I opened the door and yelled out for Kylie.
She ran down the hall, then stepped into the apartment cautiously, eyes glued to her husband.
“Don’t go in any farther,” I said. “When Benoit Skyped us, the block of C4 he held up had a timer. The one I disabled doesn’t. There’s got to be another bomb somewhere.”
“We don’t have time to look for it,” Kylie said. “Let’s just get Spence out of here.”
“You can’t,” Spence said.
“Yes, we can,” Kylie said. “We’ve got six minutes and twelve seconds, and we’re getting you out of this building if we have to carry you out stark naked, chair and all.”
Spence’s body started to tremble. “You can’t get me out,” he repeated.
“Why?”
His eyes stared straight down at his feet. “That’s why.”
I followed his gaze. I hadn’t seen it before. Probably because there was almost no blood—just small dark stains where Spence’s feet had been nailed to the floor.
Chapter 78
“OH MY GOD,” Kylie said, kneeling down at Spence’s feet.
“He had a nail gun,” Spence said.
“We have to pry you loose,” she said, putting a hand on his left foot.
Spence’s head and shoulders jerked back hard, and he let out a gut-wrenching scream. “Don’t—don’t touch. Please.”
“Spence, we have to get the nails out.”
“No time,” he said, breathing rapidly through the fog of fear and pain. “Just get yourself out.”
The reality of what was happening was incomprehensible, yet Spence seemed ready to accept it.
Kylie and I weren’t.
“Spence,” I said. “Where did Benoit go after he started the timer?”
“Kitch-en,” he said, forcing the word out in two syllables separated by a gasp for air.
Kylie and I both ran to the kitchen.
It felt like déjà vu. Only a few minutes ago I had been flinging the cabinet doors open in Dino’s apartment. Now Kylie and I were doing the same thing in hers.
“I’ll do the top. You get the ones on the bottom,” she said.
I dropped to a squat and started opening the lower cabinets.
“Clear, clear, clear, clear,” Kylie said every time she opened another door and found nothing.
And then I saw it. The top of my head was just at countertop level, and I caught a flicker of red. It was the same glowing red light I had seen when Benoit started the countdown timer. It was coming through the glass door of a sleek, stainless-steel Breville toaster oven.
“Kylie, I got it,” I said, standing up.
“We only have two minutes. Can you disarm it?”
“Maybe if I had two days. I might have exaggerated my bomb experience,” I said. “I can’t even take a chance on opening the oven door. It could be rigged to blow. We have to ditch it—the whole thing.”
“Well, we can’t throw it out the window,” Kylie said. “God knows how many people we’d kill.”
“Do you have a safe?” I said. “That would contain some of the explosion.”
She shook her head. “What about the basement?” she said. “It’s like a bunker down there.”
“Not enough time. Even if your elevator managed to get us down there, we’d never get out.”
“We don’t need the elevator,” she said. “Grab it and follow me.”
The toaster oven was freestanding, about the size of a small microwave, and unplugged. I picked it up and followed Kylie.
“Garbage chute,” she said, bolting out the front door.
The incinerator room was just past the elevator. We went in, and Kylie pulled the chute door open.
As soon as she did, we both realized her mistake. The door was hinged at the bottom, and the hopper was designed to drop down only about sixty degrees. Plastic garbage bags could be squished and squeezed to cram down the chute. Stainless-steel toaster ovens couldn’t.
“Pull hard on the door,” I said. “Rip it right out of the wall.”
Kylie sat on the floor, grabbed the handle, and put all her weight on it.
“It won’t budge,” she said. “The bomb is too damn big to shove through the door.”
I stared at the red glow. We had ninety seconds.
Chapter 79
“GET ME A sledgehammer,” I said.
“I don’t have a sledge—no, I have something. Give me a second,” she said, running back to her apartment.
“I can give you seventy-two seconds,” I yelled back after her. “And then we’re toast.”
I watched the timer count down to 1:00, 0:59, 0:58, and I wondered how much C4 Benoit could stuff into the guts of a toaster oven. From what I knew about his style, he wouldn’t skimp on the ingredients.
Kylie came back carrying a twenty-pound dumbbell. “Best I can do,” she said. “Hold the door open.”
I’m pretty sure I’m stronger than Kylie, but I wasn’t about to debate which one of us should be wielding the dumbbell. We had only thirty-seven seconds, and I figured whatever she lacked in brute strength, she would make up for with pure adrenaline.
I set the toaster oven on the floor, pulled down the chute door as far as the hinge would go, then grabbed the handle to hold the door in place.
“I’m hoping you’re as accurate with a dumbbell as you are with a Glock,” I said. “Try not to hit me. We’ve got thirty seconds. When we get down to ten, we should run like hell for your apartment.”
So we can die in there with Spence, because as sure as shit, when this blows, the blast radius is going to go a lot farther than your living room.
Kylie brought the dumbbell down hard. The force reverberated up my arm, but the door didn’t budge.
“Twenty-five seconds,” I said.
She swung it again.
The door hung on tight.
“Hit it again,” I said. “Third time’s the charm.”
