“You go stand over there, against those shelves,” Wilkes said. Then he stepped over the ring of video-game consoles and prodded the laptop with his shoe. “Interesting setup here. You organizing another drone attack?”
“Angel had nothing to do with those,” Chapel said. “She was framed. The thing in California, with the power station — she couldn’t have done that.”
“She could have programmed the drone to do it in advance, put it on a timer,” Wilkes said. He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t give a crap. I’m not here to solve a big mystery, Jimmy. I’m not a detective.”
“Then why are you here?”
Wilkes gave him a big shit-eating grin. Then he squatted down next to the laptop, the gun still trained on Chapel. He picked up the hard drive attached to the laptop. Standing up, he lifted the hard drive until the laptop dangled in the air by the cord that connected them. He gave the hard drive a good swift yank and it came free, the laptop crashing to the floor.
“This is it, huh? What you stole from that trailer. The last part of Angel.”
Chapel said nothing.
Wilkes dropped the hard drive. It hit the concrete floor with a bang. He lifted one booted foot and stamped down hard on the metal box. Something inside it cracked. Then, perhaps for good measure, he lowered his pistol and put two bullets into the casing.
Even with the silencer the gunshots were loud enough to make Chapel’s ears ring. The noise echoed and reverberated around the stockroom.
It was almost enough to mask the sound of someone grunting in frustration behind Wilkes.
Almost. Chapel forced himself not to look over there. If Wilkes hadn’t heard it, he didn’t want to draw the marine’s attention to the fact that Angel was still in the stockroom, hidden behind a shelving unit.
It turned out not to matter. Almost before the echoes had finished bouncing around the room, she gave another grunt, loud enough that anyone could have heard it.
Wilkes didn’t waste time speaking. He brought the pistol back up to point at Chapel, but turned his head to look behind him.
Just in time to see the entire shelving unit, ten feet high and packed with boxes of electronics, come crashing down on him.
Boxes and video-game consoles went everywhere, sliding across the floor. Wilkes let out a sound that was half gasp and half cry of rage as he disappeared from view.
Where the shelving unit had been, Angel was revealed, standing there breathing hard and looking terrified.
“Go,” Chapel shouted at her. “Get Julia — get out of here!”
He could hear Wilkes moving around under the pile of debris. A pile of blister-packed toner cartridges slid off the heap like an avalanche down the side of a cardboard mountain. There wasn’t much time.
Angel still stood there, looking like she had no idea what she’d just done.
“Go!” Chapel shouted again.
This time she took the hint, sprinting toward the fire door.
Chapel approached the debris pile carefully, not knowing where exactly Wilkes might be under all the boxes and broken electronics. He could hear the man moving, trying to escape. He might be badly injured down there. Or merely incapacitated for a second.
Boxes shifted and heaved, and for a second Chapel expected Wilkes to come rearing up out of the mess, howling like a wounded bear. That didn’t happen, though. The boxes settled, finding their own level. Chapel couldn’t hear Wilkes anymore. Had the marine passed out in there? Was he dead?
Chapel reached down carefully and pulled a box off the top of the pile.
The 9 mm appeared in the gap. Chapel could see one of Wilkes’s eyes under the debris.
The pistol fired. The noise and the muzzle flash blinded and deafened him and he could only stagger backwards, away from the attack.
It took Chapel a second to realize he’d been shot.
It wasn’t the first time Chapel had caught a bullet.
In fact, he knew the feeling all too well. Shock would keep most of the pain away until he ran out of adrenaline and his body had to accept what had happened to it. Shock couldn’t spare him the wave of nausea and weakness that spread through his guts, though.
He put pressure on the wound with his artificial hand and tried to breathe. He needed to think, he needed to plan—
He needed to run.
The pile of boxes was already moving, shifting, as Wilkes struggled to get free. Wilkes was still alive and conscious and armed down there, and any second now he would jump up and finish what he’d started. Chapel ducked around the side of the debris pile, desperately hoping Wilkes didn’t just shoot him again as he passed by. He headed through the stockroom, not looking back, and crashed into the push bar of the fire door with his good arm. Hitting the door sent a wave of pain through his chest, but he ignored it and kept moving.
Outside, on the dark loading dock, he saw nothing that could help him. Julia was gone — Angel must have woken her up and gotten her out of there. The two of them could be sitting in the car just a hundred yards away, waiting for him. He hoped not. For one thing, he wanted them gone so they would be safe, so that they would be far away from Wilkes. For another thing, getting to them would mean climbing over the chain-link fence again.
Wounded as he was, that wasn’t going to happen.
Behind him, inside the store, he heard something heavy crash and fall. That would be Wilkes working himself free.
Chapel studied the terrain around him. Behind the electronics store lay a long stretch of undeveloped woodland, a dark forest that would offer some cover. He started running for those trees, knowing they were his only chance.
Halfway there the pain showed up to the party. It was like his nervous system had just realized he’d been shot and was replaying the experience to see what it had missed. Lancing pain shot through his side. Muscles from his groin up to what remained of his left shoulder twisted into knots, and red spots flashed before his eyes. He doubled over, wondering if he was going to throw up, wondering if he was just going to collapse in a heap right there, right then.
No. He refused to just stop now. Chapel gritted his teeth and forced his legs to get moving. They weren’t injured, after all.
Bent nearly double, he half walked, half ran into the trees. Darkness flooded over him, but he told himself that was just because the branches of the trees were blocking out the moonlight. It had nothing to do with his brain desperately wanting to pass out and sleep through the pain that only kept getting worse.
Behind him he heard the fire door slam open. Chapel ducked low to try to avoid being seen.
A bullet smashed through a thin tree branch just over his head, showering him in chips of wood and bark. Apparently Wilkes could see him just fine.
That was the impetus he needed.
Chapel ran.
Keeping one hand on his wound, Chapel waved the other in front of him, fending off low branches and preventing himself from running headlong into a tree trunk. He could see almost nothing at all, just the occasional flash of dark sky or the silhouette of a tree limb like a talon grasping at his face.
The ground behind the electronics store sloped gradually downward, and up ahead Chapel could hear running water — a creek or a stream or something. He had no idea how far these woods extended, or what might lie on the other side. If he lived long enough to get there, he would worry about it then.
Behind him he heard Wilkes’s heavy boots crunching through drifts of fallen leaves left over from the previous autumn. Chapel probably made as much noise himself, but it was lost under the constant roar of blood in his ears and the sound of his own breathing as it howled in and out of his chest.