door opened nearer, and soon closed, and then Gary heard the distinct click-step, click-step of Trotti’s shoes with those damned taps he wore to keep his heels from wearing.
Then the swish of an ID card, a faint clack, and the nearside door opened because as always Trotti walked two paces to the main light switch, and with his chin on the tiles, Gary saw the door swing shut but Trotti did not look around at the gunman standing fully in the open behind him, the automatic now in his left hand.
When Trotti did turn, the man hit him a terrible blow just below the sternum, his right fist coming from thigh height and plunging deep into poor Gabe Trotti’s soft gut, and if the gunman hadn’t snatched at Trotti’s coat lapel, Gabe would have sprawled across a row of chairs. Gabe’s feet turned inward, almost dancing really, as he bent double with both hands clutching his belly, hat falling to the floor, Gabe’s bald spot comically and pathetically revealed.
“Down,” said the gunman, and kicked Trotti’s ankle, keeping him from a loud fall by that pitiless lapel grip. Trotti went down on one side in a fetal position, trying to breathe with a diaphragm that was almost totally paralyzed. Gary, who had two older brothers, knew that you didn’t die from a hard right to the gizzard. You just felt like you were going to, and you could no more call for help than you could fart Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
With a quick, hard look toward Gary, the gunman stood over his new victim and tore off strips of tape while Trotti began to gasp a little air, sticking one edge of each strip neatly to the edge of the nearest reading table. That little detail was the thing that made Gary Macallister hate him the most, the way he did everything as if he’d thought it out coldly, maybe done it a thousand times before.
Then he knelt, shifting his gaze to Gary now and then, but talking to Gabe Trotti. “Make one noise and you’ll never make another,” he said, the pistol aligned along Trotti’s big Italian beak. “Breathe through your nose, now,” he added, and fitted the tape cruelly over Trotti’s little mustache.
Trotti’s hands came up, but weakly, and though it was a struggle for a moment with that tape flicking and sticking while Trotti tried to ward it off, it was never much of a contest and soon his wrists were bound behind him. The ankles went even faster but at least, Gary thought, poor old Gabe was breathing well enough to get his color back. His face was a deep red, in fact, as the gunman trussed his ankles to his belt.
By now, the big roll of silver tape was smaller than it had been, and as the gunman looked at the roll, Gary thought that monstrous face would be smiling without the pantyhose. After a practiced glance at the table legs, the man eased two chairs away, dragging Trotti on his belly so that the table legs exactly flanked Trotti’s bent elbows.
It took a moment for Gary to see the logic of it, but when tape linked each elbow to a table leg, and with his knees bent back, there was no way Gabe Trotti could go anywhere, not even bang his feet. Of course a man could bang his nose against the tile, if he were so inclined.
“Now you,” said the man, gesturing with the automatic toward Gary. “But first give me your ID card. And remember if I have to kill any of you, every one of you gets it.”
At least Gary didn’t have to lie facing Gabe’s furious gaze. With his elbows taped to the legs of another table, he wondered what the rustling signified until he managed to turn his head as the gunman stepped into the hall. His shoes stuck out of his hip pockets and he wore Gabe Trotti’s brogans, unlaced, their heels tapping a false message as they moved off.
Gary kept expecting gunfire, hearing only his and Trotti’s breathing, until two sets of footsteps echoed in the corridor a few minutes later. The gunman knew how to use an ID card, shoving an enraged Cully Wickham through the door ahead of him. Gary saw, as the gunman forced Cully to lie prone beside a third table, that the shift captain’s wrists and mouth were already taped.
Wickham’s mistake was trying to kick as the tape circled his ankles. The man knelt on Wickham’s back, bouncing his forehead off the floor with his free hand. “Suit yourself, if you want more of this,” he said, ignoring Cully’s groans. Gary had often wished he could give Wickham a whack like that. Now that somebody had, Gary could only feel helpless rage over it.
Moments later, Cully Wickham lay secured under the heavy table, facing away from the others. Gary could not see the gunman now, but watched as Trotti’s shoes dropped to the floor. He did see the man as he stopped in the corridor doorway.
The guy must’ve been on a tight schedule because he was checking his wristwatch as he spoke. “I’ll be back now and then to check. The man who has managed to get even one arm loose will get a slug through his kneecap. Think about it,” he added darkly, and Gary heard his pace quicken in the corridor.
It was so quiet after that, Gary knew when the phone rang downstairs fifteen minutes later. It stopped, then began again and went on ringing for a long time, the loneliest sound Gary Macallister had ever heard. Shortly afterward, the gunman ducked into the library again, said, “You three just may make it,” and left on the run.