Seth turned and fired the round in the cylinder. The left half of the man’s face disappeared, exposing his sinuses and the base of his brain. He made a gargling sound before he hit the floor.

He heard the hurried footsteps of the other man exit the room. Quickly, Seth thought. He had to move quickly. They wouldn’t make the same mistake with the grenade twice. Next time they’d hold it long enough to prevent him from throwing it back.

Desperately he searched the room for an exit There were only the door and the window. Cold air poured in through the panes of glass broken by the explosion. He had seconds at most before the men in the hallway threw in another grenade.

He tucked the Magnum with its spent rounds into his belt at the small of his back and stood up. He brushed the curtain back with a swipe of his hand, and stared out at eight stories of black empty space. Directly ahead of him, twenty-five or thirty yards away, was the lighted operator’s compartment of the construction crane he had seen from the street. The arm of the crane was motionless. Seth’s eyes followed the arm to its end and then down. The cables from the crane’s arm ran down to a metal hopper being filled with concrete from a truck that had backed into the site. The men continued to work. Men guided a hose from the truck to the hopper. Others stood by steadying the hopper. The deafening roar of the construction site had masked the firefight above.

Frantically searching for a ledge, a toehold, he watched as the concrete hopper began to climb as the crane’s cables took up slack. Then the arm began to swing toward him. The arm slowly gathered speed.

What was it Yost had said right after the explosion? The crane. He had cursed, thinking the crane had hit his building again. Then, as Seth watched the arm swing ponderously toward him, he heard a familiar clink in the hallway. What was it?

The crane’s arm grew closer. Don’t let it stop, God. Please don’t let it stop.

Seth crouched next to the windowsill waiting for his chance.

Then the clink in the hallway came back to him. Shit! It was the sound of a grenade pin hitting the floor.

The crane’s arm moved closer; twenty feet away, fifteen, ten. Seth crawled up on the windowsill. Five feet—

He heard the grenade thud against the floor. He took one look downward at the blackness below him and then leaped at the crane’s swinging latticework arm.

He felt the grenade before he heard it. Its shock wave lifted him and pushed him forward, slamming him into the arm’s gridwork. Behind him he heard the explosion dimly, its blast muffled by the powerful engines of the crane and by the trucks below and the hammerings of rivet guns on an adjacent construction site.

Seth extended his arms to soften his trajectory but the explosive force of the grenade hurled him against the crane’s metal girders with an unmerciful force. He felt the muscles in his arms and shoulders strain as he reached for a handhold and tried to keep his head safe at the same time. He almost succeeded.