Strong Darkness (15 page)

Until Caitlin dropped down all the way to her stomach, SIG steadied in two hands, and shot the clown square in the face, sending gory pieces of blood and bone flying through the air. The corpse was thrown backward onto the riders he'd squeezed himself among, coating them in brain and skull matter.

The applause stopped.

The screams began.

Caitlin rolled sideways, fortunate to avoid the misaimed bullets fired by the clown still clutching the boy before him as a shield. No way she could risk a shot now, certainly not from her back where she'd ended up, so Caitlin did the next best thing.

She shot out the car's overhead skylight, one of the many new features added since she'd ridden the train as a girl. The safety glass disintegrated in a single instant, raining shards downward all over the clown where they settled into his red wig, the pieces shiny against the matte finish of his hair. Still dragging the boy with him, he shook them free, firing off shots until his revolver clicked empty, while retreating to the door separating this car from the next.

He surged through it as Caitlin pushed herself back to her feet, greeted by errant fire from the wounded clown leaking blood out his baggy white costume. She was dimly aware of desperate cries and screams, the riders gone invisible to her after ducking down beneath their seats for protection.

Caitlin fired two shots purposely low into the floor before the wounded clown, stilling his fire long enough to take better aim and put her last three bullets into him, one blowing part of his scalp into a wall patch between two windows. Then she started down the aisle, becoming aware of the screams and cries coming from the car through which the final clown was now moving with his young hostage in tow.

A hand suddenly reached out and grasped her arm.

“That's my son, Ranger, my son!” a man blared, eyes wide in panic. “Please, please!”

Caitlin shook herself free and moved on.

 

36

P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND

The room's only illumination came from the streetlamps breaking the darkness beyond and the glow of headlights cruising along nearby Route 95 that splashed moving shadows across the walls of Dylan's room.

“Where's your goddamn gun?” Dylan asked, sitting further upright in bed.

“Back home, son. Airlines got a thing about civilians carrying them on flights.”

Dylan looked down at Cort Wesley's phone, which he was still holding after his call to Caitlin that had gone straight to voice mail. His finger rolled across the screen, activating the flashlight app that shone on a white-coated figure, a doctor, standing in the doorway.

An Asian doctor.

He started into the room, was halfway through the door when he whipped out something black and shiny from beneath his lab coat. Cort Wesley recognized it as a mini-submachine gun, with a sound suppressor affixed to its barrel, as he threw himself into motion, crashing into the door and slamming it hard into the Chinese gunman, pinning whatever kind of gun it was against the wall. Cort Wesley jerked the door backward, cracked an elbow into the smaller man's skull, and then went for his weapon. He had reached and managed to grab hold of the cold steel much too easily, he realized, because the Chinese gunman had let him.

Cort Wesley let the weapon go flying from his grasp and felt a blow slam into his ribs with the force of an iron bar. He recognized the move as some kind of martial arts strike, thrown with an open hand so what hit him was the palm and heel with enough force to rattle his ribs. Cort Wesley felt the air burst out of him, but clung to his calm even as his breath fled him.

The Chinese man was a whirling blur of muscle and bone, no features Cort Wesley could lock on to long enough to focus a strike. And before instinct could take over, the smaller man unleashed a wild flurry of blows that Cort Wesley blocked, deflected, dodged, ducked under, yet still felt enough land to leave him dazed and disoriented.

Cort Wesley felt the back of his head slam into something that shattered on impact and realized momentum had carried the two of them into the bathroom. Mirror glass rained all around him, the biggest shard of it catching the dim reflection of a can of disinfectant spray sitting atop the toilet bowl. Cort Wesley groped for it, missing on the first two flails and nearly knocking it to the floor with a third, until he locked it into his grasp with the fourth.

The Chinese man was twisting in close, for what Cort Wesley vaguely recognized as a move that would snap his neck like a twig, when he found the activator and snapped the can before the smaller man's eyes as he hit it. He sprayed and kept spraying, his assailant wailing up a storm as his deadly hands sprang upward to his burning eyes.

Cort Wesley gave no quarter from there, pummeling the smaller man's ribs and face, and then driving him backward, back into the room where only Dylan's bed stopped his pitch and held him upright. He seemed to be slumping to the floor, Cort Wesley just realizing the bed was empty, when a knife flashed in the Chinese man's hand.

Spittle flew from the man's mouth, his eyes wide with fury, as he slashed the knife sideways, its blade struggling to glint in the near darkness of the room. Cort Wesley narrowly avoided the first blow and managed to deflect the second, but a third followed a feint that left a gash down his side. Light exploded before his eyes, the pain following fast, and Cort Wesley felt his wounded side was freezing up solid. Hobbled, he was still able to knock the next blow aside while managing only a halfhearted counter with his other arm.

Then he saw the knife rearing back, nothing he could do to stop its surge from the angle at which it was coming. Still he tried to twist, tried to get his arm up when …

CRACK!

… the muffled sound coming from inside him, it seemed, until the Chinese man froze in place before him. His eyes locked open and glassy before he keeled over forward to reveal Dylan perched on the floor holding the silenced mini-machine pistol in hand. Holding it steady in case the would-be killer moved again.

Cort Wesley moved gingerly across the floor as hot pain continued to seer his side where the knife had grazed him. Dylan clung to the weapon, holding it straight and still as if he still had a target in his sights. A thin wisp of smoke bled from the barrel and drifted past him before dissipating in the stale room air.

He took the mini-machine pistol from his son's grasp, the boy only then snapping alert as if roused from a dream. He met Cort Wesley's gaze, but couldn't hold it.

“We gotta move, son.”

He helped Dylan to his feet as a vast shadow appeared in the doorway, blocking what little light the corridor had to shed.

