Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

by Gabriel Hunt

  “Well, at least you didn’t go quietly,” Gabriel said.

  But Sheba wasn’t listening. She was already halfway to the bathroom, her coral blouse pulled open. She let it fall to the floor behind her and Gabriel left it lying there. The bloodstains wouldn’t come out, not from silk. She could find something else to wear in the closet.

  “Did this guy say anything when he broke in?”

  “Yeah,” Sheba said, unhooking her bra, stripping it off her shoulders and flinging it at Gabriel’s chest. “He said come quietly or I’ll blow your brains out.” Furiously, she stepped out of her slacks and turned to get the water running in the shower.

  “Anything about where he was taking you?”

  “He didn’t seem to feel the need to share that much information with me.” She stood facing him, thumbs hooked under the waistband of her panties, naked otherwise, blood smeared in the long cascade of her auburn hair, and Gabriel thought back to his conversation with Michael. He’d had hopes of getting Sheba out of her clothing, but this wasn’t the way he’d had in mind.

  “Why don’t you take your shower, I’ll wait for you outside—”

  “Like hell you will,” she said. “You and that gun of yours will stay right here with me.” She stripped off the last bit of clothing she had on and stepped under the steaming spray.

  Minutes later, Sheba emerged dripping but no longer trembling, angry but no longer scared. She wrapped a towel turban-style around her head and made a beeline for the closet. Gabriel kept very little clothing for himself there, just a few linen shirts in various shades of cream and tan, a few pairs of khaki pants—items pretty much indistinguishable from the outfit he had on. But there was a good-sized selection of women’s clothes, things various guests had left behind optimistically after stays of a night or two. Sheba flipped through the hangers like a shopper at a sale, discarding one option after another. “Jesus, Gabriel, why are all your women so goddamn flatchested?”

  “Only by your standards,” Gabriel said. He’d met Sheba’s family, and nature had been generous to all the McCoy women.

  She found a dress, finally, a red satin number with a long slit up the side and no sleeves, but at least it fit when she pulled it down over her head. It had once held the ample charms of a woman named Cierra Almanzar; she’d left it here when she’d returned to her post as director of the Museum of the Americas in Mexico City. She wouldn’t mind sharing it with a fellow academic, Gabriel decided.

  Gabriel strapped on a hip holster for his Colt, put a leather jacket on over it. He checked the gun’s cylinder—just two shots left. And naturally he didn’t have any more ammunition here in the apartment. Who would have thought he’d need any?

  Sheba stepped back into the shoes she’d kicked off earlier, gaining three inches in the process, and Gabriel led her to the front door. They’d been in here barely ten minutes, but he knew she was right: for safety’s sake, they couldn’t leave soon enough.

  He swung the door open.

  Then he swung it shut again, spun, and, grabbing Sheba around the waist, took her down like a lineman making a tackle. They hit the floor an instant before the wood of the door splintered inwards and a cloud of shotgun pellets sped through the air inches above their heads.

  Chapter 3

  A second blast followed the first, tearing great gouts out of the wall opposite the door.

  Gabriel put a finger to his lips, then gestured in the direction of the bedroom. Sheba nodded and began crawling that way on her hands and knees. Gabriel unholstered his Colt, armed it, waited one second…two seconds…three—and then popped up when he saw a shadow on the ruined surface of the door inch closer.

  In a glimpse he saw the shotgun wielder, a big bear of a man in a black windbreaker, and behind him a pair of skinnier whippet types, hawk-nosed, their severe hair-lines shaved down to stubble. All three were holding handguns, though only the two in back had them pointed at Gabriel.

  Gabriel fired twice and dodged away, not waiting to see who he’d hit. Return fire sounded loudly and bullet holes blossomed in the wall behind where Gabriel had been standing. A ricochet zinged into the mirror, which shattered, shards of glass pouring onto the floor with a sound like rain. This was the first bit of damage that really pissed Gabriel off—that mirror had been an antique. But there’d be time to mourn it later. If he was lucky.