I was right. The door gave. Not a lot, but it gave.
“It’s loose,” I yelled. “Again.”
She lowered the boom, and this time chunks of cinder block fell to the floor.
“One more time. Eighteen seconds.”
Kylie raised the dumbbell high and brought it down with a loud grunt worthy of Serena Williams.
The steel door hit the floor with a clatter.
I picked up the toaster oven as Kylie lashed out at the cinder block wall again and again.
It crumbled, leaving a gaping hole where the door had been. I could see the garbage chute. It was round. And wide.
“Out of the way!” I yelled.
I took one last look at the clock and dropped Kylie and Spence’s ultrachic, stainless-steel, countertop toaster-bomb into the abyss.
The window of time for us to get out of the incinerator room had passed.
“Seven seconds!” I yelled. “Hit the dirt.”
She dropped to the floor.
“Six.”
The irony of it all hit me in an instant. If Kylie and I had been able to run back to her apartment, we probably would have had a chance. But here in the incinerator room, we were directly above ground zero.
“Five.”
The bomb would explode in the basement, a fireball would travel up the chute like a cannon shot, and we would both be engulfed in flames. But maybe it didn’t have to be both of us.
“Four.”
We all die sooner or later. I always figured I had till much later, but if it had to be today, there was no place else I’d rather be, and no one else I’d rather be with.
I threw myself on top of her and covered her body with mine.
“Three. Two. One.”
Chapter 80
“KABOOM!” GABRIEL SCREAMED at the top of his lungs.
The semi-comatose man on the engine room floor snapped alert.
“Did you hear that, Charlie?” Gabriel said. “That was the kaboom of justice.”
Connor gave him a quizzical look.
“As of three seco
nds ago, the bitch cop who killed my girlfriend, and her asshole husband, who stole my identity, just got blown to hell. I wish I could have watched them go up in smoke, but I have bigger fish to fry. Namely your cronies on the top deck.”
Connor tried to talk through the duct tape, but all that came out was a shrill whine.
“You want a speaking part?” Gabriel said. “Okay, but you raise your voice, and I will stick this stun baton down your pants and fry your junk like a Jimmy Dean sausage. Understood?”
The man nodded, and Gabriel yanked the duct tape from his mouth.
Connor gulped air. “Thank you,” he wheezed.
“Don’t thank me, Charlie. I’m going to kill you in about half an hour.”
“Why me?”
“Don’t take it personally. I’m blowing up an entire boat. You just happen to be on it.”
“I don’t have to be on it,” Connor said. “Cut the tape and let me jump ship. I’ll take my chances in the river. Come on, man, give a brother a break.”
“Bad news, brother. This is just makeup. Underneath, I’m as white as Vanilla Ice.”
“Even so, you said we had a lot in common. You’re right. Those guys upstairs are not my cronies. I’m just a working stiff busting his balls for the man. Don’t let me die down here, too.”
“No can do, but kudos on presenting a noble argument. And thank you for not trotting out the old ‘I got a wife and six kids’ routine. It’s so overdone.”
“I don’t have kids, and my ex won’t even notice I’m gone,” Connor said. “The only ones who are going to miss me are the Alley Cats.”
“I hate to break it to you, but cats don’t have feelings.”
Connor laughed. “These cats do. The Alley Cats is the name of my bowling team. If you won’t do it for me, at least do it for them.”
“You crack me up,” Gabriel said. “I wish I could stick around for the whole show, but I’m done here.” He stepped back to inspect the final charge. “Not bad for an amateur.”
“That’s cell-phone-activated,” Connor said. “I’d say that’s a notch or two above amateur.”
“Credit where credit is due, Charlie. I had a great teacher. Mickey Peltz. I hated to have to kill him. I feel the same way about Adrienne, the catering chick upstairs. You too. It totally sucks that good guys like you have to die.”
“I’m touched. Your compassion means a lot to me in my final moments.”
“If it’s any consolation, it’ll be painless. Mickey was right. Sixty pounds is more than enough to split this hull like a ripe melon. Especially with the charge I put under this fuel tank. How big is it, anyway?”
“Each one is five thousand gallons. One blows, and they’ll all go.”
“Then I have twenty pounds all rigged and ready to go that I don’t need down here. I think maybe I’ll take it upstairs and find a nice little spot for it in the main salon.”
“Or maybe you could just shove it up your ass and give yourself a call,” Connor said.
Gabriel laughed. “Charlie, you have no idea how much you’ve brought to this film,” he said, tucking the remaining C4 into his jacket pockets. “When I came up with this scene, I always pictured it as high drama—me sweating like a pig, molding the plastic, scared shitless that I’d blow myself up. But you added just the right touch of comic relief. You’re like the black Quentin Tarantino.”
“So let me get this straight,” Connor said. “You’re making a movie?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the camera?”
Gabriel tapped a finger to his head.
“Oh boy,” Connor said. “And this movie in your head—I die in it?”
“It’s an action movie. Lots of people die in it.”
“Including you?”
“Oh, no. I’m the hero. I escape.”
“How?”
“That’s a spoiler, Charlie. I can’t tip the ending.”
