My spirits lifted. Maybe they’d barge through. Maybe it was over.
Then, with a piercing hiss, a rifle bullet sailed right below me to the front of the store. It splintered the centre front door into a gigantic cobweb of white cracks.
The officers fell back. They ducked behind the battalion of police cars lining the curb.
Not over, I thought. Not over by – literally – a long shot.
I’d started sweating again, this time like a waterslide, without even realizing it. I was the audience for a horror movie that I badly didn’t want to watch anymore. But I had no choice.
I looked back toward the office.
Heck had grabbed Mr. Rafferty’s shirt collar. He twisted the collar into a corkscrew. Oxygen intake minimized, the storeowner turned a bright red and started gasping.
The gunman dragged Mr. Rafferty through cosmetics toward the front. He kept the point of his rifle jammed into the older man’s jowly chin. Meanwhile, he was making Mr. Rafferty carry the money-stuffed pillowcase for him.
At the end of the cosmetics aisle, Heck paused at a display of some kind. Still with his rifle on Mr. Rafferty, he grabbed a slim, square package off the display.
Holding one end of the package between his teeth, he ripped the other end open, and pulled out a pair of nylons.
Huh?
Pulling one nylon leg over his face, Heck shoved Mr. Rafferty forward again, all the way to the centre front door. He could see the police through the glass. But, with nylon distorting his features, the police wouldn’t get any kind of visual fix on him.
But where was Jon? Wouldn’t Heck want to keep Jon in his view, too?
I looked back toward the office. No Jon.
At the centre front door, Heck removed his rifle from under the storeowner’s jowly chin. He smashed the rifle butt through the splintered glass, creating a jagged hole. Through it he yelled:
“Stay clear of me, coppers. Old man Rafferty’s a bullet away from eternity.”
Heck had problems controlling his temper, to put it mildly. He’d exploded in rage when Gina snuck off.
So how come he wasn’t frazzled about Jon’s disappearance?
Jon and Heck. Their names drummed in my mind as they had before. Together, as in a unit.
Jon-and-Heck.
JonandHeck.
Maybe they were a unit, I thought. That would explain how Heck knew about Friday being the ideal day to pull a robbery. About the cash supply Mr. Rafferty built up in the safe all week.
If I was right, not only had Jon betrayed his dad; he’d put the old guy’s life at risk.
If I was right.
There was one thing that didn’t fit my theory, though.
Jon had tackled Heck, trying to overpower him. Granted, Jon had ended up slamming into the custodian by mistake, getting the guy killed in the process – but you had to give it to Jon. He had tried to resist Heck.
At least, it had looked that way.
At the moment, though, I had other things to think about. Like mice.
That skittering sound I’d heard somewhere behind me. I’d assumed it was a mouse. I’d thought: if I was a mouse, I’d be in the deli, not up here.
And that was just it.
A mouse would be in the deli.
That was no mouse I’d heard.
More like a rat.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jon was up here, in this dimly lit, pipe-and-wire-crammed, netherworld jungle. That’s why I hadn’t seen him just now. He’d figured out where I was – and he was coming after me.
Not that I was scared about taking Jon on. At this point I’d have loved nothing better than an excuse to land a punch right in the middle of that permanent sneer.
But, at the sound of a tussle, Heck might settle our differences by peppering the ceiling with bullets. I was guessing that was pretty much Heck’s idea of conflict resolution.
Besides, as long as Jon didn’t know where I was, I had a chance of finding Gina and escaping.
I surveyed the area around me. I had just crawled around the fat, winding silver air duct. Ahead of me lay tangles of pipes and wires – but no more air duct. Jon wasn’t anywhere along this side of the duct; I’d be able to see him.
I heard a blast from a loudspeaker outside the building: the police talking to Heck. From up here their words were muffled. I wasn’t interested for the time being in what they were saying. I stayed statue-still beside the air duct and listened for sounds on the other side.
No sounds. The silence was thick, like a blanket. Nothing.
