More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,80

I went to the one at the end, and the lock was stuck, the window was swollen with moisture, but not painted over. The wind belted another flock of icy pellets against the glass, and I realized…Emma, get used to it: In a moment, you’re going to be on the receiving end of all nature’s fury. Still a better option than a gun.

By now, my armed friend outside had realized that the butter knife was no good, and had moved on to credit cards. Luckily, he or she was as concerned as I had been with keeping quiet, and so I gained a few more precious moments as the intruder tried to figure out how to open the door silently.

I reevaluated the risk of climbing out onto an icy ledge during a blizzard: the building was old, but the roof of the porte cochere would surely hold me; I was only on the second floor and the twenty feet or so I could possibly fall probably wouldn’t kill me. There were my dubious abilities in disarming someone; I’d done okay in my Krav Maga classes, but my instructor Nolan had gotten a fake gun up to my head often enough to make me doubt my chances. Although I doubted that whoever had that gun would want to risk the noise in firing a shot, I couldn’t risk that he might also have brought a silencer.

I had already started bashing the lock on the window.

The lock gave. With a little effort, I hoisted the window up. I couldn’t believe I was going to do this, but I was more interested in saving my life than I was at being embarrassed, at this point. A blast of cold air and hard sleet roared through the window and I had second thoughts about going out there. Surely it would be better to try and hide or try and get the gun away from whoever was out there while I waited for the cops…

No. Guns require a drastic response.

Any thoughts I might have had about trying to shut the window after me were immediately banished. The wind whipped so hard that I could barely keep myself stuck to the wall and keep my feet under me.

There was no sound behind me, at least, nothing I could hear over the wind, the ice, and the blood pounding in my ears. Then a shot seemed to come from below me—I felt a thud next to me and brick chips flew up at me—but it must have been a trick of the wind. I couldn’t stay put, in any case, and wait for the cops to show up.

As I shuffled along the narrow, level part of the porch roof, the only thing keeping me from sliding right off the icy masonry was the elaborate system of spikes to prevent pigeons from nesting on the building. I crushed some, and felt a couple getting ready to pierce the leather sole of my shoe as I moved my feet, but that was preferable to bullet ventilation and extreme lead poisoning. At least they provided some traction against the ice.

My fingers were numb and, suddenly, I was measuring happiness by the millimeters of gap between the surface of the mortar and the edge of the bricks. Every second I was losing my sense of touch.

I tried to yell, maybe get the attention of those in the next room. The wind howled around me and drowned my calls for help: I would have to get closer to the window before I had any chance at all of being heard. I would have to get to the window before I froze to death, which felt like it would be in about three minutes on a night like this.

With all of my concentration on the natural forces working against me, I’d nearly forgotten what had compelled me out there in the first place. Another bullet whined past me just as I slipped on a particularly slippery patch. I could literally feel myself being peeled off the face of the building when a contrary blast of wind knocked me back into the wall. Not daring to look above me, with the side of my face slammed into the cold brick, I shot my hand up over my head in a blind attempt to find a hand hold on a decorative course of brick that jutted out slightly. The first time I did nothing but jam my fingertips into the underside of it, knocking loose