Drew breath. Waited patiently. A few seconds more.
Then he swiveled around, back toward me. His gaze dropped to the floor, as if he’d just discovered something. I saw what he was looking at.
The railback chair I’d just moved out of the way of the basement door.
It was out of place. Not exactly where he’d left it.
His gaze rose slowly. He smiled, baring teeth that were brown and belonged in a beaver’s mouth.
He raised the Desert Eagle and pointed it right at the basement door, directly at me, as if he had X-ray vision and could see through the wood, and he squeezed the trigger—
blam blam blam
—and I lurched out of the way and everything was happening in slow motion, the thunderous explosions and the muzzle flash, fireballs that lit up the entire room, the splintering of the door, and as I let go of the doorknob and the banister and leaped backward I felt a bullet slam into my chest, the pain staggering, and everything went black.
104.
When I came to, a few seconds later, my body was wracked with excruciating pain. Like something had exploded inside my chest while my rib cage was being crushed in some enormous vise. The pain in my left leg was even worse, sharp and throbbing, the nerve endings shrieking and juddering. Everything moved in a sort of stroboscopic motion, like a rapid series of still images.
Where was I?
On my back, I knew, sprawled on a hard cold floor in the near darkness, surrounded by the dank odor of mold and old concrete and the stench of urine. As my eyes adjusted, I saw snowdrifts of what looked like shredded newspaper all around me, and a lot of rat droppings.
Something scurried by, made a scree sound, and I lurched.
A large shaggy Brown Norway rat, its long scaly tail writhing, stopped a few feet away. It gazed with beady brown eyes, maybe curious, or maybe resentful that I’d disturbed its den. It twitched its whiskers and scuttled away into the darkness.
Pale moonlight filtered in from above, through a gaping hole in the underside of a wooden staircase.
In an instant I realized what had just happened.
A bullet had struck me, slamming into the left side of my ballistic vest, but it hadn’t penetrated my body. I was alive only because two inches of solid oak had slowed the round’s velocity. But I’d been knocked off balance, shoved backward down the stairs. Then I’d crashed feet first through the termite-damaged, rotten planks and broken through, landing on the concrete floor below.
I tried to breathe, but each time I inhaled it felt like daggers piercing my lungs. I sensed warm blood seeping down my left leg. I reached down to feel the bullet wound.
But there wasn’t any.
Instead, the jagged end of a broken plank a foot long was sunk several inches into my left calf, through tough denim.
I grabbed the board and wrenched it out of my flesh. A couple of long rusty nails protruded from the wood. As painful as it had been lodged in my calf, it was far worse coming out.
I tried to recall the number of shots he’d fired at me. The .50 caliber Desert Eagle’s magazine held only seven rounds. Had he fired four or five? Maybe even six.
Maybe he didn’t have any rounds left. Maybe he had one.
I was short of breath and dazed and numb. A creak somewhere overhead, then heavy footsteps on the top steps. Zhukov was coming down the stairs.
Maybe he thought he’d killed me but wanted to make sure. Maybe he thought he could just finish me off. I had to move before he fired straight down as I lay here gasping.
I felt for my weapon but it wasn’t in the holster. I’d been holding it when the bullets struck me. Maybe I’d dropped it when I took a tumble. Now I felt for it on the cold floor, my hands sweeping over the concrete and the debris and the rat droppings. But it was nowhere within reach.
A light came on: a bare bulb mounted to one of the rafters about ten feet away. The ceiling was low. The basement was small: maybe thirty feet by twenty.
Wooden shelves were screwed on to the cinder-block walls, lined with old canning jars. Rickety children’s bookcases, painted with clowns and dancers, were heaped with newspapers and magazines that had been chewed through, cobwebbed, littered with rat droppings. In one corner, in a square hole cut into the concrete floor, a rusty sump