And then – that skittering again.
The air duct rose almost to the flat roof. But not quite. There was an inch or so of room between.
I rose to half-standing position and squinted through the narrow space.
I’d been right. Not five feet away from me, his teeth bared in a mean, hungry leer, was Jon Rafferty.
His gaze was fixed right on me.
He turned his face this way and that, his leer widening. I realized it wasn’t me he was looking at.
It was his reflection, in the silver air duct.
I dropped out of view, but not before I noticed what the source of the skittering was.
In his right hand, Jon was carrying his switchblade. As he crawled, the tip of the knife scratched along the tiles.
With all that was going on, why was Jon stalking me? He’d been on my case big-time since he nabbed me. But not because of the supposed wallet theft. There was some other reason Jon had it in for me. Something else that put that vicious glint in his eyes …
He moved on, dragging the knife. Scratch … scratch …
Jon was crawling to the far end of the air duct. Which would bring him around to me.
I could probably jump down to the change table before he got here.
But why take chances? Besides, I’d had enough of Jon messing with me. I decided it was time to mess with him a little.
I felt in my back pocket for the blueprints to the store. The blueprints, rolled up and bound with an elastic band.
I eased the elastic off. Then, I stripped some duct tape off the nearest set of wires. Scrunching the tape into a ball, I positioned it inside one end of the elastic.
Lifting my do-it-yourself slingshot to the narrow space above the air duct, I stretched the elastic. I aimed at a set of pipes. I let the ball of duct tape go.
Piiinnnnggg!
Jon whipped around, bonking his forehead against the air duct. The whole duct vibrated, with a booming series of echoes. The effect was like an earthquake.
“WHAT’S GOING ON UP THERE, RICH BOY?” yelled Heck.
Jon had botched his attempt at being stealthy, that was what. I almost smiled at the rage twisting Jon’s face.
Clutching his knife in the air, he crawled toward the area where the Piiinnnnggg! had sounded. Unfortunately, being mad doesn’t help if you’re trying to be silent. Using just one hand to crawl, Jon fell over a clump of wires. His knife hand went down smash through a light pod. Glass chunks hailed to the store floor.
On my side of the air duct, I stopped watching Jon – Three-Stooges-rolled-into-one entertainment that he was – and bent down again. I crept back to the tile I’d pried loose.
Placing both hands on either side of the hole, I swung down and dropped to the top of the change table.
It dipped under my weight but didn’t crack. The grinning teddy bears provided a soft landing. Rolling off the table, I straightened them up again. Maybe I was catching the tidiness bug from Gina.
I could hear muffled thuds in the ceiling as Jon continued his klutzy hunt for me.
At the front of the store, I could also hear Heck mumble-talking to Mr. Rafferty. The storeowner was whimpering, pleading. For his life, maybe.<
br />
Poor, wretched guy. If I could help him, I would.
For now, though, I was headed for the electronics section. I ran past a huge, red-roofed playhouse, managing to avoid knocking against a display of musical chimes. A sea-themed display, plastic whales, octopi and fish grinned back at me. Everybody grinned in this department.
Sprinting through the CD section, I slid to a stop in the middle of the cell phones.
They gleamed around me: silver, pink, green, blue, red, gold, purple. It was more like a candy display than a digital one. I scanned the phone wares.
My gaze stopped on a sign that read, TESTER PHONE: TRY IT – YOU’LL LOVE IT!
There was nothing under the sign. Gina had the phone. That was the one she’d used to call the police.
Outside, a policewoman boomed through a megaphone: “WE UNDERSTAND THERE’S BEEN A SHOOTING. IF THE GUNMAN WILL LET EVERYONE GO, I’LL COME IN, ON MY OWN, AND WE CAN TALK. I KNOW WE CAN FIGURE A WAY OUT OF THIS.”
Ah. The conciliatory approach. That should work like a charm with Heck.
