There was a dossier open on the bed, with photographs and xeroxes of bank statements. She was studying her next target. They didn't let their people out after they knew who the target was. A good piece of security, Shad thought.
"You're free," Shad said. His mouth was dry. "Follow the others to the stairs."
She made a nervous gesture with her hands. "I left you a message earlier."
"I forgot to check."
" I haven't told them anything."
He opened the door. "Better get out of here."
She took her blanket and left without looking back. Shad walked to the next door. Peering out the window was a scar-faced woman in an eye patch whose distinctive features he'd last seen in the New York Post.
Dr. Cody Havero.
"I've been looking for you, Doc," Shad said, and turned to the dinosaur. "Hit nine!" The lock buzzed, and Shad pulled open the door.
"Listen," Cody said.
"You're free," Shad said. "Take the stairs to the roof, go down the fire escape, and head for the police station."
"No. Wait. My name is Cody Havero."
"Hit ten!" Shad looked at her. "I know who you are. The whole city's been trying to find you. Hit eleven!"
"Listen." Following him. "I know things. A lot of what's going on, here and on the Rox. I know a lot of the people they've lined up as targets. And-"
Shad heard one of the freight elevators start up and put a hand over Cody's mouth. Night rose from the floor, covered them both. Cody gave a little shiver as her vision darkened.
The elevator platform rose, and Shad could see through the old-fashioned folding elevator door that Tachyon was on it. He looked pale and about a hundred years old. Even the plume on his hat drooped. He was carrying a tray with plastic-wrapped sandwiches and paper cups of coffee.
Shad was already moving, a memory flaming in his mind of Shelley in the hound joker body, little bits of tissue sticking- to her fur as she wiped away tears…
Tachyon slid open the elevator door before he noticed anything was wrong, and Shad turned everything to night, reached into the elevator, and grabbed Tachyon by the throat.
Hot coffee spattered the floor. Shad slammed Tach's head into the side of the elevator, then swung him around and out of the elevator and smashed him into the brick wall of the main room. Tachyon went limp.
Shad reached down, took the alien's collar in his hands, applied an X-hand choke hold, pressing not only on the windpipe but on the blood vessels on either side of the neck, cutting the arteries that fed the brain. Whoever was inside Tachyon was going to have to die before he jumped out.
He tightened his hold. The darkness fell away, and Cody screamed.
"No! Leave her alone!"
Tachyon was moving feebly, trying without success to tear Shad's hands away. Cody ran to him, grabbed one of Shad's arms in both her own, tried to haul him off the alien. "That's not Tachyon!" she said.
"Either way," said Shad, and tightened his grip, pressing hard. Tachyon's eyes rolled up. Shad remembered the way the garrote had sliced into his throat when he was a boy, the way the police had to give him a tracheotomy after they kicked down the door, dug a hole in his windpipe, and how he didn't understand what was happening and tried to fight them, thinking they were trying to kill him too.
Cody tugged on him. "It's just some girl named Kelly. She's not really anybody."
Shad looked at her. She took a step back, her eyes widening as she saw his expression, and then determination entered her face, and she yanked on his arm again. "She's Blaise's girlfriend. That's all she is. She does what they tell her."
Shad looked down at the alien body, its face turning purple, and released his hold. Tachyon thudded to the floor, clutched at his throat.
"Blaise is the bad one," Cody told him. "He's behind the whole thing. He's evil."
"Didn't think he was a choirboy," Shad said. His throat ached as if in sympathy with Tachyon's.
"He killed the real Tachyon months ago. Blaise told me." Tachyon's not dead, Shad thought in surprise. He's on the Rox.
He was about to tell Havero that, but suddenly the room was filled with the flat unmistakable boom of a Kalashnikov. Shad's nerves screamed as he dove forward and rolled, willed his opaque black cloak around him. He flattened himself against the metal wall of the prison complex.
The overhead mesh rattled. Cody, he saw, had reacted well, throwing herself flat, and she was now low-crawling toward cover. Her Vietnam reflexes seemed intact.
The AK boomed again. Shad extended his opaque field and climbed up the wall of the cage complex. There was a fountain of sparks from the control console, and the yellow dinosaur fell back, arms waving.
The joker was crouched, the AK shouldered and leveled, and there was a ripping sound as the guard unloaded a full magazine in the direction of the escaping prisoners.
Shad screamed in anger and ate every photon in the joker's body. It took several long seconds. Shad's heart seemed to swell with sudden heat. The joker pitched forward, frozen; there were little crystalline sounds as bits of him broke off and rattled downward through the mesh. Shad ran for the table, saw the dinosaur lying splayed with his brain oozing down the brick wall behind him, the yellow body twitching in its final throes. Shad looked wildly for Shelley and saw her-saw Lisa Traeger's body-running up the iron stairway, panic stamped on her face but otherwise unharmed. Two more of the prisoners were down, wounded. The rest of the swarm of bullets had only pocked the red brick walls. Either the guard was a bad shot, or he'd been seeing triple from his head injury.
Cody Havero ran forward to render first aid, her hands snatching automatically at her pockets as if for medical instruments.
A telephone on the control panel began to purr. Shad picked it up. His eyes tracked to the stair.
"What's happening? Who's shooting?" The voice sounded female and young.
"What's happened-" He felt himself smile. "-is that I just killed your guard. The question is, what do you think you can do about it?"
He put the phone down. "Everybody out," he said, and hit the remaining switches. Jokers burst out of cells and staggered for the exits.
"Help your friends!" Shad said, pointing to the two wounded. "Get 'em out."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tachyon rise to an unsteady crouch, then fall headfirst down the stairs. Shad suppressed an impulse to pursue and instead hit the switches labeled floods and managed to kill most of the floodlights. An alarm buzzer began its cry, repeating its grating message every three seconds. Shad walked toward the stairway, darkness swirling off his form like dancing mist.
The first two jumpers bounded up the stairs with UZIs in their hands. Shad dropped night around them, watched the panic grow in their eyes, then drew heat from their bodies till they went unconscious and stumbled back down the stairs. He heard someone scream down below. Shots bounced up the stairway, fired blind by someone out of sight.
Shad jumped over the barrier to the freight elevator that Tachyon hadn't used, then walked down the side of the elevator shaft. Peering around the corner, he saw a cold-eyed mastiff of a joker and a chubby-faced young white girl braced behind some packing crates, the joker with another AK and the girl with a Dirty Harry revolver far too large for her hands. Both were staring at the stairway with its two bluefaced figures. A white boy in a flash Italian jacket and Bart Simpson T-shirt was trying to kick-start a vintage Triumph motorbike, but in his panic he'd flooded the engine.