Chapter 73

73

Beside the silver ribbon of the moonlit river, the old brick factory burned.

Up on the grocery store roof now beside Doug and his rifle, Shaw gazed at the fire, at its reflection in the water and at the smoke that was rising steadily into the starry sky.

He'd done a good job of setting the fire. That was for sure. Even before he had fully retreated on the moving platform back to Main Street, the south half of the roof had become an inferno and most of the windows on the second story beneath it had become completely engulfed.

As he continued to survey the dramatic vista, Shaw thought the whole scene of it looked oddly familiar, like something from a history book or a fairy tale.

No, it was a painting, he realized. What was that famous one called with the marble city burning alongside a body of water? People were falling into the water and there were dead bodies everywhere.

For the life of him, he couldn't remember.

As if it mattered, he thought. He was the artist here. And this was his masterpiece.

Shaw glanced down at Doug manning the Barrett, and knelt beside him.

He lifted the man's spotting scope and scanned it over the second-story windows on the north of the factory for movement.

Please stick your head up, cop , he thought as he scanned the upper windows and the front door. Pretty please .

Shaw was passing the spotter scope over the second story again when he detected movement to the right of the factory.

It wasn't in the factory itself, he realized, but behind it.

On the other side of factory to the north was the bridge and on the other side of the bridge, there was a construction crane, its arm extended upward to the sky. This boom arm was latticed and yellow and as Shaw watched, it slowly tilted downward as it swiveled toward the front of the bridge.

"Hey, who's working that crane by the bridge?" Shaw called into the mic.

"Not one of us," came the reply from Garner.

Shaw suddenly remembered what the waitress had said about the others in the restaurant.

Construction workers.

"Shit," Shaw said with a gasp.

They had gotten out of the factory somehow, he realized. Gotten out on the back of it on the river side maybe.

The sons of bitches were playing games, Shaw thought. They were making a run for it.

He tracked down the latticed yellow boom for the cab with the spotting scope. But he couldn't see it. The north end of the factory blocked the view.

"Rifle!" he cried at Doug.

"What?"

"RIFLE!" Shaw screamed.

Doug handed up the huge Barrett. Being the length of a bench press bar, Shaw had to hoist it up over his shoulder like a marching soldier in a parade before he was able to turn with it and run.

Behind them to the east was a larger apartment building that butted up against the roof of the grocery store with windows on the level of the grocery store's roof. Shaw smashed in a window with the butt of the Barrett and climbed into the bedroom of an apartment and ran quickly through it and found the front door. In the outer hall, he took the stairs and hammered up to the third floor, then took a fourth flight to the roof.

Out the roof door, back into the cold again, he ran to the west edge of the building facing the bridge. Just as he arrived, he saw the now fully extended yellow crane arm come down across Route 4 with a screeching thud and enormous boom.

Son of a bitch! It was completely blocking the road to the bridge now, making it impossible for them to cross it.

Shaw racked the Barrett's bolt, the metal-on-metal clack of it loud, like two swords clanging together.

Weighing thirty-two pounds and almost five feet long, the Barrett semiautomatic shoulder-fired .50 caliber sniper rifle was the king of the jungle. Each of the ten rounds of .50 BMG 660-grain full metal jackets in its box magazine were the length of a can of Coke and weighed a quarter of a pound.

Powerful enough to take down aircraft and tear open a personnel carrier, what it did to a human body, Shaw knew from experience, was perverse. An unholy act of desecration.

"You wanna dance? Let's go!" Shaw yelled as he laid its bipod down near the edge of the roof and sighted.

The glass windshield of the cab zoomed up huge in the eyepiece of the Schmidt & Bender riflescope.

There was a figure in the cab.

Shaw was a disciplined enough shooter to go instantly reverent and humble. Slow is fast, slow is fast , he thought like a mantra as he stilled himself with a deep breath.

Then there was a double explosion in Shaw's ears and a double bucking bronco kick at Shaw's shoulder as he pulled the trigger of the gigantic .50 caliber sniper rifle twice.

He sighted on the cab windshield again. The glass was shattered now, obscuring the view inside. His eyes probed, up and down and side to side. There was no blood on the broken glass.

Shit. Had he gotten the bastard or not? He couldn't tell. And where were the others?

He looked around, passing the crosshairs over the bridge, the water, the trees. Slowly and methodically, he scanned the entire area between the bridge and the burning factory. Then he did it again.

Dammit! He couldn't see anyone.

A sense of terrible dread roared through him. That he was failing. That he already had failed.

Shaw refocused, stilled himself, breathed away the turmoil until he was an object at rest again.

He got off the scope and stood scanning the roof around him. Twenty feet to his right, the fire escape of the building faced out toward Route 4. He shouldered the rifle and began to run.