I leaned closer, straining to hear Remy's words. The music was screaming harshly as the girl in front of us, her mouth open in a silent scream of ecstasy, began to arch her body toward one final spasm. From the corner of my eye, I could see two men moving purposefully across the room. Bouncers? To keep the onlookers in control and prevent the scene from becoming one of mass rape? I eyed them warily.
"…old friends again — agent's report — the volcano…" Disconnected snatches of Remy's talk came across to me. Watching the two men move closer, I reached over and put my hand on his arm. Inches away, the girl's body quivered, then, at last, convulsed.
"Remy," I said, "keep your eye on…"
He started to turn. At that moment, both men whipped aside their djellabas.
"Remy!" I shouted. "Down!"
It was too late. In the low-ceilinged room, the brutal chatter of Sten guns was deafening. Remy's body slammed forward as if he had been smashed in the spine with a gigantic hammer. A line of bloody holes appeared along his back as if they had been tattooed there. His head exploded. The skull splintered into an eruption of red blood, gray brains, and white slivers of bone. Instantly, my face was soaked with his blood, my hands and shirt splattered.
There was nothing I could do for Remy now. And I didn't have time to mourn him. A split second after the first bullets hit, I had flattened myself and started to roll. Wimelmina — my 9mm Luger and ever-present companion — was already in my hand. Flat on my belly, I snaked behind a brick pillar and returned fire. My first bullet hit home. I saw one of the two men drop his gun and arch his head back, clawing at his neck, shrieking. Blood spurted from his carotid artery as if it had been a high-pressure hose. He dropped, still clawing at himself. He was a dead man, watching himself die. But the other man was still very much alive. Even as my second bullet nicked his face, he dropped to the floor and wrenched his still-living friend's body in front of him. Using it as a shield, he continued to fire. Bullets kicked up dust and splinters of clay floor inches from my face. I didn't waste time and ammunition trying to hit the few inches of the gunman's skull that I could see. I turned Wilhelmina upward and sighted at the three dim bulbs which were the room's only source of light. I missed the first one, cursed, then scored three bulls-eyes. The room was plunged into thick darkness.
"Help! Please! Help me!"
Out of the deafening chaos of screams, shouts, and gunfire, a woman's voice sounded near me. I turned my head. It was the dancer. She was a few feet away, clawing desperately at the floor for shelter that wasn't there, her face contorted with terror. In the confusion her bra had been ripped away, and her naked breasts were splattered with bright splashes of blood. Remy St. Pierre's blood. I reached out one hand, grabbed her roughly by her long, thick black hair, and dragged her behind the pillar.
"Stay down," I growled. "Don't move."
She "huddled against me. I could feel the soft curves of her body against my gun arm. I held my fire for a minute, zeroing in on the flashes from the gunman's weapon. He was spraying the whole room now, laying down a line of fire that would have to include me — if I hadn't had cover. The room had become a hell-hole, a nightmare death pit littered with corpses, in which the still-living trampled screaming over the writhing bodies of the dying, slipping in pools of blood, tripping over smashed and mutilated flesh, falling themselves as bullets slammed savagely into their backs or faces. A few feet away, one man shrieked continuously, pressing his hands to his abdomen. His belly had been ripped open by bullets, and his guts were spilling out onto the floor.
"Please!" whimpered the girl next to me. "Please! Get us out of here!"
"Soon," I snapped. If there was any possibility of getting that gunman, and getting him alive, I wanted it. I steadied my hand against the pillar, sighted carefully, and squeezed off a shot. Just to let him know I was still there. If I could get him to abandon his tactic of laying down a sheet of fire in hopes of getting me at random, and force him to come looking for me in the dark — I could feel Hugo, my pencil-thin stiletto nestling comfortably in his chamois case on my arm.
"Listen!" the girl next to me said suddenly.
I ignored her, and squeezed off another shot. The firing halted for a moment, then resumed. The gunman had reloaded. And he was still firing at random.
"Listen!" the girl said again, more urgently, tugging at my arm.
I turned my head. Somewhere in the distance, over the brutal chatter of the Sten gun, I heard the distinctive piercing squawk of a police car.
"Police!" said the girl. "We must leave now! We must!"
The gunman must have heard the sound, too. There was one final burst, splintering bricks on the pillar and kicking up clay from the floor uncomfortably close to where we lay, and then silence. If you could call that charnel-house of screams, moans, and flailing bodies silence. I grabbed the girl by the arm and pulled her and myself up to a half-crouch. There was no use hanging around for the post-mortems. The gunman would be long gone.
"A back exit," I snapped to the girl. "One that doesn't let out onto any street. Fast!"
"Over there," she said instantly. "Behind the wall tapestry."
I couldn't see what she was pointing to in the dark, but I took her word for it. Pulling her by the arm I groped my way along the wall, through an underbrush of human bodies, dead and dying. Hands clutched at my legs, my waist. I shoved them aside, ignoring the wailing cries all around me. I didn't have time to play Florence Nightingale. I didn't have time to be questioned by the Moroccan police.
"Under the tapestry," I heard the girl whisper behind me, "there is a wooden peg. You must pull it. Hard."
My hands found the rough wool of a Moroccan tapestry. I ripped it aside and felt under it for the peg. My hands were wet and slippery with something I knew was blood. The squawking of the police car was closer now. Suddenly, it stopped.
"Hurry!" implored the girl. "They are outside!"
I found the crudely shaped peg and pulled — as somewhere in a coolly remote part of my mind I registered the fact that, for an innocent bystander, the girl seemed a little too anxious to avoid the police.
"Hurry!" she begged. "Please!"
T pulled harder. Suddenly, T felt a section of the clay wall give. It swung back, letting a gust of cool night air into the death-stench of the room. I pushed the girl into the opening and followed her. From behind, a hand clutched desperately at my shoulder, and a body tried to push its way into the opening in front of me. My right hand swung up, and then down, in a semi-lethal karate chop. I heard an agonized grunt, and the body fell. I pushed it out of the opening with one foot and went through, shouldering the wall-section back into place behind me. I paused. Wherever we were, it was pitch black.
"This way," I heard the girl whisper near me. Her hand reached out and found mine. 'To your right. Be careful. There are steps."
I let her hand pull me along, down a flight of steps and through some sort of narrow tunnel. I had to keep my head down. There was a smell of dust, decay, and age mingling with the night air.
"This exit is rarely used," the girl whispered to me in the darkness. "It is known only by the owner and a few of his friends."
"Like the two men with Sten guns?" I suggested.
"The men with the guns were not friends. But — now we must crawl. Be careful. The opening is not large."
I found myself on my belly, wriggling through a passage just barely big enough for my body. It was damp and it stank. It didn't take much figuring for me to realize we had connected with an old, unused section of the sewer system. But five strenuous minutes later, the flow of fresh air had increased. Ahead of me, the girl stopped suddenly.