“First of all, the name’s not Charlie. It’s Charles. Second of all, there’s no way in hell you’ll escape. If the explosion doesn’t kill you, Harbor Patrol will fish you out of the drink before you can swim fifty feet.”
“Oh, I escape. It’s in my script. The problem with you, Charles, is that you’ve got no imagination.”
“I got plenty of imagination. You want to hear my script? You’re no hero. You’re just another one of those nut-job suicide bombers who thinks he’s going to wind up with seventy-two virgins.”
“I’m not one of them,” Gabriel yelled, pulling the stun baton from his holster and pointing it at Connor. “I’m the star of this whole show.”
“Oh yeah,” Connor said. “And nothing says ‘action hero’ like a young white guy using a cattle prod on a poor old black man who’s duct-taped to a steam pipe.”
Gabriel holstered the stun baton and knelt down next to Connor. “Charles, trust me. This is a great movie, and I really do have a brilliant way of ending it.”
“But since I’ll be dead, I’ll never get to see it. How convenient.”
“You think I’m lying?” Gabriel said. “I got the escape scene right here in my pocket. It’s mind-blowing.”
“Show it to me,” Connor said.
“Show you? You ever even read a movie script, old man?” Gabriel asked.
“I work for Shelley Trager. He leaves scripts in the bathrooms, and believe me, that’s where a lot of them belong.”
“Well, mine is pure gold.”
“Prove it,” Connor said. “Let me read it. Right here. Right now.”
Gabriel shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t usually show it around. In fact, except for my girlfriend, I haven’t shown it to anybody.”
“Hey, man, I’m not just anybody. I’m the black Quentin Tarantino.”
Chapter 81
I WAS FLAT-OUT wrong. I felt a little stupid, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being dead wrong.
Not only do I not know squat about explosives, but I totally underestimated the New York City Department of Buildings.
Somewhere, somehow, someone, bless his bureaucratic little heart, foresaw my predicament, and had the vision to insist that all garbage chutes in the city of New York must extend six feet above the roof and be equipped with a safety valve called an explosion cap.
The ball of flame I was afraid would travel up the chute and burn us both to hell never did. Instead, a deafening explosion rocked the building and released a pressure wave of hot expanding gases, most of which blew straight through the roof.
Some of the blowback billowed through the hole in the wall we had created, but at least the little incinerator room we were trapped in hadn’t turned into a blazing coffin.
Neither of us moved for a solid fifteen seconds as ash, soot, and chunks of hot garbage fell around us.
And then, silence.
My mouth was pressed to Kylie’s ear.
“Are you alive?” I whispered.
“No,” she said.
“Me either,” I said.
I rolled off her, and the two of us sat up. We weren’t quite ready to stand.
“You have absolutely no bomb experience, do you?” Kylie said, shaking plaster dust out of her hair.
I stood up and grinned down at her like an idiot, thrilled to be alive. “I do now.”
I helped her to her feet, and she put her arms around me, clasping her hands behind my neck. I wrapped my arms around her waist, and, as the dust settled around us, we stood there, gazing into each other’s eyes.
I remember the first day I saw her at the academy. She was heart-stoppingly beautiful back then and, ten years later, with her face marbled with grime and her hair streaked with gray ash, Kylie MacDonald was still the most beautiful woman in the world.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “If you hadn’t stopped me from unlocking that front door, Spence and I—and you—we’d all be—”
She either couldn’t finish, or she just decided that words weren’t enough. She leaned into me and kissed me gently.
But that was ten years ago. Right here, right now, I knew that it all would begin and end with a single kiss.
“You’re welcome,” I said, lowering my arms from around her waist.
She stepped away, and the moment was over.
“Wish I could stay,” she said, “but I’ve got a homicidal maniac to catch, and my poor husband’s got both feet nailed to the floor.”
“How many times have I heard that old excuse?” I said as I followed her down the hallway so I could aid and comfort the lucky bastard with both feet nailed to the floor.
Chapter 82
THE SECOND THAT KYLIE and I walked through the door of the apartment, Spence burst into tears.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, his body still in trauma, now shaking with gratitude and relief.
“That makes three of us,” Kylie said.
She grabbed an afghan throw from the sofa and draped it over his legs. Then she knelt beside him, cradling him in her arms, kissing his forehead, his cheeks, and finally his lips.
I squatted down behind him and cut away the duct tape that bound him to the chair.
As soon as his arms were free, he hugged her tight, and I watched as she quietly rocked him back and forth.
“You guys have got to stop Benoit,” he said, breaking the hug abruptly.
“We will,” she said. “But first we have to do something about getting those nails out of your feet.”
Spence sat back in the chair. “We,” he said, “do not have to do anything. I love you, Kylie, but I don’t need a cop with a crowbar and a claw hammer prying me loose.”
“I love you, too,” she said, “but I can’t just leave you sitting in the middle of the living room. My mother is coming next weekend, and you know what a neat freak she is.”
The love between the two of them was palpable. I couldn’t imagine how much pain he was in, but just having her near made him smile. She was also frustrating the hell out of him.
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