The Jade Figurine

Chapter Twelve

I threw myself backward, turning my body, and batted the cane-backed chair out of the way. It bounced and clattered into the far wall. Light flamed briefly from across the office, like a match being struck. Dinessen shouted something, but the words were lost in the hollow roar of the Luger. A bullet ricocheted off the concrete flooring somewhere on my right as I moved in a scuttling crawl toward the door behind the desk, trying to get my feet under me.

Two more muzzle flashes cut momentary holes in the darkness. I staggered upright, heard one of the pellets slap into the wall high above my head. The other cut into the doorjamb, spraying splinters into my face, and the room was filled with the stench of burnt gunpowder and the dying echoes of the shots when I hit the door with my shoulder, sent it banging off the wooden wall in the warehouse beyond.

Dinessen fired a fourth time. Pain seared through my trailing right arm, numbing it, and then I was through into the warehouse in a jerky, spindle-legged run. Shadowed mounds and masses of goods filled the high-ceilinged enclosure, stacked on pallets or on suspended platforms or on the concrete floor itself. A blue light burned above a shipping counter to the right, and its eerie illumination groped ineffectually at the heavy blackness.

I veered to the left, away from the light and away from a wide center aisleway that bisected the warehouse into two long halves. Dinessen was still in the office, and I could hear him moving and bawling something incoherent in Swedish. I ran along the row toward the side wall, looking for an opening between pallets of slender boxes marked with Chinese characters. I found one finally and squeezed through into a cleared area between that row and the next one, and then ran along there a little way until I reached several skids of thick, coiled hemp rope. Footsteps slapped uncertainly on the concrete as I dragged myself over the rope into another cleared space and crouched in the pocket of darkness on the other side.

Dinessen had stopped moving now, and I knew that he was somewhere near the office door, listening, trying to pinpoint my location. The silence in the warehouse was acute and charged with tension. Until he moved, I knew I couldn’t take the chance of moving either. I felt trapped and helpless. I had no weapon, and in the ebon enclosure there was nothing I could see to use effectively against a handgun. It was a long way to the far end of the storage area; even if I could get there, I did not know the exact positioning of the loading doors, or of any other possible exit. And there was the strong chance that if I did manage to locate a way out, the door or doors would be locked in such a way that I wouldn’t be able to open them easily.

I wondered how long it would be before Dinessen thought to turn on the lights.

My mouth was dry, brassy, and the pain in my head had sharply intensified; the throbbing percussion seemed loud enough to be heard in the muggy stillness. Gently, I explored my right arm with the fingers of my left hand. The bullet had gone through the flesh and muscle just above the elbow, and there was a lot of blood. The arm had very little feeling left in it-the fingers were already useless-and I knew I would have to cradle it against my chest when I moved again, to keep it from flopping into something.

“Connell!” Dinessen shouted suddenly. “Connell, you listen! You come out and we make a deal. I don’t kill you if you come out, Connell.”

The words tumbled and echoed through the blackness. I held myself motionless. The silence grew thick again, and I knew Dinessen had realized the futility of calling out as he had. Another thirty seconds crept away, and then he began moving once more, the slap of his shoes seeming to retreat in cadence. The shipping counter, I thought. And the switches for the overhead lights.

I crawled out from the skid of hemp rope, across the cleared space, and worked my body between crates of kiam chy water jars. Another narrow aisle-and this one bordered on the far side by ten-foot piles of empty pallets, stacked close together. There was no way I could get over them, and if I tried to go around them, into the main aisleway, Dinessen would spot me immediately. Unless I could get there before he came away from the shipping counter…

The lights went on.

Bright white illumination spilled down from the large-wattage bulbs suspended at regular intervals from the ceiling rafters. I paused, blinking against the glare, and I could hear Dinessen running across the concrete again, toward the main aisleway. I stood there, indecisive, holding my useless arm-and I saw the forklift.

