He straightened and crossed over to her, immediately slipping the gag from her mouth.
"Jesus," she said in a whisper. "You're a sight for sore eyes."
"You, too," he admitted, putting his gun down so he could work on the knot binding her hands behind her back. "How bad are you hit?"
"Hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but I can walk. Bullet's still in there, though."
Willy thought back to the cell phone gun Liptak had used on her. "What the hell was that, anyway? How'd you know it was a gun?"
"We got an alert on them a few weeks ago. Something you threw out, probably. They're the latest rage. I thought of it when I saw how he was holding it."
He gave her a quick, almost embarrassed kiss. "Yeah, well, you saved my butt. Where is he now?"
She shook her head. "Somewhere around. He has a real cell phone he's been trying to use. It didn't work down here, so I think he went up."
Willy glanced over his shoulder at the door. "Which way?"
"Turn right. You got anyone with you?"
He looked at her without comment as she began rubbing her chafed wrists and rolled her eyes. "I should've known."
"Stay put," he said, and quickly left the office.
Turning the way she'd indicated, he saw a small door in the far corner of the central room, and beyond it, barely visible in the gloom, a spiral staircase. He realized he was looking at the interior of one of the Castle's four large central turrets he'd seen from the outside.
His gun ready once more, he'd barely started walking in that direction when a figure appeared in the doorway with the suddenness of an apparition.
"Don't move," Willy shouted, leveling his gun.
But Andy Liptak was having none of it. As quickly as he'd appeared, he backed into the stairwell and vanished, accompanied by the sound of footsteps pounding on hollow metal stairs.
Willy ran to the door, paused, and quickly stuck his head past the doorjamb. As in a turret of ancient times, the staircase was a tight spiral, hugging the round walls around the center of a sheer drop, and lit solely by the feeble daylight seeping through the occasional firing slit. The sounds of Liptak's retreat came from above.
Willy gave chase without hesitation.
He ran, taking the steps two at a time, fueled by the same adrenaline that a marathoner uses to make it to the finish line. And finishing is what Willy had solely in mind by now, now as so often in the past-a near-pathological drive to reach some kind of resolution, which, since he couldn't locate it in his day-to-day life, he kept trying to find in the face of lethal danger. Discovering Sammie alive had come as a huge relief, but it had made him think, if only in this brief flash of a moment, that he'd come as close to balancing the books as ever he might. That coming to Sammie's aid had in some way counterbalanced his failure to help Mary.
He heard footsteps above him slow down, falter several times as Liptak neared exhaustion, and finally stop altogether.
Willy charged on regardless.
He saw Liptak sprawled on his back, his mouth hanging open, one hand clinging to the banister as if it were a lifeline, just seconds before he was on top of him. Liptak had a gun out, too, but Willy slapped it aside with a swipe from his own, causing the other man to cry out in pain as the gun went hurtling down the narrow, empty stairwell, some eighty feet straight down.
Willy dropped his pistol on the steps and grabbed Liptak by the shirtfront in his powerful right hand, hauling him up and throwing him across the railing so that he balanced there over the long, empty hole below them. Willy was barely breathing hard.
"Hey, you little turd," he said softly, his face inches from Andy's. "You done yet?"
Liptak's body was as still and stiff as a board. His hands were clenched to Willy's shoulders in a fierce grip. "Put me down, Sniper. For Christ's sake."
Willy felt the fear coming off him like an electrical current. He watched Liptak's dilated pupils and thought he could see in their depth the darkness of the jungle, of the blackouts he'd suffered as a drunk, and of the pure inky well of his own despair, on the edge of which he balanced every day. He shifted his gaze to the gloomy, bottomless funnel of the stairwell just past Liptak's left ear, and found there the same image-and perhaps as well, a solution. The nagging thought tugging at the corner of his mind loomed into something more tangible, a synergy combining good timing, pure and brutal justice, and with it, relief.
"What d'you say we go for a little flight?" he suggested.
Liptak's mouth opened, but it was Sammie's voice he heard.
"Willy? You all right? Where are you?"
He paused, his muscles tensed for the leap. Liptak's breathing was now coming in short gasps.
"Willy?" she called again from far below, her voice almost breaking. "Goddamn it, you bastard. Answer me."
Her anger worked its way through the tangle of his mind, drawing his attention away from the task at hand, if just for a moment.
"I'm up here. With our mutual friend," he answered finally, reluctantly.
Whether it was something she heard in his voice or just simple dumb luck, she answered, "Well, don't screw it up doing something stupid, okay? Bring him down here so I can beat the crap out of him."
Her words echoed up the hollow shaft of the turret, reverberating off the walls. Slowly, he smiled, straightened slightly, and refocused on Andy Liptak's face.
"You may not believe it, but today's your lucky day," he said, and pulled him off the railing and back onto the steps. "There's movement by the chain-link fence, southwest wall."
Gunther, Ogden, Panatello, and Janet Scott all turned to look at the spot indicated by the sharpshooter through their radio earpieces.
"Roger that," Janet responded. "Do you have a visual?"
"That's affirmative. Two men and a woman. She's limping and one of the men looks like he has his hands cuffed behind his back."
Gunther whispered into her other ear.
"Does it look like the other guy has a useless left arm, probably with the hand stuffed into his pants pocket?"
There was a startled pause. "Hang on."
Despite the tension, Scott smiled. "That got him."
"Affirmative," came the report at last, the tone of voice betraying the speaker's confusion.
She reassured him. "That's good news. Hold your positions and wait till they're out in the open."
Slowly, awkwardly, three figures emerged from the jagged hole at the prison's base and picked their way across the rubble and through the torn fencing.
"It's okay," Joe Gunther said.
Janet Scott radioed everybody to stand down and ordered in the ambulance hidden nearby as the four of them broke cover and walked to meet Andy Liptak and his escort in the middle of the parking lot.
Gunther's first concern was for the wounded Sammie Martens.
"You okay?" he asked her as they drew near.
Her smile gave him what he needed to know. "Flesh wound," she answered. "I've always wanted to say that. Just didn't know it would hurt so much."
Panatello and his people grabbed Liptak away from Willy and whisked him off toward a waiting car.
Willy shook his head at her. "Such a wimp."
Ward Ogden gave him an appraising look. "We weren't sure we hadn't lost you."
"Wishful thinking," Willy told him, but then looked straight at Joe Gunther. "I figured I hadn't been a big enough pain in the butt yet."
Gunther studied his face, and seemed to read there the debate that Willy had just barely survived. "Practice makes perfect, Willy," he finally said. More Archer Mayor! Please turn this page for a preview of
GATEKEEPER
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Arnie Weller looked over the shoulder of the balding man holding out a ten-dollar bill and checked on the whereabouts of the young woman he'd seen entering a few minutes earlier.