Maggie would admit later that she had yelped and hid behind the police officer when the gun began to fire, bullets wildly thunking into the walls and steps and two into the officer. He fell backward into her arms and knocked them both to the floor, which may have saved her life as more shots riddled the reception desk until she felt marble shards rain down on her shoulders. She felt wetness against her skin but it was only her wound, wrenched into oozing again underneath its saturated bandage.
When she looked up, the barrel of the gun formed a straight line between the man holding it and her forehead. She saw the fingers around it clench.
It gave an empty click.
Even in the dim light she saw the shock on the man’s face. Then Shanaya pulled away from him and ran for the door.
The man bent over his injured hand, coughing as the first wisps of smoke drifted down the steps.
The cop partially on top of her groaned and rolled to one side, sucking in air. Chest wound, she thought, penetrated the lungs which are now filling with blood—
Then, with her hands on his chest and back, she felt the body armor underneath his uniform shirt and realized the bulletproof vest had stopped the projectiles; he gasped because the force had knocked the wind out of him. He pushed himself to his knees before she even let go of him.
He reached for his gun. It had slipped from his hand and lay on the floor to his right.
The man saw this, looked from the cop to the door and back again, and in an instant Maggie saw his reasoning. He could follow Shanaya and run for the door, at which point the cop would probably shoot at him. Or he could get the still-loaded gun from the weakened cop who even now shrank into a rasping cough as his emptied lungs tried to refill with smoky, gaseous air.
He lunged for the officer.
Maggie stepped into his path, plowing into him with all the force her small body could muster. It knocked her to the ground, nearly on top of the officer’s gun, but forced the man to stagger back as well. Only a step or two, but long enough for the cop to get his fingers on his weapon.
Change of plan. The man pivoted and ran for the door. He disappeared through the set of inner doors as the cop fired and a bullet plunked into its frame. Maggie rolled to her feet but did not pursue him, finding she didn’t care much whether he got away or not. She cared only that the building was on fire, and Jack remained upstairs.
She moved to help the officer up, but he had already regained his footing. He shouted at her to get out of the building and then followed the man . . . a mixed message, since he hardly wanted to send her out to the street where a violent criminal had just gone, yet she clearly shouldn’t remain inside where the smoke now thickened to block one’s sight.
No matter. She had no intention of leaving anyway.
She left him to find and arrest the man who had shot at them, and fled up the stairs. On the landing she promptly stumbled over a body, clad in still-smoking clothing that hurt her hands when she shoved him onto his back. Even with the dim light and the soot on his face she saw no one she recognized, and with a quick check she learned his carotid did not pulse with even the hint of a heartbeat. She left him there.
The air on the second floor, she immediately found, made the first floor seem like a meadow on a bright spring day. Wafting columns of black smoke swirled in front of her, ghostly visions of the Grim Reaper backlit by a yellow flickering glow of multiple flames. She called Jack’s name, listened for a response. Then she moved forward but more slowly, the heat and her own fear pushing her back.
She heard a cry that ran as a vein of ice up her spine and through her bones, not thawing even in the face of the blasting heat from the inferno ahead. Jack—
It wasn’t Jack, she realized as a lighted window appeared on her left. It came from someone much smaller.
Through the small window at the top of the door she saw two small children—children? What appeared to be a boy and maybe a girl, preschool ages. The older child cried and banged on the door, pausing only when he caught sight of her through the glass. Hope lifted his features. The other child sat on the floor a few feet away, rubbing the copious tears away with tiny fists.
Maggie put her hand on the knob, remembering too late the warning about fires and metal doorknobs, but though it warmed it did not burn. But it also did not turn. The door was locked.
She put her face to the glass, also uncomfortably warm. The boy worked the knob, his little hands twisting one way and then the other, as the sound of the blast and the smell of the smoke drifting under the door spoke to the inborn, animal instinct to run from danger.
“It needs a key,” Maggie called to him. “A key.” She held up one hand as if holding a key, and made a twisting motion with it. Surely an adult had been in there with them? Maybe left the key on her desk or in her purse, somewhere this small boy had seen it and could find it?
But he only stared at her, blank and uncomprehending.
“Maggie!”
She turned, relief washing over her like a warm surf, happy and joyful to know he lived, her world righted before she even saw him. She let out the breath she’d been half holding, but choked on its replacement.
He staggered out of the swirling mass, a double shadow. He held Riley’s arm around his own neck to support some of his weight. Blood covered half of Riley’s face.
“Help him out,” Jack said. “I’ll get the kids.”
“The door’s locked,” she said, positioning herself under Riley’s other arm.
“I’m okay,” Riley protested. “I can make it.”
She thought, Really? because it looks like you were shot in the head, but couldn’t speak through the coughing. Blood flowed freely from a gash along his left temple. In the light from the door’s window she could see the graze . . . but that could cause swelling on the brain—possibly why he now had trouble walking. He needed medical attention now.
“Break the glass,” she told Jack, but even as she said it she could see the difficulty. The window sat five, five and a half feet off the ground, too high to reach the inside knob from outside and too high for the kids to climb out through. Also too small for a man Jack’s size to crawl through to get them. It was a sturdy, metal door made for an industrial setting, unlikely to be forced open by anything less than a battering ram.
