“How big is it?” I asked Biggs. The softest whisper.
“Two bedrooms. This side.” Biggs pointed away from the door and window to the other side. “She in there?”
“Maybe not.”
I touched the doorknob and tested it, expecting it to be locked. The door clicked itself free and fell open so fast that the knob nearly got away from my hand. Inside, there was a tiny foyer with the same filthy shade of carpeting. Living room and kitchen right, bedrooms left. I mapped the apartment in my mind.
I ducked back out of the doorway, toward Biggs. “Tyra?” I called.
More silence. Either we had beaten Tyra, or she hadn’t planned to come. It was possible she was waiting outside, but it felt more like a game.
I scouted the rooms with Biggs hanging behind me, checking the closets and hidden corners. The bathrooms and the kitchen were stripped, the fixtures exposed. But aside from peeling walls, ravaged carpeting, and an unidentifiable rankness always close to my nostrils, Serena’s apartment had fared better than most.
“Man…” Biggs said, once we were in the foyer again.
“What?”
“I didn’t know it would look the same like this. See this?” He pointed to a large hole in the foyer wall, the drywall flaking around it. “That’s where their mama used to keep a big picture of Jesus.” He looked awestruck.
“Which room was Serena’s?”
Biggs led me to the bigger of the two shoeboxes at the end of a dark hallway; Serena’s mother sacrificed the larger bedroom so her daughters would have more space, but it was hard to imagine two twin beds fitting inside, never mind a desk. The window was large, though, overlooking rooftops from houses and duplexes on the next street.
Biggs opened the closet door and cackled. “Oh, shit,” he said, grinning.
“What?”
“They’ve still got—”
But I cut Biggs off suddenly, raising my hand. It had been faint, but I’d heard something from outside. Downstairs. A high-pitched sound. The cat? I stood still and listened. Nothing.
I followed Biggs to the closet to see what had caught his eye. He was gazing at an elaborate carving inside the closet door, painted over but so deeply grooved that I could still make it the large lettering:SHAREEF#1, it said.
Ice-water tickled my skin as the realization came:Serena really lived here.
“Sure seems like love,” I said. “You sure they never hooked up?”
“You’ll never understand it, man,” Biggs said. “Shareef was the sun in her universe. He was God to her. You don’t hook up with God.”
Biggs would have punched me for what I was thinking: He could be talking about himself as much as Serena. Shareef Pinkney had cast a spell on his two friends.
“I’m gonna send somebody here to get this door,” Biggs said, stroking the splintered wood. “I’m gonna keep this to remember them.”
Biggs should have been worrying about howwe would be remembered.
No mistaking the noise I heard this time, because it was much closer—maybe a few feet outside the apartment door: Footsteps. Creeping, butrunning. Heavy. Male?
My finger snapped to my lips:Shhhhh.
Biggs went quiet and listened, too. I wondered if the front door was the only way out. No time. Too late. At the pace I’d heard, someone might come bursting into our closet-sized room in about twenty seconds.Somebody’s here, I mouthed, moving toward the doorway for a better position. I motioned for Biggs to flank me, where we would be out of sight from the doorway.
Maybe Biggs panicked. Maybe he expected to run into Tyra. For whatever reason, Biggs ran straight past me to the open doorway. He was so quick, my fingers missed when I tried to snatch him back by the shirt. Biggs was only halfway out of the room when—POWPOWPOW—three quick explosions contorted him into a wild dance before he fell back against the wall, screaming.
My heartbeat thundered. My skin turned hot and taut, every cell in me ready to fight for my life. I could hear the gunman’s heavy breathing, probably behind a mask. He was running toward me.
Your life doesn’t always flash before your eyes right before you die. Sometimes there are no visions. No faces. No memories. No regrets. I know, because I should have died in Serena’s bedroom that day.
I lunged into the hallway like a baseball player trying to steal third, angling my shoulder so I could hope for decent aim when I hit the carpet. The gunman wouldn’t expect me to come at him from so low to the ground, which might give me a half-second’s advantage. In gunplay, half a second is all you need.
Biggs’s shrieks stabbed my eardrum as I landed nearly on top of him, my elbows locked. I squeezed the trigger twice at the blurry image running toward me in the hall.
