Page 15 of The 9th Man

“Funny man. Come with us.”

“It’s these damn pills, they don’t do a thing,” Luke droned on, accentuating his frustration with a rap on the wall.

“I said come on.”

He spun and slammed his fist into the man’s nose. Blood gushed out. The guy stumbled backward from the blow. Luke then drove a knee into the belly. With a gutturalumph, the man collapsed, stunned, unable to recover. The other man reached beneath his jacket, surely for a weapon.

The door burst open.

Jillian kicked the guy in the back of the knee.

Something cracked.

She spun on her heel and punched again, the aim and ferocity designed to dislocate a shoulder. The man let out a muffled scream that Luke silenced with a hook to the jaw, sending him motionless to the floor.

“Aren’t you the tough one?” Jillian said.

“You don’t know the half of it.” He frisked both attackers and found two 9mms, a pair of cell phones, and a car key fob.

“See if the coast is clear,” he said.

She did so, saying from the door, “We’re good.”

He powered down the cell phones, then handed them to Jillian. No sense leaving any means of communication for these guys to use. He kept the guns. Then he dragged the shorter man’s body toward the door. “We’re going out the emergency exit. When the alarm goes off, don’t look back and don’t run. Hopefully our casualty here will be the center of attention.”

She led the way as Luke hauled the man down the hallway into the open where he’d be unmissable by anyone responding to the alarm. He then hit the crash bar and shoved open the emergency exit door.

Nothing happened.

They started walking.

The door eased closed.

Jillian said, “What are the odds—”

The alarm went off, the whoop, whoop, whoop loud even through the closed door. They hustled forward into a ravine-like courtyard. On either side, three- and four-story building façades rose to form a rectangle of blue sky. Straight ahead, some fifty feet away, was a black steel door that had no knob.

No way out.

The alarm went silent.

“That was fast,” he said.

He spotted a wheeled garbage bin against a nearby wall and together they dragged it, screeching and rumbling, until the museum’s exit door was blocked.

They’d been in the courtyard less than sixty seconds, fifty seconds too long for his tastes. If more of their pursuers showed up, they were easy prey here, trapped in the courtyard. His sharp eyes surveyed every square inch.

Then, he saw it. In a far corner.

“There,” he said, pointing.

A small tunnel behind an iron grille.

They ran to it, pushing through a thicket of weedy bushes that had shoved their way up through cracks in the concrete. Set into the wall was a waist-high gate secured by a rusty latch and padlock. Through the bars was a darkened tunnel about two feet square, its floor damp with moisture.

“Drainage for this courtyard,” he said. “Otherwise, it’d be a swimming pool.”

“To where?”

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