  The Colt was empty; he jammed it back in its holster and cast about for another weapon he could use.

  Hanging from a pair of hooks on the wall was an aboriginal boomerang he’d been given by the chief of a tribe in New Guinea. Gabriel had learned to throw it while he was there, and if he were in one of the wide open spaces for which it had been designed he might have pulled off a slick maneuver, taking out multiple assailants with one flick of his wrist. But he was in a Manhattan apartment, where the best thing you could say for a boomerang was that it was a pretty good-sized stick. When he saw one of the gunmen’s hands come into view, pistol extended, Gabriel swung the boomerang down, smashing the man’s wrist. The gun fell to the ground and Gabriel kicked it out of sight under a couch.

  The second of the two skinny gunmen elbowed his fellow aside and thrust his pistol in Gabriel’s face, but Gabriel caught it backhanded with an upswing of the boomerang as the man squeezed off a shot. The bullet flew over Gabriel’s shoulder, into a window, and out over 70th Street. Gabriel swung once more, striking the man in the temple with a blow that split the wooden boomerang in half. The man crumpled. But behind him the other gunman had recovered sufficiently to leap forward, the squat blade of a boot knife shining in his left hand.

  Dropping the remnants of the boomerang, Gabriel threw up an arm to block a jab that would otherwise have given him an impromptu tracheotomy. Then he swung his other fist into the man’s gut. But the man didn’t fold up in pain; on the contrary, he took the punch without reacting at all, not surprising given the rockhard solidity of the abdomen that had met Gabriel’s knuckles.

  Pressing with a forearm that had none of the showy bulk of a weightlifter’s but all the strength, the man forced his knife closer and closer to Gabriel’s face, millimeter by millimeter. With his free hand, Gabriel grabbed the man’s injured wrist. The man squealed in pain and Gabriel took the opportunity to lunge in and deliver a headbutt to his forehead.

  If the man’s abdomen had been hard, that was nothing compared to his skull—Gabriel’s vision swam for a moment and his ears rang with the sound of the impact. But the strength went out of the other man’s arms, and he dropped to his knees amid the shards of the mirror. Gabriel lifted one of his own knees into the man’s chin and the guy slumped to one side, unconscious.

  “Not so fast,” a voice said.

  Gabriel looked up into the twin barrels of the shotgun.

  “I reloaded it,” the man in the black windbreaker said, looking less like a bear now than a wolf, his eyes narrowed to slits, a vicious, hungry expression on his face. “In case you had the idea that maybe I hadn’t.”

  Gabriel put his hands up, annoyed. Had his own shots hit no one at all?

  “I always assume,” Gabriel said, “that any gun that’s pointed at me is loaded.”

  “That’s smart,” the man said. “Now step back—over there by the couch will be fine.”

  Gabriel stepped backwards toward the couch where he’d kicked the gun earlier. Looking over, he could just make out the shape of the barrel in the shadow by one leg. If the guy allowed him to sit down at that end—

  An enormous clang sounded, like the ringing of a churchbell, and looking back Gabriel saw the man go down, shotgun and all. Sheba was standing above him with a newly dented brass coal scuttle clutched between her hands.

  “Thank you,” Gabriel said.

  “No problem,” Sheba said, tossing the scuttle aside. It clanged again when it landed. “I owed you one.”

  “You owed me two,” Gabriel said, “but who’s counting. Come on.”

  He led her back to the stairs. Before they made it one
flight down, though, they heard a clatter of footsteps racing up toward them.

  “Other way,” Gabriel said. They turned around and pounded back up, past the fifth floor, to the heavy metal door that led out onto the building’s roof. Even with the door shut behind them they could hear the footsteps and shouts of the men coming closer.

  “Fire escape,” Gabriel said and pulled Sheba along.

