"If he comes out, we'll just sit on him for a while," Rawlings assured her.
"That's great, thanks. This shouldn't take more than a few minutes."
She went back through the hole behind the metal sheet with the reassuring feeling of a brother cop at her back, and it made all the difference. She made her way cautiously, although not afraid, and found herself in a warren of what had once been offices and a showroom, empty now of stock but in an appalling state of dilapidation, Sheetrock drooping off the walls, ceiling joists exposed, filthy beyond belief. If there was a group of boys in the building, she decided after a quick search, they did not live down here.
Her flashlight found the stairs, stripped of the rotted carpeting, which had been left in a heap in one of the offices. They were firm, although they squeaked here and there as she started upward. She held the gun in one hand, the light in the other, and though her flesh still crawled, there was no turning back now.
At the top of the stairs, she stood just outside the door and stuck the flashlight and one eye around the corner, and here she found the boys' living quarters. It was a big room, one single space with a heavy freight elevator on one end, frozen with its floor two feet beneath the ceiling. Ropes of dust-clogged cobwebs dangled from the steel beams fifteen feet overhead, but on closer observation, she noticed there had been some effort to clean the floor, which lacked the jumble of bottles, needles, glue tubes, paint cans, used condoms, and general squalor that these places usually held. In the middle were a rough circle of chairs and milk crates on top of a frayed circular rug, pillows on some of the crates, one of them upended with a camping lantern set on top. Around the edges, against two of the walls, there seemed actually to have been an attempt at marking out eight or ten separate quarters with a hodgepodge of crates, cardboard boxes, and bits of wood draped with pieces of incongruous fabric, from flowered bedspreads to ancient paint-splattered tarps. Keeping well out in the center of the room, her ears straining for the least sound, Kate began to circle the floor. She probed each of the quarters with the beam of her flashlight, finding the same semblance of order that the circle of chairs showed. Some of the mattresses even had their rough covers pulled neatly up, though others…
She paused, went back to one Spartan and tidy cell, and ran the flashlight beam over the heap of - well, for lack of a better word, bedding. Yes, that was indeed a foot that she had seen protruding from the pile, enclosed in at least two layers of frayed sock. And now that she was closer, she could hear the sound of labored breathing above the slap of heavy raindrops against the black plastic someone had nailed up against the broken windows. She slid her gun back under her arm, transferred the light to her right hand, squatted down, and reached out gingerly for the covering layers at the opposite end of the mattress from the exposed sock. Black hair, long and greasy and soaked with sweat, straggled across a flushed face that had the high, broad cheekbones of a Mayan statue. His breathing sounded like a pair of wet sponges struggling to absorb a bit of air - it hurt Kate's chest just to listen to it. The boy's forehead was burning, and she pulled the covers back up around his neck. Somehow she was not surprised to see a neat stack of shoe boxes, two wide and three high, next to his mattress. On top of them lay a small, grubby notebook: There was a rainbow on its cover.
"Hello, Dio," she said quietly. She stood up, took the radio from the pocket of her leather jacket, spoke into it, and had gotten as far as "We've got a sick boy here at —" when all hell broke loose.
With a distant thunk, the overhead lights went on, and Kate's body was already automatically moving down and back when the gun started roaring at her from the freight elevator. She dove into the base of the makeshift walls, sending boxes and wood scraps flying and keeping just ahead of the terrifying slaps at her heels, until finally she had her own beautiful piece of metal in her hand. From the spurious protection of a packing crate, she aimed her gun at the source of the murderous fire. Her fifth bullet hit something.
A noise came, half yelp, half cough, followed immediately by a sharp clatter of metal dropping into metal.
"Police!" bellowed Kate at the top of her adrenaline-charged lungs. "Anyone reaching for that gun, I'll shoot!"
She heard voices, then panicking shouts, and a number of feet on the floor overhead broke into a run, heading for the back of the warehouse. At the same time, one pair of feet came pounding up the stairs toward her, stopping just outside the door.
"Police!" he shouted, then said, "Inspector Martinelli you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. There was a single gun from the freight elevator; doesn't seem to be another. I hit him and he dropped it. See it? Hanging just under that strut?" She narrowed the beam on her flashlight to illuminate the spot.
"No, I - yes, got it."
"Keep an eye on it; I'm going up."
"Wait —"
"No. Is your partner around back?"
"Yes."
"Hope he stayed there - I don't want these kids to get away. I'll clear the elevator and then call you up. Oh, and the one I was looking for is down at the other end. I was just in the middle of calling for an ambulance - it sounds like pneumonia."
Kate had lost her radio in her rapid trip through the walls but had miraculously retained her flashlight, which even more miraculously still functioned. As Rawlings spoke into his own radio, giving rapid requests for backup and ambulance, she took off across the dusty wooden floor at a fast, low crouch, hit the now-well-lit stairs at a run, and, at the top landing, seeing no switch, put her leather-clad arm up across her face and then reached up in passing to swipe at the hanging bulb with the butt end of the heavy flashlight. Safe now in the concealing darkness, she pushed the flashlight into her pocket, took up a position to one side of the door to the third floor, turned the handle, and pushed it open. Nothing. Silence came through the doorway at her, but for the wind and the raindrops, and the only light was the dim illumination creeping in through the windows and up the elevator shaft. Gun at the ready, she slipped inside; there were raised voices outside and three floors down - Rawlings's partner, Jordan, had indeed stayed in his place. And then the most beautiful sound in the world: sirens, from several directions at once, getting louder every second. Beneath them, half-heard, came a low groaning sound from the direction of the freight elevator. Out came the flashlight again, and, holding it well to the side of her body, she flicked it on. The room was open and empty of anything large enough to hide a person. Just a matter of making sure the shooter couldn't retrieve his gun. Kate took two steps away from the wall, and no more.
There was no pain, no burst of light, no time for fear, much less anger, just the beginning awareness of movement above and behind her, a faint swishing noise registering in her ears, and then Kate was gone.
SEVEN
Somewhere, deep down, she was aware. Some part of her concussed and swelling brain smelled the dust on the floor beneath her, heard the boots running toward her and the sirens cutting off, one by one, somewhere below, felt the hands and cushions and neck brace, dimly knew that she was being lifted and carried, that there was rain in her face and blue strobing lights and then the harsh flat surfaces of the hospital. A buzzing as her hair was shaved, a cold wash against the scalp, and eventually a mask on her face.
She knew all these things as textures and tastes: velvet soft black night studded by hard, sharp blue beads; the hospital as slick and cold as tile but overlaid with the warm, soft touch of a nurse whose words wrapped around her, incomprehensible but as comforting as a fur blanket. Cops like pillars, doctors like whips, these sensations washed over her while she lay stunned and unmoving, imprinting their textures on her battered brain, to appear in later life - never while she was conscious, but as dream images: fellow cops who smelled of dust, a nurse covered with luscious warm fur, words that tasted like broken glass.