Hard Freeze

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Suddenly Kurtz knew that he was not alone on the mezzanine.

It had been a long, cold wait for Hansen and his pals, first waiting at the broken window of the front mezzanine office. The parking lot had been dark, but Kurtz was sure he could see any moving figure against the snow, even though his view from the third-floor window was partially obscured by the large steel-and-plaster ornamental awning directly beneath his perch.

When Marco had broken squelch twice on the radio, Kurtz had slipped the earpiece into his pocket and moved as quietly as he could—the floor was littered with broken plaster and glass—to the rotunda mezzanine outside the office. From there he didn't have long to wait until Hansen and the other two detectives showed up and blasted Rafferty to bits.

Kurtz never had a clear shot with his pistol. The rotunda got more light than most of the rest of the train station's interior, but it was still too dark for Kurtz to see anything clearly, even with his eyes adapted to the dark. One of the men had turned a flashlight on briefly when they were inspecting their kill, but Kurtz had only a brief glimpse of SWAT-garbed men more than eighty feet across the circle of the rotunda. Too far for a shot from the.40-caliber SW99 semiauto in his hand or the.45 Compact Witness in his coat pocket Besides, even that brief glimpse of the men—he couldn't tell them apart in their black helmets and SWAT vests—showed that their body armor would stop a pistol shot.

Then the three had gone down the front stairway and battered their way out the front door and Kurtz had scuttled back to his place by the shattered window.

The entrance canopy below blocked his view until the three running men were again out of range, then lost to the darkness and falling snow of the parking lot.

Kurtz didn't even try following their retreat He sat with his back against the wall and slowed his breathing.

There was the slightest hint of noise from either the mezzanine outside the office or the rotunda below. The whispering-gallery effect worked both ways.

Marco? He didn't think the unarmed bodyguard would be stupid enough to come toward the sound of automatic weapons fire. Could Rafferty still be alive and stirring? No. Kurtz had seen the wounds in the few seconds of the flashlight's inspection.

Getting silently to his feet Kurtz raised the pistol and crossed the littered floor as quietly as he could. Glass still crunched underfoot.

Pausing at the doorway, he stepped out onto the mezzanine, pistol ready.

A shadow against the wall to his right moved with impossible speed. The.40 S&W went flying out across the railing and Kurtz felt his right wrist and hand go numb from the kick.

He leaped back, pawing with his left hand for the.45 in his peacoat pocket but the shadow leaped and a two-footed Jack caught him in the chest, breaking ribs and throwing Kurtz backward into the office.

Rolling, Kurtz got to his feet and lifted both arms in defense even as the shadow hurtled at him and three more fast kicks numbed his right forearm, smashed another rib, and kicked Kurtz's feet out from under him. He landed hard and felt broken glass rip at his back even as the wind rushed out of him.

Hansen? No. Who?

Kurtz staggered to his knees and grabbed for the extra gun again but his peacoat had been torn open and twisted around by the fall and he couldn't find the pocket. Maybe the gun had been knocked free but Kurtz couldn't see it in the dim light through the broken window.

His assailant came up behind him silently, grabbed Kurtz by the hair and pulled him to his feet.

Instinctively, Kurtz threw his left hand up tight to his chin—the right hand was useless—and felt a long blade cutting his forearm to the bone rather than severing his neck. Kurtz gasped and kicked backward as hard as he could.

The man danced away.

Kurtz was reeling, barely able to stand, feeling the shattered rib where it had cut into his right lung. He was bleeding badly, right hand dangling useless, legs shaky. He had only a few seconds he could stay standing, maybe thirty seconds before he lost consciousness.

His attacker moved to his left, a shadow in shadows.

Kurtz backed toward the window. A tall shard of sharp glass stuck upward from the windowsill. If he could maneuver the man toward the…

The man-shaped darkness leaped from the shadows. Kurtz abandoned the window-glass strategy, tugged his coat around with his bloody left hand, and reached for his pocket just as there came a blinding flash of fight.