The blur stopped running and tripped.“Fuck!” A man fell.
A gun flew free and hit the wall. A nine-millimeter. The Glock landed two feet from me on the floor, and I dived just as the gunman reached for it. One quick sweep of my arm was the difference between living and dying.
I stomped the gunman’s ribs hard, hitting him with my heel. And again. He groaned behind his black ski mask, rolling over in a fetal position. I saw a singed hole in the middle of his chest, but Biggs wasn’t the only one wearing Kevlar. The gunman was holding his lower abdomen, just below the vest. Blood spattered the carpet beneath him. That second wound could kill him, but not before I asked him some questions. I didn’t want to take off his mask to see his face yet. I might have to shoot him again.
“You OK?” I asked Biggs. I didn’t dare look behind me, on one knee as I cautiously jabbed at the gunman’s legs and waist, searching for another weapon while I kept one eye on the foyer. The gunman made a move toward me, so I leaped back.
“H-heshot me!” Biggs gasped. He sounded as if he was going into shock.
The gunman rolled into the wall and wailed, agonized. Convinced he was unarmed and wasn’t going anywhere, I backed up and knelt beside Biggs, stealing quick glances to see how badly he’d been hit.
Biggs was doing better than the gunman. Of the three shots fired, two had hit him in the vest and one had lodged into the meat of his upper right thigh, near the femoral artery. A little higher, and he would have been a soprano. He was bleeding, not spurting.
“Congratulations,” I said. “He missed your balls.”
Biggs blinked petrified tears from his eyes. “F-for real?”
I gave Biggs the Smith & Wesson, which he aimed toward the gunman with a shaky hand, his chest heaving as he breathed.
“Chill,” I said to the cold rage in Biggs’s eyes. “We need him. Cover the door.”
It takes self-control not to kill someone who has just tried to kill you, if only out of fear. Once I was convinced Biggs wasn’t going to blow his attacker away on principle, I checked the Glock’s clip. He’d fired three times, so he still had fourteen shots left. The Smith & Wesson only had three.
“You still got your phone? Call 911,” I told Biggs.
“You’re in The Jungle, man. You can time 911 with a calendar. I know who to call,” Biggs gasped, fumbling for the phone in his pocket. He moaned from a wave of pain, but he dialed.
Now, the gunman.
“Man, I’m dyin’…” the man whimpered as I walked cautiously toward him. From the puddle of blood on his clothes and the sharp smell in the hallway, I didn’t think he was exaggerating.
“How many more?” I said. “Answer me, and you go to the ER.”
“Two, two,” he said. “Get me adoctor, man!”
I had to see his face. More than I wanted to know who had tried to kill me, I wanted to know who I had just shot. “Take off the mask.Do it.”
Behind me, Biggs was shouting excitedly on his phone, half in expletives.
The gunman groaned and yanked off his ski mask, leaving a smear of blood across his cheek. He was my complexion and square-jawed, about thirty, with three days’ worth of facial hair. His hair was in cornrows. I didn’t know him. I was glad he wasn’t a kid. The teardrop-shaped priso
n tat on his cheek told me he was proud to be a killer.
“Where are the other two?” I said.
“Shit, I don’t know. Trey was outside, was gonna lock the gate. Billy might be anywhere.”
Suddenly, I realized what distant sound I’d heard while Biggs was talking to me in the bedroom:the rusty gate being closed. We were locked in the complex, and two more gunmen named Trey and Billy were hunting for us.
Biggs was right. We didn’t have time for 911.
“Who hired you?” I asked the gunman.
“Who the fuck youthink ?” he said. “I ain’t sayin’ no names, so go on and shoot me. I’ll be dead now or dead later.”
“M.C. Glazer?” I said.
He wrenched his face away without answering—but of course it was Glazer. Like Lorenzo had told me, M.C. Glazer didn’t believe in pressing charges. I humiliated Glaze—and he probably thought I’d killed his man, Jenk—so I’d won myself an execution. Tyra might not have even known why Glaze asked her to make the call. It was easy to understand why the rapper might want me dead, but why Devon Biggs?
