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Back Stop at Nothing Save as PDF
Contents ( 98)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81
  82. 82
  83. 83
  84. 84
  85. 85
  86. 86
  87. 87
  88. 88
  89. 89
  90. 90
  91. 91
  92. 92
  93. 93
  94. 94
  95. 95
  96. 96
  97. 97
  98. EPILOGUE

“THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM SIGNAL YOU ARE HEARING IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED. THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM SIGNAL YOU ARE HEARING IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED.”

As the siren blast whooped twice again, Gannon glanced over and saw that all of the towels were burning now. He crawled over and grabbed one and opened the door into the bedroom. Keeping low, he thrust the burning towel under the edge of the bedspread and set it alight. It caught up immediately in a horrid chemical stink, and there was immediate thick black smoke. He threw another burning towel onto the desk.

When the bed was going pretty good, he peeked out around the burning bottom of it. The entire end of the room by the shattered window was covered in smoke, and the wall behind the desk was catching fire.

Gannon got to his knees, coughing, and grabbed the metal frame of the bed and hurled the whole burning mess of it up and at the window. Then he reached into the sitting room and grabbed the young woman by the hand.

He thought he was certainly going to get shot in the back as they leaped over the murdered reporter a split second later.

But the bullets didn’t come, and Gannon got the front door flung open, and they were out in the hallway with the black smoke chasing behind them.

51

They ran down the hall in the terrifying alarm squeal. Very confused-looking people were standing in some of the doorways of the other rooms.

“What the hell is going on?” said one of them, an old hairy guy in a bathrobe.

“The hotel’s on fire! Run!” Gannon yelled as he dodged past him around a corner.

On the other side of it was a pretty thirtysomething woman standing beside the stairwell doorway.

In midstride, Gannon registered three things about her almost simultaneously.

She had fear in her face. There was a phone in one of her hands and a semiautomatic pistol in the other.

Gannon didn’t break stride as he let go of the navy lieutenant’s hand. Instead, he tucked down his shoulder and hit the armed woman a lick at the upper chest that leveled her off her feet and sent both of them into the stairwell and down the stairs.

Gannon rode the woman down the stairs like a toboggan and landed his two-twenty hard on top of her at the bottom of the half-flight floor. As he got up, he could see that the nice-looking honey blond–haired woman wasn’t holding anything now and her face was showing pure shock. She was gasping and staring at where one of her broken left forearm bones was sticking up between her elbow and wrist, almost through the skin.

Gannon saw her phone there on the concrete beside her, and he stomped it with his new construction boot in a shatter of plastic and then lifted her fallen gun.

It was a Smith & Wesson stainless-steel .45, the single-stack stippled beavertail grip small in his big hand. He racked the slide and saw that there wasn’t even a round in the chamber. Gannon checked the eight-round magazine with a click and put one in the pipe with another. Then he cocked the bobbed hammer all the way back with his calloused thumb as he tucked it into his waistband.