Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Sixty-Six

Dating back to high school, I've always had an obsessive component to my personality that drove me to tackle the hardest part of multilayered tasks first and save the easiest parts for last.

Calvin Ward was about six-foot-two inches tall and a hundred and seventy-five pounds. Unconscious, he was dead weight and felt like double his natural weight, but I dragged him out first, gripping him under the armpits, and pulled him down the grated metal stairs, hoping I wasn't breaking his legs or shattering ankles, as he bounced.

We stopped one flight down when I realized there were still two flights to go before we reached the ground, and I went back for Pogano. He wasn't as heavy as Ward, but he was lankier and was just as awkward to carry as a rolled-up area rug.

It was a relief to finally go back for Jefferson, knowing he was shorter and much lighter than the others.

But my relief was short-lived. A loud boom shattered the calm, and I nearly fell over the rickety, rusty handrail. My guess was the S.W.A.T. team had rammed the ground-level doors and entered the building.

That meant our captors would be looking for a way out. I was right. Just as I made it out the door with Jefferson, I saw them.

I think it took them a minute to realize what was happening. There was an open door, their gateway to probable freedom. But they were confused. Either they hadn't been aware of the door before and had only entered the room to kill us, or they were aware of the door and were surprised to see it already wide open.

Either way, they recovered quickly and opened fire.

Luckily, they were terrible shots. At least one of them held his pistol sideways like the bad guys in pretty much every nineteen nineties John Woo action movie...especially those starring Nicholas Cage and/or John Travolta.

Legs and ankles be damned. I practically ran down the stairs with Jefferson in tow, wondering how I might get all three men to the ground and racking my brain for something to negotiate with, something to offer the shooters that might encourage them to leave us and flee.

But I didn't have long to think. By the time I made it to the second-story deck, they were on us. They looked like boys, scrawny teenagers, swimming in their clothes, sweating profusely. And I'd swear one of them had been crying.

They wore pocket flags – flat-ironed blue, tan, and gray bandanas, folded to a point and dangling from their waistbands to signify that they were members of the Almighty Graylords, one of Chicago's oldest street gangs.

I let Jefferson slump gently against my feet and raised both hands. I wanted to argue to them that the cops had to be less than a minute from finding us so they should just run – run and save themselves.

"Listen fellas..."

And then there was light. I'd heard that a large caliber handgun fired at close range is so loud that the sound is deafening and delayed, with the flash of the explosion traveling faster than the boom.

I felt the shot before I actually heard it and felt dread as I fell atop Jefferson when I heard four more shots in rapid succession. They were killing us all.