  At the edge of the roof they both leaned over the side, looked down at the topmost fire escape balcony some dozen feet below. Some old buildings in New York had metal ladders connecting the fire escape to the roof, but this wasn’t one of them. Some also had wide, modern fire escapes with protective railings to keep you from slipping off, but this wasn’t one of those either. The only way down from here was to climb over the edge of the roof, dangle, and let go—and if you slipped, you slipped five stories to the pavement.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Sheba said. Her face had gone pale, much the same as it had in Hungary; sixty feet wasn’t three hundred, but a fall would be just as fatal. “Gabriel, I don’t know if I can—”

  “Of course you can,” he said. “Here, I’ll lower you.” He wedged himself up against the stone wall at the edge of the roof and held tightly to her forearms as she carefully climbed onto the ledge. She extended one leg over the edge, then moved the other off, and as he suddenly found himself bearing her entire weight, Gabriel lost hold of one of her arms.

  “Gabriel!”

  “It’s okay, I’ve got you.” And he did, if only by one arm. He bent at the waist and carefully lowered her as far as he could. Her feet were still some distance from the platform. “Ready? I’m going to let go.”

  “One second,” she said, and kicked off her heels again. One landed on the fire escape—the other slipped between the widely spaced metal laths and plummeted to the concrete below.

  “Ready?” Gabriel said again.

  “Wait—”

  The door banged open behind him then, and Gabriel let go. He heard Sheba’s scream and a clatter as she landed, but he couldn’t spare a glance to see how she was doing. Not with three men pouring through the doorway onto the roof, three men who all matched Gabriel’s six-foot height but topped him in breadth and whose revolvers were probably not as lacking in bullets. That’s what he had to assume, anyway.

  He quickly ran through some options in his head. There wasn’t any place he could run—it was a small roof. There wasn’t much for him to take shelter behind, just a single roof fan in a metal housing, and if he tried that they could split up and pin him down from both sides. Maybe if he could somehow make it past them to the stairs—

  Gabriel turned and vaulted over the side of the building.

  There was no second cable waiting for him this time. No first cable, for that matter. Just a narrow fire escape and a five-story drop.

  For an instant, as he fell through the air, Gabriel found himself thinking about how much of his adult life he’d spent jumping from high places with people who wanted to kill him close behind. It was a topic, he decided, that might reward reflection sometime, when he could think about it at his leisure. But as his feet hit the fire escape and his legs buckled under him and he slid toward the edge, his mind was drawn sharply back to more pressing matters.

  Scrabbling with one arm, he caught hold of the last of the laths just as he plunged over the side. He held on tight and found himself swinging from it in a great arc, back and forth, like a kid on a jungle gym. At the inner end of one swing he let go, dropping onto the next balcony down.

  Glancing between the laths at his feet, he saw Sheba two flights below him, a shoe in one hand, descending as quickly as she could manage. Glancing up, he saw the men on the roof looking back down and then the barrels of their guns as they extended them toward him.

  Three triggers were pulled simultaneously, and three bullets went spanging off various bits of metal between them and him.

  Gabriel got his legs under him and, staying low, hurried down the metal steps. From overhead he heard the sound of first one, then another, of the men landing on the fire escape. The third attempted it but missed. A moment later he fell past Gabriel, arms windmilling desperately; their eyes locked for an instant and then he was gone. The sound when he hit the ground was wet and terrible.

  Gabriel chanced another look down and was briefly concerned when he didn’t see Sheba below him. Then he realized it was because she’d already reached the bottom. He caught sight of her running along the sidewalk toward Park Avenue, both shoes in her hands now, bare feet pounding against the pavement.

  Another bullet flew past him, this one within inches of his face. He saw Sheba stop and look back. “Go!” he shouted. “Don’t wait for me. Just go!”

  She turned again—and ran head-on into the arms of a man who’d stepped around the corner into her path.

  He was at least a foot taller than her and quite a bit heavier; despite the warm weather he wore a heavy overcoat and black leather gloves. And when she tried to back away, he wrapped his long arms around her and lifted her entirely off her feet.

  The shoes fell from her hands.

