Dragon Tears Read Online Free PDF Page B

plenty of time to stew in there. But that wasn’t how it worked. Cops were expected to act rather than react. If there was a way out of the storeroom, any delay on their part would allow the perp to escape.
    Besides, when your partner was Connie Gulliver, you did not have the luxury of dawdling or ruminating. She was never reckless, always professional and cautious—but so quick and aggressive that it seemed sometimes as if she had come to homicide investigations by way of a SWAT team.
    Connie snatched up a broom that was leaning against the wall. Holding it near the base, she poked the handle against the half-open door, which swung inward with a protracted squeak. When the door was all the way open, she threw the broom aside. It clattered like old bones on the tile floor.
    They regarded each other tensely from opposite sides of the doorway.
    Silence in the storeroom.
    Without exposing himself to the perp, Harry could see just a narrow wedge of darkness beyond the threshold.
    The only sounds were the chuckling and sputtering of the pots and deep fryers in the kitchen, the hum of the exhaust fans overhead.
    As Harry’s eyes adjusted to the gloom beyond the door, he saw geometric forms, dark gray in the threatening black. Suddenly he realized it wasn’t a storeroom. It was the bottom of a stairwell.
    He cursed under his breath again.
    Connie whispered: “What?”
    “Stairs.”
    He crossed the threshold, as heedless of his safety as Connie was of hers, because there was no other way to do it. Stairways were narrow traps in which you couldn’t easily dodge a bullet, and dark stairways were worse. The gloom above was such that he couldn’t see if the perp was up there, but he figured he made a perfect target with the backlighting from the kitchen. He would have preferred to blockade the stairwell door and find another route onto the second floor, but by then the perp would be long gone or barricaded so well that it might cost a couple of other cops’ lives to root him out.
    Once committed, he took the stairs as fast as he dared, slowed only by the need to stay to one side, against the wall, where the floorboards would be the tightest and the least likely to sag and squeak underfoot. He reached a narrow landing, moving blindly with his back to the wall.
    Squinting up into utter lightlessness, he wondered how a second floor could be as perfectly dark as a basement.
    From above came soft laughter.
    Harry froze on the landing. He was confident that he was no longer backlit. He pressed tighter to the wall.
    Connie bumped into him and also froze.
    Harry waited for the queer laugh to come again. He hoped to get a fix precise enough to make it worth risking a shot and revealing his own location.
    Nothing.
    He held his breath.
    Then something thumped. Rattled. Thumped again. Rattled. Thumped again.
    He realized some object was rolling and bouncing down the steps toward them. What? He had no idea. His imagination deserted him.
    Thump. Rattle. Thump.
    Intuitively he knew that whatever was coming down the stairs was not good. That’s why the perp had laughed. Something small from the sound of it, but deadly in spite of being small. He was infuriated with himself for being unable to
think
, to visualize. He felt stupid and useless. A foul sweat suddenly sheathed him.
    The object hit the landing and rolled to a stop against his left foot. It bumped his shoe. He jerked back, then immediately squatted, blindly felt the floor, found the damn thing. Larger than an egg but roughly egg-shaped. With the intricate geometric surface of a pinecone. Heavier than a pinecone. With a lever on top.
    “Get down!” He stood and threw the hand grenade back into the upper hall before following his own advice and dropping as flat as possible on the landing.
    He heard the grenade clatter against something above.
    He hoped his throw had sent the damn thing all the way into the second-floor hall. But maybe it bounced off a stairwell wall and was arcing