“Devon, can you stand up?” I said.
“—and I meanRIGHT FUCKING NOW,” Biggs was saying on the phone, his eyes wild. He tried to stand, leaning against the wall with a bloody palmprint. He yelled out in pain.
“I know it hurts, man, but we gotta get out of sight,” I said, rushing to support him. He hopped on one leg and yelled again, holding me as if he would fall five stories if I let him go. “Cops on the way?”
Biggs nodded, in too much agony for conversation. Not only was his leg injured, but two bullets had slammed into his chest at close range. The Kevlar had saved his life—it stops penetration—but the energy load is nonnegotiable. Biggs might have broken ribs, and one of those ribs might have pierced his lung. Should I take Biggs back into Serena’s bedroom to hide, maybe the closet?
Crash.A change of plans flew through the living room window.
A dullBOOM rattled the apartment, dwarfing the gunfire. I dropped Biggs to crouch and aim, expecting the team of shooters to appear. Instead, I smelled acrid smoke and sickly sweet gasoline. A blast of heat snaked its way from the living room.
Molotov cocktail,I realized. The hired killers were trying to draw us out, or burn us to death. Either way was probably fine with them.
Biggs panicked, firing twice at the empty foyer before I pinned his arm to the wall so he wouldn’t shoot me by mistake. I thought my left eardrum had burst from the sound. The gunman was yelling, his face terrified, but all I heard was buzzing in my head.
“Is there another way out?” I shouted into Biggs’s ear. Pale smoke had already crept to us in the back of the hall, with more on the way.
Biggs’s eyes were blank, and he went limp. His phone was on the floor, and he nearly dropped his gun. “Wh-what?” he said. Biggs was fading, and I understood: We had walked into a war. Three more seconds, the smoke in the hall was as thick as fog.
The front door twenty feet ahead of me was still closed, reflecting shimmering patterns from flames in the living room. No one had stormed in to pick us off. Had they thrown the bomb and run?
I leaped over the writhing gunman. After plugging my nose and mouth with my forearm, I crouched and took a look around the corner at the living room. Heat baked my face. Orange-white flames gobbled at the carpeting and walls. The way the gas stuck to the walls in lumps told me it wasn’t simple petrol: This was “foo-foo gas,” homemade napalm. Gasoline and detergent. I had hoped there would be little to burn in an unfurnished room, but the pile of debris had provided plenty of food already, and the smoke needed even less. The roiling clouds were already so clotted that I couldn’t see the kitchen, or even as far as the back wall.
I had to test the front door. I turned the knob.
Gunfire chopped a zig-zag of four holes through the wood. Bullets pinged in a chorus around me. I collapsed to the floor with a yell, ducking by pure instinct. Fear cramped my muscles, so I didn’t know at first that I hadn’t been hit. Four bullet holes in the foyer wall behind me were the testament to my luck.
I could forget about the front door.
Two more shots chipped away at whatever glass remained in the living room window, a reminder that the living room was a gauntlet, too. We were pinned. The wounded gunman was still yelling, begging his crew to let him out. He knew as well as I did that we were all about to be killed by bullets or the smoke.
I went back to Biggs, who was a blinking, wide-eyed mess. I shook his shoulders, hard.“Is there another way out?” I yelled again.
Biggs pointed to Serena’s room, so I grabbed him and helped him hop inside. This room still had its door, which I closed and locked, although the lock was old and flimsy. The air in Serena’s room was less smoky than the hall, so it felt a lot less like sudden death. I pulled off our shirts to stuff under the door and stave off the smoke.
I thanked God for the large window, which was already hanging halfway off its track and only needed a hard shove to fall out, shattering two stories below. Suddenly, we had ventilation; the smoke in Serena’s room thinned. I peered outside, ready to duck, but I didn’t see anyone. All that waited thirty feet below was broken glass, slabs of concrete, and an empty Dumpster. I could make it, but Devon sure as hell couldn’t.
Please let there be a fire escape,I thought. But the only thing remotely like an escape route was a rusting storm pipe hugging the corner of the building from the rooftop, not quite at arm’s reach. The pipe might have reached the ground floor once, but it was broken off four feet below Serena’s window. Even if I wanted to take a chance on being ambushed once I got down, jumping from the pipe was the same as jumping out of the window. Not an option for Devon, and I couldn’t leave a wounded man.