The figure, who had kicked him in the chest again, was not distracted by the light. The man body-blocked Kurtz with a sharp shoulder, lifted him, and threw him backward through the window even as Kurtz's left hand became entangled in his own coat pocket.

Kurtz was dimly aware that he was somersaulting through the cold air, looking up at the dark rectangle of window fifteen feet above, his assailant's face white against the blackness there. Then Kurtz hit the solid canopy with his back, smashed through the rotten plaster and lathing and rebar, and fell another fifteen feet to the snowy pavement below.

A hundred yards away through blowing snow, snug in the driver's seat of the Cadillac SUV, Hansen heard none of this. He turned the ignition, heard the V-8 roar to life, set the heater to maximum, and flipped on the halogen headlights.

He had just raised his hand to the gearshift when there came a soft tik-tik and thirty-two pounds of C-4 explosive rigged under the floorboards, in the engine compartment, behind the dash, and especially carefully around the 40-gallon fuel tank, exploded in tight sequence.

The first wad of explosive blew off Hansen's feet just above the ankles. The second batch of C-4 blew the hood a hundred feet into the air and sent the windshield flying. The main packet ignited the fuel tank and lifted the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle five feet into the air before the SUV dropped back onto burning tires. The interior of the Cadillac immediately filled with a fuel-air mixture of burning gasoline.

Hansen was alive. Even as he breathed flames, he thought, I'm alive!

He tried the door but it was buckled and jammed. The passenger seat was twisted forward and on fire. Hansen himself was on fire. The wood-and-polymer steering wheel was melting in his hands.

Not knowing yet that his feet were gone, Hansen lurched forward and clawed at the dashboard, pulling himself through the jagged hole where the windshield had been.

The hood was gone; the engine compartment was a well of flames.

Hansen did not stop. Reaching up and over with hands of molten flesh, he grabbed the optional roof rack of the Cadillac and pulled his charred and burning legs out of the wreck, twisting free of the interior, dropping himself away from the flaming mass of metal.

His hair was on fire. His face was on fire. Hansen rolled in the deep snow, smothering the flames, screaming in agony.

He crawled on his smoking elbows farther from the wreck, rolling on his back, trying to breathe through the pain in his lungs. He could see everything clearly, not knowing that his eyelids had fused with his brow and could not be closed. Hansen held his hands in front of his face. They hurt. He saw in a surge of disbelief bordering on a weird joy that his fingers had bloated like hot dogs left too long on the charcoal grill and then burst and melted. He saw white bone against the black sky. The flames illuminated everything in a sixty-yard radius.

Hansen tried to scream for help but his lungs were two sacks of carbon.

A silhouette walked between him and the burning vehicle. A man. The dark shape knelt, leaned closer, showed a face to the flames.

"Hansen," said John Wellington Frears. "Do you hear me? Do you know who I am?"

I am not James B. Hansen, Hansen thought and tried to say, but neither his jaws nor tongue would work.

Frears looked down at the burned man. Hansen's clothes had peeled off and his skin hung in greasy folds, smoking like charred rags. The man's face showed exposed and burned muscles like cords of slick red-and-yellow rope. Hansen's scorched lips had peeled back from his teeth, so he seemed to be caught in the middle of a wild grin. The staring gray eyes could not blink. Only the thin column of Hansen's breath rising into the frigid air from the open mouth showed that he still lived.

"Can you hear me, Hansen?" said Frears. "Can you see who I am? I did this. You killed my daughter, Hansen. And I did this. Stay alive and suffer, you son of a bitch."

Frears knelt next to the charred man for several minutes. Long enough to see the pupils in the monster's eyes widen in recognition and then become fixed and dilated. Long enough to see that the only vapor rising into the cold air from Hansen now was no longer breath, but steam and smoke from the cooked flesh.

Distant sirens rose from the direction of the lighted city—the habitat, John Wellington Frears thought, of the other men, the civilized men. He rose and was ready to walk back to the Lincoln parked a block away when he saw something that looked like an animal crawling toward him through the snow of the parking lot.