Heck yelled back, “I WANT YOU, ALL OF YOU, TO BACK OFF, OR THE OLD MAN HERE GETS IT.”
By now the air inside Rafferty’s was hot and still. It was smothering, like a heavy blanket.
I headed for the nearest customer-service counter. It was circle-shaped. Inside the circle, on the floor, lay a cell phone, a pink one with silver sparkles.
Pink and silver – and then black, all black, as something blunt and heavy sliced deep into the back of my skull, knocking me out.
Someone was bending over me. Someone blurry. There was bashing inside my head, like a gong being struck over and over. The gong was hitting the backs of my eyes and my vision was jumping all over the place. I couldn’t focus.
I squinted, forcing my eyes to hold still.
The someone was Gina. She was tugging nervously on one of her silver hoop earrings. She looked pale.
She was also holding an axe.
I mumbled, “I was coming to help you, and you sliced my head open.” Gina lowered the axe.
“Ohhhh,” I moaned. “The final blow … ” I shut my eyes.
Gina whispered crossly, though with a tearful tremor in her voice, “I don’t know why everything has to be a joke with you.”
Good idea to whisper, I thought. No sense in alerting Heck to where we were. “I wasn’t joking,” I whispered back, and opened my eyes – cautiously.
She was holding the axe handle close to my face. It had blood and hair on it.
“See?” she said. “I hit you with the handle, not the blade. But I – I may have clobbered you a little harder than I meant to.
“After I snuck away from Heck, I grabbed the axe from the hardware department, for self-defence. When I saw you drop from the ceiling, I got scared and used it.” She managed a feeble grin. “I thought that you and Heck were in this together. I mean, what with both of you being …
“Thieves,” I finished for her. I thought it was kind of nice that she couldn’t bring herself to say the word, everything considered. “Though actually, I’m not.”
I winced. It hurt to talk.
Gina set the axe on the floor and helped me up, just enough so Heck couldn’t catch sight of us.
The pain in my eyes got worse. I swayed around on my feet. It wasn’t Gina holding me up, but my mother, the day in grade one I’d fallen off the school stage. Everybody had laughed, and I’d loved it – even though I was bawling my eyes out. It takes an actor to claim the spotlight, Mom had said. That was when I knew I wanted to go into acting.
“I’m sorry about hitting you,” Gina said, and the image of Mom and the grade one stage vanished.
“Not as sorry as I am,” I said. If my head hadn’t been splitting I would have enjoyed the fact that she had an arm around my shoulders, supporting me. Well, you can’t have everything.
Voice tired and ragged, I explained, “I knew you’d be freaked about this situation. I thought you might appreciate having someone to escape with. We could use the buddy system. If Heck saw one of us – if he shot one of us – the other one would be there to help.”
Gina watched me, her dark eyes uncertain, mistrustful. But she didn’t let go of me.
From the floor, the pink phone gleamed into the corner of my eye. The bright colour hurt. “I figured it was you who phoned the cops,” I said.
Gina nodded. “I told them what happened. They wanted me to stay on the phone, but the signal died.”
“At least you got through,” I said. “Heck wasn’t counting on that.”
“Not just Heck,” Gina said. “Rick, the custodian. Jon was right. Rick must’ve been involved in this. Rick shut off the power and the external phone lines before Heck came in. It had to have been Rick. He had keys to the control room.”
So did Jon, I thought. I didn’t say this, though. Gina was upset enough without hearing my theories about her boyfriend. That he was as crooked as a Z and then some.
She murmured, puzzled, “I wouldn’t have pegged Rick as the criminal type. His main interests in life were sun-tanning and waterskiing.”
I felt sick in a way that had nothing to do with the head-bashing I’d just got. To avoid thinking about Rick, I concentrated on our escape.
I said, “My idea was, we’d head to the back of the store. There’s gotta be a back way out.”
Gina sighed. “Sure, there’s a back way. The employee entrance. That’s where I ran when I got away from Heck. But the employee entrance is in lockdown. Swiping my card didn’t work. I don’t get it. How could the door be in lockdown if the power isn’t on?”
