Page 138 of Code 6
Diego raised his pistol and stepped out from behind the Dumpster. Through an opening between the wall and the Dumpster’s edge, Kate watched him move deeper into the alley, his every move like a trained law enforcement agent. Roll-down steel shutters covered the windowsand doors that faced the alley. Corrugated boxes, flattened and stacked for disposal, one on top of the other, rose in cardboard towers. Diego took cover behind one of the stacks about twenty feet ahead of Kate. He listened. Kate listened harder. There was only silence. Diego stepped out carefully from behind the cardboard tower and started forward.
A shot rang out. Diego went down, dropping to the pavement somewhere on the other side of the stack of crushed boxes. He was completely out of Kate’s line of sight, making it impossible for her to know if he was alive or dead. Kate had to make a decision, but the possibility that Diego was only wounded, in need of help, eliminated one option.
She couldn’t turn and run.
With her back pressed to the brick face of the building, Kate poked her head around the corner, peering cautiously down the black alley. She took another step forward, then stopped. There was a noise from the other side of the stack of flattened cardboard boxes, where Diego had fallen. If Diego was alive, she couldn’t tell; and if his shooter was lying in wait on the other side, she couldn’t tell, either. She took cover behind the stack, her heart pounding.
A chorus of sirens whined in the distance. Police were on the way. Diego must have called. That meant he was alive on the other side.
Two more quick shots rang out, which popped in the stacked cardboard. Kate hit the deck and saw a man running away from her. The woman in the red dress was with him. He turned and fired again in Kate’s direction, still running. Kate log-rolled across the alley, and she didn’t stop rolling until she bumped right up against Diego’s body. She was looking directly into his eyes.
“How bad?” she whispered.
He tried to speak but didn’t answer.
Kate checked his pulse. Weak, but still beating. The wound was to his upper thigh. He’d had the initial presence of mind to rip a rope-like fastener from the stacked boxes and make a tourniquet, but the bloodloss had pushed him into near unconsciousness. Kate checked the tourniquet. Another gunshot pierced the darkness, the bullet whizzing overhead. Kate braced for more gunfire, but she heard only the echo of footfalls on asphalt. The shooter was making a run for it.
“Go,” said Diego.
“I can’t leave you here!”
Ahead, in the darkness, a stack of boxes toppled to the pavement. Kate took aim with her pistol, ready to fire.
“Kate?”
She recognized the voice, and Kate’s heart leapt into her throat. “Patrick?”
He hurried toward her and immediately saw the gravity of the situation.
“It’s my friend Diego,” said Kate. “He’s hit but alive.”
The police sirens in the distance grew louder.
“I chased Liu toward you,” said Patrick, using the name he’d given him. “But I never fired a shot. He has Olga.”
“No one ran past us,” said Kate.
“There’s no other way out of this alley, except—”
They raised their eyes toward the sky at the same time. Liu was four stories above them on the fire escape ladder. Olga was with him.
“You stay with your friend until the cops get here,” said Patrick.
“Patrick, you can’t—” she started to say, but the look in his eyes said the matter was not debatable.
“I promised Olga I wouldn’t leave without her,” he said.
Kate squeezed his hand, so proud and yet wanting to tackle him and make him stay put.
“Please be careful,” she said, and he was on his way.
Chapter 65
Patrick ran to the fire escape ladder, grabbed a rung, and started climbing the warehouse wall. As he stared up into the night sky, with countless rungs to go, the long and narrow ladder triggered a childhood memory of a picture book Kate had read to him as a toddler,Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me.For one scary moment, he wondered if his life was flashing before his eyes.
He was halfway up. Liu was at least three stories above him, and Patrick looked up just as he pushed Olga up onto the roof of the building. Patrick kept climbing. Liu fired a shot from the top of the ladder. The bullet skipped past Patrick against the brick wall. He pressed his body as close to the ladder as possible and looked up. No sight of Liu. The moon was above him, but this was definitely no children’s book. Patrick shook off the distraction and summoned the courage of the U.S. Army Rangers who stormed the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in support of the Omaha Beach landings on D-Day in the face of enemy fire.
Patrick, lead the way!he told himself, borrowing the Rangers motto he’d heard a thousand times in his Call of Duty video games.