It was an ancient American-made model, painted a dull yellow. And it had been parked so that its rear end and the right-hand driver’s side were partially hidden behind the crates of kiam chy jars at the main aisleway. The twin iron blades jutted out waist high in front like opened and entreating arms.

I went down to it in a humped-over position, trying to move as silently as I could, taking air with short, openmouthed breaths. Dinessen had stopped moving again, to listen, and I knew I didn’t have much time, that he would have to start down the aisleway pretty soon. He wasn’t going to play the waiting game all night.

I came to the rear of the lift and got my left hand on the cold metal bar there, leaning in on the open side. The ignition key was in its dashboard lock. I released a silent breath and reached in to turn it to the On position. It made a small click that was barely discernible even to my own ears. There were no front or side-mount lights on the lift, nothing to show that I had switched it on.

I looked at the gearshift. The machine was old enough and small enough so that it only had two speeds-forward and reverse. Whoever had driven it last had parked it in the forward position. I put my left foot into the rung set into the metal side plate and lifted myself prone across the seat. The high dashboard and the wide cylinder and crossbars of the lift forks were an effective shield between Dinessen and me.

Still, I lay there for a long moment, not breathing at all now. The warehouse remained shrouded in silence, and the lights burned like miniature suns overhead. I was sweating heavily, covered with blood and filled with pain and rage.

Dinessen began moving again.

I could hear his shoes scuffling along the concrete as he started down the main aisleway-slow steps, careful steps, wary steps. I groped with my left foot until I found the lift’s clutch and then pushed it to the floor. It made no sound. I brought my right foot under and got it positioned on the accelerator, then lifted my left hand to the dashboard with my thumb poised on the starter button.

I had worked for an import-export firm in Singapore for a while, and part of my duties there had been the moving of freight with a forklift similar to this one. It had constantly been in need of repairs, and I had had trouble starting it on occasion. If the engine on this one didn’t catch on the first or second try, I was through with it. Dinessen would be down on me in a matter of seconds once he heard the cough and grind of the lift’s starter.

I worked wetness onto my lips and inhaled deeply-and then I raised up on the seat and hit the starter.

The motor whirred, whirred, didn’t catch. Frantically, I pumped the accelerator and shoved the button in again, using my little finger to draw out the choke. This time the engine came to life with a guttural rumble. I wrapped my left hand around the wheel and snapped the clutch out. The undersize rear tires spun, smoking violently on the concrete, and finally took hold.

The lift jumped forward, the engine roaring now, the rear end snapping around. My fingers were slippery with blood, and I had to fight for a firm grip on the wheel to get the machine straightened. Through the crossbars I could see Dinessen, his face a mask of surprise and sudden terror, crouching in the middle of the aisleway with the Luger raised in his hand.

He squeezed off twice, convulsively. The reports seemed popgun loud amid the rumbling in my ears. One of the bullets came through and sang past my right ear; the other pinged sharply and metallically off one of the crossbars on the lift frame. Dinessen turned and started to run, clumsily, his huge feet tangling with one another in his haste to get out of the way of the hurtling machine. I let go of the wheel and jumped out to the side, hit the concrete on my numbed right shoulder, felt only the shock of impact.

I rolled over, and when I came up I heard Dinessen scream-a high-pitched, terrified sound over the amplified roar of the forklift’s motor. But then the scream was chopped off in a thundering, reverberating crash, and I knew the machine had slapped into the upper wall that separated the warehouse from the office.

I got to my feet, painfully, and went down there. The lift lay on its side at the base of the wall, its rear wheels spinning. The stench of gasoline from its ruptured tank was heavy in the stagnant air. I took one look at Dinessen, and at the dripping red grooves the forks had made in the wooden wall, and turned away to keep from being sick.

One of those gleaming metal forks had caught him just above the belt at the rear, carried him forward, and driven him into the wall as the lift collided with it. There was not much left of him now at all.