Page 82 of No Safe Place

No way was he going to let this cop win. He was going to put this pesky piece of shit where he belonged. In a body bag.

“That’s it, boys. Get some, get some!” he cried into the mic as the moving platform came alongside the factory itself. “Let’s take this place down brick by brick.”

Coming ever closer, Shaw crouched low as he heard a stray friendly round whip past his ear.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” he cried. “And stay the hell away from the left. Just at the north of the building, not the south side where I am!”

He slammed the operator on his back hard.

“Move the boom up now. Let’s go! Get me on the roof. Move it!”

Shaw already had the platform gate open as they came to the side of the two-story building’s roof.

The tar paper under his feet had a springy give when he stepped onto it, but it seemed firm enough. Jogging with the axe and gas can, he arrived to the midpoint of the roof and placed the gas can down and went to work.

The tar paper gave easily under the head of the axe when he whacked at it. He chopped once and then twice. The third time he chopped, he saw plywood and a snarl of wooly insulation and he knelt and touched it. It was yellowed. How many years old? he wondered. A hundred? More.

It was as dry as tinder.

Perfect, he thought.

He stood and turned the axe around and swung again. The long pickax side sank deep. After he wedged it loose, he looked down and smiled. There was now an opening into the building below.

Once he had four such holes into the building two feet apart in a rough square, he paused for a moment, his face a sheen of sweat. He leaned on the shaft of the axe like a farmer resting in a field. Out behind the factory he took in the clear view of the bridge, the flowing river, the lights of the roadblock on the ridge on its other side.

He giggled as he dropped the axe and retrieved the gas can. He proceeded to pour the gasoline hole to hole to hole to hole and back.

The heady sweet masculine reek of the fuel was invigorating. As was the sound of it splattering into the factory floor below. After the can was empty, he tossed it aside and wiped his hands on the thighs of his tactical pants and lit a cigarette. The red cherry on it pulsed as he blew on its tip.

He took in a deep drag and let it out with a few smoke rings.

Then he flicked it.

“Nothing but net,” he said as it tumbled end over end and disappeared down into the first gasoline drenched hole.

There was a pause and then a ribbon of flame flicked out of the hole like a large tongue out of a mouth. Then there were two tongues, then a trio, then a quartet.

The smoke started to rise and Shaw began to back away from the flames toward the platform, smiling ear to ear.

71

When the shooting finally stopped, I was on the north end of the second story of the old factory building by one of the blasted-out windows.

Eyes closed, flat down on my belly with my cheek pressed to the floor, it took me almost a full minute to brush the glass dust out of my hair and eyes in order to look around.

I should have kept my eyes closed.

The room around me looked like an artillery shell had struck a direct hit on a landfill. Not just the windows had been shot out, but everything that was above waist height in the room. The antique furniture and cabinets and paintings and knickknacks and toys. Everything was broken, cracked, pulverized or in splinters. There were even big hunks missing out of the plaster and brick walls where they had been peppered with countless rounds.

When I had antagonized the mercenary on the SAT phone it was to make him do something emotional, to get him to do something stupid.

But maybe the additional anger I’d drawn out of him, I thought as I helped Colleen crawl out from behind a bullet-riddled chest of drawers, hadn’t been the best idea after all.

“Where to now?” she said.

“The middle stairwell. Come on. And stay down. Those windows are exposed now. There might be snipers.”

Down on all fours careful to avoid the glass, we crawled away south toward the stairs.

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