Tanish.
I gasped and began, against all reason, all judgment, to get to my feet. A sudden hollowness gripped my stomach, and my chest and throat tightened, as if some great vise were crushing the air from my body. I hadn’t thought they would involve him in this, hadn’t thought they trusted him. He had probably asked for the job to prove his loyalty.
Stupid, I thought. Both of us. I should have seen this coming.
And in that instant, I caught a flicker of movement, not down on the warehouse floor but from the observation booth in the roof. Someone had raised the blind carefully, and I could see two figures working by the light of a dim oil lamp: two uniformed figures and a piece of equipment with a hopper and a long, hefty barrel like a sawn log.
I stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, catching the chink of metal as one of the men in the booth upended a bag into the hopper and the other took hold of a pair of handles, so that he sat like a mantis, aiming the barrel down in the warehouse.
It can’t be.
I had never seen one before, but I recognized the machine gun for what it was moments before it opened up with a blaze of flame and a stream of deafening bangs.
I leapt to my feet, shouting at Tanish to get down, that it was a trap, but my words were lost in the chaos as the bullets rained down. All the muted panic and anxiety were swept away as everyone down below ran for cover and returned fire. The machine gun didn’t stop, its huge barrel revolving with each shot, each yard-long spurt of fire, and I knew what I had to do.
No one down below could stop it. I drew my pistol and ran toward the shuttered window.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam went the relentless machine gun, splintering crates, carving up the concrete, punching through corrugated metal. And flesh.
I heard the screams.
Tanish …
I sighted along the hexagonal barrel of my revolver toward the shadowy figure who was turning the machine gun’s crank, and fired. The gun almost kicked out of my hand, but I held on to it, drew back the hammer, and fired again. The report was deafening and fire seemed to flash out of the side of the cylinder as well as from the muzzle, but I had just enough composure to move through the smoke, cocking the pistol and aim afresh before squeezing the trigger a third time.
The gunner—who was wearing the silver and navy of a policeman—slumped to one side, clutching his shoulder, and his companion snatched the handle from him, dragging the barrel of the weapon up and around toward me, still spewing fire and noise all along its deadly arc, perforating the metal walls and roof as he tried to get me in his sights.
I fired twice more, pulling the hammer feverishly back after each shot, then again, and again, shooting blindly into the smoke, driven by fear and horror until I realized the empty pistol was clicking over and over.
But the machine gun had fallen silent.
For a moment, I clung to the rail as the gantry swam. My stomach felt like iron but was somehow moving—cold but molten—and I sank to my knees, sweat running down my face, unable to breathe.
Below me, Andrews and his men cannoned in, weapons raised, hunched over as they advanced into the warehouse. Andrews shouted orders, but the sound echoed oddly, and I could not hear the words. Then came the blare and flash of a shotgun, and suddenly, it was a chaos of running and shouting and gunfire.
There were bodies on the ground.
One of the Westsiders drew a pistol and fired twice at the policemen before rushing toward the back door. He reached it as it blew open, crashing against the wall, and more police came through. He fired again, and I heard a shout of pain before a barrage of gunfire cut him down where he stood.
I forced myself to get to my feet, fighting back nausea and dizziness, staggering along the catwalk to the metal stairs, wincing as bullets sang and whined through the stuffy, smoke-laden air. Somewhere a shower of shotgun pellets rained down on metal, and up ahead, the gantry sparked as a stray round skipped off it.
But I had to get to Tanish, who was down there in the middle of it all. There was more shouting, another cannonade back and forth, and the slap of bullets into wood, then two more shots, and suddenly, amazingly, nothing.
My ears rang, but I kept moving, half falling down the metal steps and into the cover of the stacked crates, where one of the policemen was sitting on the ground, nursing his bleeding arm. Andrews was shouting again, and in the unearthly glow of the gas lamp and the fog of gunsmoke, I could see people with their hands raised as the police closed in, weapons still up and level.
I ran drunkenly to the light, hands shaking, almost blind with the horror of what had happened, what I had done, and what I might find.