  Gabriel hurried to get to the bottom of the fire escape, but by the time he made it, leaping over the side of the lowest balcony and landing in a crouch, Sheba had already been bundled, screaming, into a black car that peeled away from the curb in a cloud of exhaust.

  He ran after the car, chasing it out into the street as more gunshots exploded behind him. The car swung around the corner onto Park, where for once—this being a weekend morning in New York City in the middle of August—traffic was practically nonexistent. There’d be no catching it on foot. Gabriel looked back the other way, saw a yellow cab speeding downtown, and stepped into its path. The car screeched to a stop just inches from his legs.

  The cabbie, a turbaned and bearded Sikh, stuck his head out the driver-side window and shouted, “You wish to be killed? Is this what you desire?”

  Gabriel threw open the door to the backseat, piled inside. “You see that car,” he said to the driver in Punjabi, “the black one, there? Follow it. Don’t let it out of your sight. A woman’s life depends on it.”

  Through the rear window, Gabriel saw the men from the roof round the corner. One of them kicked Sheba’s shoes into the gutter as he ran. The other raised his gun.

  “Now!” Gabriel said, ducking.

  The cabbie glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the rear windshield of his car shatter. He put the gas pedal to the floor and, swerving around a double-parked delivery van, roared off.

  Chapter 4

  They made it three blocks before a sedan pulled in behind them, a silver Audi with smoked-glass windows and a dent the size of a melon in the hood. The four silver circles across the car’s grill made Gabriel think of the ring in the nose of a bull, particularly when the driver revved the engine angrily and the car surged forward. The Audi came within a few feet of the cab’s rear bumper before the taxi driver—Rajiv Narindra, according to the ID displayed on the back of his seat—swerved again, nearly sideswiping a street-corner hotdog cart in his haste to change lanes.

  Above the next intersection, the traffic light changed from green to yellow. Narindra sped through it. It turned red before the Audi reached it, but they sped through as well. A chorus of honking erupted behind them.

  “Who are these men?” Narindra shouted back at Gabriel.

  “They are hired killers, abductors,” Gabriel said, testing the limits of his Punjabi vocabulary. “They have taken a friend of mine and…mean to…” Damn it, what was the word? “Harm her.”

  “Why?”

  “If I could tell you that,” Gabriel muttered, in English this time, “I wouldn’t be here in the first place.” He bent forward over the front seat, thankful to have gotten into one of the minority of cabs in New York that didn’t have a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas between the driver and the passengers. He rifled through the pile of odds and ends cluttering the passenger seat: a thick, spiral-bound book of
maps, a handful of ballpoint pens, half a sandwich, an unopened bottle of Snapple. Narindra turned the wheel sharply to the left, throwing Gabriel against his shoulder, and then swung it back to the right.

  “Do you have anything we could use as…” Gabriel’s language skills petered out again. Desperately he resorted to English. “A weapon—a gun…a, a, a jack, something heavy—anything you could use as a weapon?”

  Narindra shook his head. “A weapon? This I do not have.”

  Up ahead, Gabriel saw the black car speeding up, pulling away. A glance at their own speedometer showed they were doing close to fifty themselves.

  From behind, meanwhile, came the crack-crack-crack of gunfire. Narindra cut across two lanes and then back.

  Beggars can’t be choosers. Gabriel grabbed the Snapple bottle and, turning in one swift movement, cocked his arm and launched the bottle through the open space where the rear windshield had been. The driver of the Audi pulled to one side to avoid it, but the bottle struck, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in the glass.

  That was something—but hardly enough. And now he was out of projectiles completely.

  An arm holding a gun emerged from the Audi’s passenger-side window and fire erupted from the barrel. Gabriel dropped to his knees in the cab’s footwell. A line of bullet holes stitched across the back of the front seat, throwing puffs of padding into the air. That it was only shreds of foam rubber raining down on him and not blood was just dumb luck, Gabriel knew—two feet to the left and he’d have been hurtling down Park Avenue in a cab with a corpse at the wheel.

  He peeked over the front seat again, looked at the dashboard. There had to be something—