“I know where the keys are,” he said, and began to turn away.
“Jack!” The name ripped from her throat without conscious thought. She didn’t want him to stay. She wanted him to leave the building with her, right now.
But she didn’t want two children to burn to death either.
The fingers of one hand brushed her cheek. “I’ll be all right. Get him out of here.” Then he went back toward the main room, the vortex of heat and flame and smoke.
“I can make it,” Riley said again, but his weight leaned on her until her knees threatened to buckle.
Hanging on to the arm around her neck with her left hand and stretching her right arm around his waist, she pulled him toward the steps. He grabbed the banister and the extra bit of stability helped as they made a lumbering but hasty progress down the steps. Riley said nothing and neither did she. They barely had time since each breath produced at least a small cough and sometimes a hacking, stop-and-bend rasp.
They made it to the bottom, Maggie listening more for Jack’s feet on the steps behind them than for any activity outside. She did not hesitate at the doors to the sidewalk. She had heard the sirens and figured there would be plenty of cop cars, firetrucks, and ambulances out there on the street, and the bad guy had either been cuffed and guided into a back seat behind a cage, or he had fled. Either way, she and Riley had no choice. They had to breathe or they were going to die.
The outside air hit her with a cold slap and she sucked it in with appreciation. Then she coughed it out with much less appreciation and repeated same.
As expected, they walked into a sea of red and blue and white lights. Officers with guns dropped them when they recognized Riley and herself. Strong hands hustled them over to the ambulance as EMTs emerged from its cab. The firemen snaked hoses around all of them and began to break the upstairs windows with concentrated beams of water. She could hear the glass tinkle across the sidewalk and the fire howl as it received a boost of oxygen.
“Is the building clear?” someone asked her.
“No! Jack’s in there. And two kids!”
“Suspects?”
“I don’t know.” On the other side of one of the cop cars, she saw a uniformed officer guiding the man who had shot at her into the back of a car. From his position she guessed the man had his hands cuffed behind his back. Good for him.
Shanaya stood nearby, getting a blanket draped around her shoulders by another officer.
“One down on the second floor,” Riley told them. “The kids are in a room on the second—”
Then the EMT pulled him onto a gurney and his weight fell from Maggie’s shoulders. She turned without a good-bye or a kind word and headed straight back to the foyer entrance.
She didn’t make it. As her toe touched the sidewalk’s edge she found herself encircled and lifted and pulled away. At first she thought the building had exploded again, but the force turned out to be a fireman who had to stand six-five in his stocking feet.
“Jack’s in there!” she screamed at him.
“I know.”
“You have to get him out!”
“You can’t go in,” he said, which did not address her statement. “Leave this to us.”
But “us” now stood around outside in the mist from the hoses.
She said, “There are two children locked in a room on the second floor. Top of the stairs on the left.”
A trump card. A grown man didn’t push the hero button like vulnerable children did. And that’s where Jack would be, she told herself. If he collapsed from the smoke, she would not be able to move him, even drag him out, and then they would both perish. But a team of firemen could get him and the children.
“Stay behind the trucks,” he told her, and went back to work, as if the idea that she might ignore any command of his could never enter his mind.
He still blocked the entrance, so she returned to Riley’s side behind the ambulance. At least she had a clear view to the sidewalk—though “clear” view could not be considered accurate with the smoke and the wall of water from the hoses. The EMTs were cleaning and examining the detective’s head wound, asking him questions, and prodding his limbs to check for other injuries. They didn’t notice the blood on her shirt underneath her jacket, which she kept zipped up lest they strapped her to a gurney as well.
“I don’t know why the place went up like that. It was like the walls were flammable.” He had to raise his speaking voice to not quite shouting to be heard over the engines and the clatter.
“Feathers. You said they insulated with them.”
“Feathers are flammable?”
“Extremely.” She took his hand, more to calm her own pounding heart than to comfort him, since he seemed more annoyed than distressed.
“Just put a bandage on it! It doesn’t even hurt that much. Can’t I get up?”
The EMT told him no, and that he’d have to be transported for X-rays and a possible CT scan.
“No way,” he said. “I don’t need that—”
“Yes,” Maggie told him firmly. “You do. A blow like that could cause a subdural hematoma.”
“What’s that?” In his haste it came out “wuzzat.”
“Bleeding on the brain. You don’t want that.”
He tried to sit up. “Jeffers—”
“Neither do Hannah and Natalie,” she added.
He lay back down.
Kids. The best motivation in the world.
“Was Jeffers the guy with the gun? If so, they’ve got him cuffed. Don’t worry about it.” She squeezed his hand and told him she’d keep him posted, a weak promise that things would be all right. She didn’t even know where they were taking him; she felt about ready to collapse herself, and not even the burning building could keep the cold from worming its frigid tendrils into her flesh. The spray from the hoses had coated her with water, now turning to an icy rime on her clothes.
But as the EMTs moved to knock out the legs of Riley’s gurney and load him up, he gave Maggie’s fingers a jerk. “Make sure they bring him out of there.”
“Count on it,” she told him, and went to do exactly that.
