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| At the next corner I slid to a stop and poked my head low around | |
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| A wide passageway between two brick buildings, ending in a set of wooden steps | |
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| At the bottom, I thought, my chest scalding with pain, would be the steep slope of houses built over the Broadway Tunnel--open, busy, the logical place to have a car waiting | |
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| Nilsson and Phil were shoving two women toward the steps | |
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| Another head bobbed at shoulder level, already descending | |
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| My skull was coming apart in fragments, like pieces of tile | |
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| Phil wheeled at my voice and I raised the pistol | |
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| Piers flung one woman toward the steps, the other broke free and staggered a yard toward me, falling in terror as he fired twice more, cataclysmic booms that shook the walls | |
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| Half of our soldiers never fired their rifles in Korea, the Army learned in horror--too afraid of the sound, of the sight of another human being in the path of a bullet | |
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| I swayed and leaned against jutting brick, lifted the barrel up and let it drop slowly, crossing his black hair, until the sight divided the base of his throat and the whole world sat on the end of the barrel | |
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| My breath stopped of its own accord the way they tell you a thousand times on the firing range and my finder began its microscopic contraction--the woman stood up again, and I stopped, and then they were gone | |
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| By the time I reached the top of the steps, Piers was pulling the back door closed, the big dark sedan was gathering speed, pulling into traffic and heading for the maw of the tunnel | |
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| I spun in every direction | |
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| No red hair, no blonde hair | |
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| Behind me, at the end of the passage, Grab was telling and pointing to his open car | |
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| Closer, six feet away, sobbing and hunched over in a coat too heavy and too bloody, wobbled Muriel Contreras | |