Flailing wildly, the crook of his knee jammed itself into the angle formed by the crane arm’s triangular framework. For what seemed like aeons, Seth hung upside down, carried through the night on the arm of the crane eight floors above the ground. He felt the Magnum slide out of his waistband.

Dizzily, he looked down at the darkness eighty feet blow. Then a warm thick fluid dripped into his eyes, smearing the vision. It was several moments before he realized it was his own blood draining from his nose. He reached up to wipe the blood away.

He heard shouts from below now. Men on the ground who had spotted him hanging there. The crane was slowing.

No. God, please. Don’t let them stop it.

With an almost superhuman effort he reached above him and pulled himself up until he was straddling the lower beam of the crane’s arm. As he did, two faces appeared at the window to Yost’s apartment, less than fifty feet away. They looked down, trying to determine where the body had landed.

The crane moved another thirty feet away from them, dragged by the momentum of the hill hopper of concrete, and then stopped. Seth wiped at the blood that flowed freely from his nose and tried to clear his head. The blow to his face had thrown off his sense of balance. He tried to move forward and the world spun. For a moment he thought the crane had started up again. And then things stabilized.

Above him Seth heard someone shout. He looked at the window to Yost’s apartment and saw one of the men pointing at him. Simultaneously, both men raised their weapons. Despite his shaky equilibrium, he scrambled through the framework of the arm toward the operator’s compartment

The operator must have seen what was happening. The crane’s powerful engine roared and the arm began to move again, making Seth a moving target, carrying him into the darkness away from his assailants.

There was more shouting from the window, and moments later the glass enclosure of the crane operator’s compartment exploded under a massive assault of gunfire. Seth watched the crane operator jerk and dance and then collapse onto the controls. A split second later, the crane engine roared. The arm’s dizzying circle accelerated faster and faster, threatening to sling Seth off.

Heart pounding, muscles strained to the breaking point, Seth clambered over the girders, fighting the increasing centrifugal force and equally aware that he’d be an easy target once he moved again into range of the killers’ guns. Bullets pinged off the steelwork around him as he reached the vertical support tower. He half climbed, half fell toward the ground.

At the bottom of the crane, brawny arms hustled him away as the crane arm spun wildly, sparking as the end of the boom grazed Yost’s building. Cries of alarm echoed through the construction site as a concrete counterbalance weight plummeted to the ground and demolished a section of scaffolding just instants after it had been cleared of workers.