The news that there was no back exit didn’t make the pounding inside my head any better. “In a company power outage, an emergency power source can come into play,” I said. “That would explain the locked-down doors and the still-functioning intercom system. I’ve heard about this kind of stuff from my stepfather. He’s in the security biz.”
Gina looked surprised, maybe at the idea that an alleged wallet thief had a relative in the loss-prevention business. But all she said was, “I bet your stepdad has lots of interesting stories.”
Loud stories, for sure, I almost said, but didn’t. It occurred to me, grudgingly, that Alvin’s stories were kind of interesting, at that.
“Anyway, whoever flipped on the emergency power knew the store pretty well,” Gina remarked, and sighed. “More proof Rick was in this with Heck.”
Not Rick, I thought. Jon.
I closed my eyes and pictured Heck, waiting outside in the hot sun for Jon to shut the power off, lock down the rear exits, and let him in the front – pretending Heck was a customer. To get the robbery going. Jon must be some kind of mastermind, planning all this.
What bothered me was, I couldn’t see Jon as a mastermind. More like a mini-mind.
There was something here I didn’t understand.
“Are you still with me?” Gina sounded frightened.
I wasn’t sure I was. My eyelids felt like ball bearings. No, heavier than that. They felt like the sky, and I was Atlas trying to lift it.
I mumbled, “But I should understand it. ‘To grasp the full significance is the actor’s duty.’ ” I was feeling woozy again. Maybe I was going into a coma.
“Sam?”
She remembered my name. That was something worth coming back into consciousness for.
I took a deep breath, forced my eyes open, and focused on her.
She asked, “What were you just saying?”
“It’s something this 1950s actor James Dean said. He meant that, if you’re going to act out life, you have to be able to understand it.”
Gina stared at me. Then she broke into a glimmer, just a glimmer, of a smile. “You’re a weird kind of thief.”
“You’re a weird kind of
axe-wielder.”
Her smile grew wider.
Then a rifle shot blistered the air, followed by the sound of shattering glass.
CHAPTER SIX
The broken glass wasn’t from the front doors this time. It poured down from a light pod to one side of the store, over the coffee shop.
“I’d advise staying away from the doughnuts,” I murmured to Gina. I pulled her down, inside the O of the customer service counter.
At the front, Heck shouted out to the police, “DON’T GET ANY IDEAS ABOUT BUSTIN’ IN. I’ll TALK TO YOU WHEN I’M GOOD AND READY.”
This time Heck had taken the silencer off. He’d fired the shot as a warning to the police to stay back.
“When will he be good and ready?” Gina whispered back despairingly. In spite of the heat she was shivering.
I massaged my forehead. “That’s an interesting point. If Heck was planning to hunker down for a while, he wouldn’t have aimed at the coffee shop ceiling. Unless he’s into snacking on glass fragments, he’s just ruined the only food source around here. Which makes me think … ”
I paused. As a matter of fact it was hard to think with my head still pounding.
Gina rummaged in her purse and came up with a small container of Tylenol. “Here. This’ll make you feel better.”
“I get it. You cause and cure headaches.” I knocked back a couple, almost choking on them because they were so dry. Too bad I didn’t have a nice tall glass of lemonade to wash them down.
There were lots of too bads in life. Being taken hostage by a gunman was right up there.
I explained to Gina, “Heck must be pretty sure he’s gonna get out of here soon. Otherwise he would have aimed away from the food supply.”
Gina shook her head in frustration. Her hoop earrings bounced. “That doesn’t mean anything. Heck’s a nutter. He can’t reason things out. He’s barely in control of himself. Look what he did to Rick.”
The policewoman was answering Heck – if you could call what they were having a conversation – through her megaphone. “WE KNOW SOMEONE’S INJURED IN THERE. WE HAVE AMBULANCES STANDING BY TO – ”
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