“What’s the way out?” I asked Biggs.
Biggs was barely on his feet, leaning against the closet door. Blood from his gunshot had left an ominous stain on his pants; he needed a doctor, too. Biggs’s lips moved, but the buzzing in my ears roared over it. Then I felt apop, and suddenly I could hear again. “—climb down that pipe to get past her mama,” Biggs was wheezing. “It’s strong, and it’s got grips all the way down. I did it when I was sixteen.”
“The pipe’s broken,” I said.
“FUCK!”Biggs said. He dragged himself to the window, losing his balance. He collapsed against the window frame, gazed out at the storm pipe, and cursed again. I craned my ears for sirens, but there was a surreal silence in my head. All I could hear was my breathing. And my heart thumping.
“Where’s thecops ?” Biggs said. “I called ten minutes ago!”
“It just seems that way,” I said, wiping sweat from my eyes. It felt like three minutes, but it might only be one. I was losing track of time.
In the hallway outside, the gunman was screaming and hacking in the smoke.
I would have done more for him if I could have.
Biggs’s eyes went blank again. “We’re gonna’ die here, man.Right here. Oh, God, please, not a fire…Not on my mama’s street…”
While Biggs tried to negotiate his terms with God, I sifted through the options and picked one: Couldn’t I use the pipe to climbup to the rooftop and find a way down from there? But I couldn’t take Biggs with me. He was in no condition for climbing, and I would be lucky if the pipe would support me alone.
I put my hand on Biggs’s shoulder, looked into his eyes, and told him my plan.
“Keep the gun. Hide in the closet. Close the door. Then…” I answered his anxious eyes with a shrug. “I’ll come back for you.” It sounded like a fairy tale.
Biggs blinked. He got it: His life depended on me, and my life was on shaky ground. If I hadn’t been so scared myself, I would have felt sorry for him.
“Save my ass, Hardwick, and I’ll pay you anything,” Biggs said. He reached to shake on the deal, and I clasped his hand. He probably needed to touch someone.
“My weekly rate is three grand, plus hazard pay.”
“Five bill
s,” he said, so earnestly he might have been asking for my hand in marriage.
“That’ll work.” I wasn’t going to throw my life away for Devon, but I would fight like hell to avoid facing Dorothea Biggs. I couldn’t send people she’d never met to bring her the news that her only child was dead. If Devon died, I would have to tell her myself.
“You want the vest, Ten?” Biggs said suddenly. The offer surprised us both.
I thought about it. Shook my head. “Just weight. You keep it, D.” Shit, we were Ten and D now. Just two old friends at a barbecue.
He drew in a labored breath. “Get your ass back here quick.”
Biggs suddenly clung to my hand. Tears crept from his eyes as he spoke between hitching breaths. “No matter what you think…all I wanted was the best for Reenie. Shareef and me both…would have done anything for her. All Iever wanted…was to take care of her.” His eyes were desperate to be understood. Forgiven.
“Like you said, man, you were kids,” I said.
I hooked my arms beneath Biggs’s armpits and dragged him to the closet. He crawled inside, where Serena’s childhood tribute to Shareef would keep him company. I hoped Biggs was a praying man, because I wasn’t sure God would recognize my voice.
“Keep out of sight,” I told Biggs. “You’ve got one shot now. Don’t waste it.”
“I’m saving one for sure,” Biggs said, gulping at the air. He shivered in the corner, shirtless and bleeding. “I ain’t dying in no fire.”
Lucky for him, then. The smoke would get him first.
“It won’t come to that,” I said, even though it just might.
I closed the closet door, shutting Devon Biggs into the dark.
A single step. That was all that stood between me and freedom.
When I balanced at the edge of the window frame, holding the wall for support, the storm pipe’s first support brace was a three-foot reach to the corner of the building. That would be the strongest part, least likely to crumble under my hands and send me cartwheeling down to the alley below. I would have to jump off the window frame, or leave myself flailing. It was one long, hard step to freedom.
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