Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (children's books read aloud TXT) 📕

“Son of a bitch!” The light came back on, Chalmers having reached the sconce and jiggled it. Blood dripped out of a gash in his left cheek. He pulled tissue from his pocket and pressed it against his wound. “Bastard knew the wiring was shaky.”

“Jesus.” Piñero pointed to a tubular steel rod that lay on the floor. It looked as if it had come from a music stand. One end was wet. In the dimness, the color was uncertain to the eye but we knew it was red.

I pushed past Chalmers and opened the bell tower door, but he came right behind me and caught my arm.

“His advantage,” he said. “You’re lit. He’s not. If he’s got something up there—”

As if on cue, I heard the unmistakable sound of a slide racked on a semiautomatic pistol. The first shot boomed down through the darkness, tearing a hole between us in the wooden floor of the bell tower landing. The gun was at least .40 caliber.

Chalmers and I pressed our backs against the walls as much as possible. A second shot just missed my foot. The landing was too narrow. Sooner or later Brother Grace would hit one of us. Chalmers and I both unholstered and fired back, two shots each. It didn’t matter that his standard-issue Glock 22 S&W.40 was louder than my baby Glock. Each explosion in so tight a space must have hurt everyone else’s ears as much as it did mine. Backing down the stairs to give us room to retreat, Piñero screamed, “Shots fired! Shots fired!” into the handy-talky he pulled off his belt but his words sounded distant to my ringing ears. “Get in here and get these people out of the building!”

The ringing faded. I heard screaming. “Out the back!” I shouted. “Not the front!”

“Active shooter in the bell tower! Shooter in the tower!” Piñero said. “Get people out the back so he can’t pick ‘em off! Call for back-up!”

Chalmers pushed me past him down the stairs. “You got nowhere to go!” he shouted up to Brother Grace, who answered with another shot. Chalmers grunted and clutched his upper chest, toppling into me. We both hit the tile floor outside the choir loft, me on my side, Chalmers on his back. Fedora askew, Piñero pulled his partner to one side, while I skittered backward to the bookcase beside the loft.

“Shit,” Chalmers said through clenched teeth. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“Officer down! Officer down!” Piñero said into his handy-talky. “We need EMTs in the bell tower now.” Then he tried to peel open Chalmers’s leather coat. “Lemme see. Lemme see.” Chalmers choked back his pain as Piñero worked the ruined leather over his shoulder.

“How bad?” Chalmers and I said, almost in unison.

“Upper chest, just under the clavicle, maybe two inches from his left shoulder.”

Piñero wadded a handkerchief with tissue and pressed it into the wound. I heard feet thudding up the stairs and spun my gun toward the sound just as a rifle came into view.

“Whoa, man! Just me!” Pete Kim said. “My heart’s too old for shocks.” He held up an AR-15. “From the SUV. The officers are clearing out the church. SWAT is on the way.”

“Fucked up my face and shot me,” Chalmers said, his breathing labored. “The bastard fucked up my face—”

“You’re a tough SOB, Terry,” Piñero said. “All that time in the gym, you got this pendejo trying to shoot through rhino hide. We’ll bring him down so you can spit in his eye.”

Three EMTs reached us in less than ten minutes. Piñero, Kim, and I kept our guns trained on the bell tower landing as two men and a woman stabilized Chalmers in the choir loft and got him downstairs. We followed them part of the way down and held our position to keep Brother Grace in check. After a few minutes the SWAT commander, a big man named Stoll, stepped in to take charge.

“I’m going to the ER,” Piñero said when we reached street level and went outside, where the ambulance was just closing its doors. “Pete, you run point till the brass get here.”

“Got it, Raf,” Kim said as SWAT team members hurried past in various directions.

A few minutes after Piñero took off, Stoll came back down with one of his officers and pulled Kim out of earshot. The three of them spoke for a few minutes. Then the SWAT men moved off and Kim returned to where I stood.

“Standard breach?” I said.

He nodded. “It’ll take a bit to set up. Once they establish a perimeter and get some shooters on nearby roofs, we’ll all have to knock on doors to evacuate the nearest homes and get other people to their basements. We know he’s got at least one piece up there, probably a pistol.”

“Sounded like a handgun,” I said.

Kim looked at the AR-15 still in his hands and shook his head. “I sure hope he doesn’t have any long guns. The last thing a residential neighborhood needs is bullets whizzing every which way.”

“This your first SWAT op?” I asked.

He sighed and looked down. “My first was a long time ago, when I was on patrol. A guy with a warrant out on him took his own kids hostage. Didn’t end well.” He swallowed. “Twenty-three years on the job, ten in a suit, I have a reputation for taking everything in stride. People still ask where I’m from. Or why I’m not in computer science or medicine. I tell them I’m as bad at math as every other kid born here, and my Korean is even worse. Good old Pete, reliable smartass. But I still think about those two little boys and wonder what might have happened if I’d just let the guy jump that stop sign and didn’t follow him home.”

“Whatever you can’t let go makes you a better cop,” I said.

“Thanks.” He smiled. “At least there are no hostages in play this time. They might be able to talk him out.”

I doubted Brother Grace