 

37

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

The clown was halfway down the aisle of the rearmost train car, revolver in one hand and hostage boy in the other, when Caitlin surged through the door and caught him in her sights.

“Let the boy go and drop the weapon!” she called out, SIG steadied before her.

The clown was almost to the back door marked
EMERGENCY EXIT
, no place else to go from there.

“
Now!
You hear me? Let him go
now
!”

Caitlin wanted to shoot then, but the boy was just too close and she was still too far away to be sure of hitting the right target.

“Last chance!” she shouted anyway, thinking of something else.

Her hand was already stretching upward, reaching for the emergency brake pull her grandfather had told her about yanking one day to forestall a robbery on a train even older than this one. She pulled downward and heard the screech of the train's huge brakes engaging just before the initial jolt of displaced gravity threw all the passengers forward.

Including the clown.

But he latched on to a handhold just in time, the boy separated from his grasp as the clown burst through the door at the train's rear and vanished an instant ahead of Caitlin's bullet shattering the glass window. She figured he'd jumped off the train for sure, but reaching the remnants of the window provided no view of him fleeing beyond, meaning he'd chosen another route of escape from the slowing train: The roof.

With that, Caitlin surged through the door and grabbed hold of the highest ladder rung she could grasp, following the clown's path up onto the train's roof.

*   *   *

The train's speed was down to probably twenty miles per hour and still slowing when she crested the ladder's top and pulled herself onto the roof of the rearmost car, spotting the clown already atop the center car now. The slowing clip allowed him to twist sideways and fire her way, missing with two shots and then a third.

Caitlin knew how hard hitting a moving target while moving yourself was. So she lurched to her feet and chanced sprinting straight for him before he could jump off. The clown emptied the revolver's cylinder, none of his shots even coming close. Caitlin opened up with her SIG in response, each report sending a pang through her eardrums, bullet after bullet skewing off target as the clown used a speed loader, slammed the cylinder back closed, and started firing anew.

She felt the heat of one and then another of the clown's bullets hiss right past her and slowed enough to steady her aim before letting loose with her next salvo. Waiting until she reached the break between the third car and the second, the train down to fifteen miles per hour, maybe ten when she hit her trigger again as the clown's gun locked empty and he sank a hand into the baggy pocket of his Western clown suit.

Before he could find a fresh speed loader, impact literally picked him up and threw him over the edge of the center car down to the break between it and the lead car Caitlin and Sharon Yarlas had boarded. She backed up to give herself enough of a start to easily leap from the top of the trailing car to the center one, bending at the knees as her boots touched down.

The train's slowing pace made it easy to cover the car's distance quickly and she reached the break with the lead car to find the clown's body pinned between them, lying faceup with his eyes locked open. Caitlin saw that he'd sweated most of his makeup off and crouched to get a better look because what she'd glimpsed standing didn't seem possible. But it was, as revealed by the clear view afforded her now.

The clown was Chinese.

 

38

P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND

Coach Estes stood in the doorway to Dylan's room, flanked by a dozen of Dylan's teammates on the Brown University football team, maybe more.

“Thought we'd stop by to visit,” Estes said, just starting to grasp the busted-up conditions of the room.

“We're gonna need some help getting out of here, Coach,” Cort Wesley told him.

“Just tell us how,” Estes offered, his gaze finally locking on the Chinese man dressed as a doctor Dylan had shot dead.

*   *   *

The hospital floor was a study of chaos, just catching up to the sound of gunshots and reports of a violent struggle in a patient's room. A parade of doctors, nurses, and attendants rushing in all directions through darkness broken only by emergency lights shining down from their wall mounts. They seemed not even to regard the sight of Cort Wesley wheeling his son's bed down the hallway, enclosed now by a dozen Brown football players, led by the school's head coach, whose big frames rendered it invisible.

Cort Wesley was hardly surprised when he saw three more Chinese coming straight at him from the head of the hall, backup for the man left dead in Dylan's room.

“Now!”

With that, Coach Estes and the Brown football players darted sideways and Cort Wesley sent the hospital bed speeding straight for the three Chinese men who froze briefly at the ruffled mattress and bedcovers rolling their way.

Dylan had exited the room on wobbly feet between three massive offensive lineman more accustomed to blowing holes for him through opponents' defensive lines. The three Chinese had managed to free their guns. But the empty bed speeding toward them proved enough of a distraction to give Cort Wesley the instant he needed to steady the mini-submachine gun he'd drawn from under a sheet.

He opened fire just as the Chinese gunmen found their triggers and took all three out with a succession of single shots sprayed side to side, fighting against barrel jerk and sway that blew heat up into his face with each report. The gun was a piece of shit really, but from this distance it was good enough to do the job. The hospital bed had rammed the wall, one wheel oddly still spinning, when what looked like the whole Providence Police Department burst through a stairwell door just beyond the dead bodies at the head of the hall, guns leveled and ready to fire.

 

P
ART
F
OUR

“You may withdraw every regular soldier … from the border of Texas … if you will give her but a single regiment of Texas Rangers.”

—Sam Houston

 

39

P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND

“Drop it! On the floor now!”

Cort Wesley had already shed the mini-submachine gun and was halfway there before the cop's order was even finished. He was placed under arrest and transported to the Providence Police Department, after the knife wound he'd suffered was dressed. Turned out to be little more than a scratch.

“I guess I shouldn't be surprised,” Detective Finneran said, shaking his head, his expression stretched into a grimace from what might have been a bad case of heartburn. “This kind of shit followed you here just like it followed our favorite Texas Ranger.”

“Not exactly. Those shooters were coming to finish the job on my son. I'm not there at the time, you'd be investigating his death instead of theirs.”