Stan howled. Let go. Stumbled back through the window.
I bolted. Down the ancient fire escape, rusty metal rungs shaking, whole structure swaying from my rat-a-tat impact, as I half slid, half jumped from metal decking down to metal decking, desperate to hit the street five stories below.
Stan was gonna get his right arm out now. Stan was gonna hunt me down. And Stan would shoot a woman in cold blood.
I felt the fire escape groan again. Heard, more than saw, Stan squirm and heave and twist his considerable homicidal bulk onto the narrow fifth-story decking.
Faster, faster. Not much time now. Gotta move, move, move.
As the fire escape heaved, sighed, gave an ominous creak.
“Gonna get you, girl,” Stan bellowed from above. “Big Stan gonna run you down. What’d ya do to my family? Where’s my Tomika? Tell me now, girl. Talk, or I’ll shoot out your damn bitch brains.”
The first metal bolt attaching the fifth-story decking to the crumbling brick building went ping. Then the second, third, fourth.
Go, go, go I urged myself. No time to lose. Jack, racing the giant down the beanstalk. Run!
The whole fire escape swayed above me. Making the sharp corner two flights below, I knew the moment Stan figured out what was happening, because he dropped his gun. It went sailing by me, just missing my head. Stan didn’t need his pistol anymore. He’d grabbed for the railing instead.
Except that wouldn’t help him any. I knew, because I was the one who’d ratcheted loose all the bolts attaching the rickety fifth-story fire escape to the ancient bricks of the dilapidated building.
A precaution built into a precaution built into a precaution.
I’m only a hundred and five pounds. Too small to fight a giant like Stan. But lighter and faster to beat him down a collapsing fire escape.
The wobbly metal ladder was shaking beneath my feet now. Above me, I heard a terrible screech as the fifth story decking swung out into midair, then felt it, like a giant chain, start ripping the corresponding layers of decks and ladders from the side of the cheaply constructed housing unit. Ping. Ping. Ping.
Stan screamed.
Metal groaned. People inside the building began to yell at the unexpected commotion, while the ladder beneath my own feet suddenly lurched down and away. One story above street level. Wasn’t gonna make it.
I jumped, dropped, and rolled. To the side, away from the collapsing metal structure thundering down and across the street.
More screaming. More yelling. More groaning.
Stan Miller plunged five stories to the frozen pavement below.
Then the screaming stopped. Gritty sand and dirty snow ballooned up, settled back down.
I staggered to my feet, cleared my eyes, registered a pain in my ankle. Now was not the time. People pouring out. Residents of the unit who’d been immune to gunfire and screaming, but not this. No one, no how, had seen anything like this. They gathered on the street, yapping, dialing cell phones, shaking their heads, and then, when they spotted Stan’s hulking body, skewered on multiple shorn metal rungs, the first woman screeched in horror, before several more joined her.
I stared at the carnage, the twisted heap of wreckage, the blood pooling on the front of Stan’s shirt.
Then, I ran.
I didn’t look back. Not for the screaming women. Not for the growing cries, not for the startled exclamation from the lone kid who spotted my escape.
I ran and I ran and I ran, my body shaking uncontrollably.
Round the block, I paused long enough to grab my messenger bag from beneath a snowy bush. Then I was off and running again.
9:56 P.M.
Seventy hours left to live.
What would you have done?
Chapter 14