Certain Prey

she turned and lurched down toward the elevators. The doors were just closing, and she slapped at the button and they started to open and she looked back and saw Lucas peek from behind her doors and she fired again, and let herself fall into the elevator.
    Lucas fired twice more, but had a bad angle at the closing doors; one slug hit the doors, the other might have slipped inside . . . He crawled toward them and pushed the down button.

    “F UCKIN’GUN,” Sherrill said to Sloan in the lobby, their guns coming out. “That was a fuckin’ gun. A big fuckin’ gun.”
    “Wait for the elevator, it’s coming down,” Sloan said. “I’m taking the stairs.”
    “Too far, too far,” Sherrill said, but Sloan was moving: “Gotta block them, gotta block the parking ramp.”
    “Careful,” she shouted after him.
    “Call in,” he shouted back, and Sherrill got her cell phone out and pushed the speed-dial for dispatch and began shouting into it as the numbers came down to five. Then it stopped, and Sherrill ran to the stairway and yelled up, “Elevator stopped at five, watch the ramp.”
    “Got it,” Sloan called.
    The other elevator was going up again and Sherrill, without thinking, punched the up button. The first one, the elevator that stopped at five, started down. But the other rose inexorably to twenty-seven before it stopped. She ran back to the stairway access and shouted after Sloan, “The elevator’s on twenty-seven.”
    At that moment, the second elevator dinged in the lobby. She shouted at the frightened security guard, “Turn off that elevator. Stop it. Can you stop it on this floor? Stop it!”
    He ran to the elevator as the door opened, but then almost stumped, stopping outside of it: “My, God, there’s blood . . .”
    Sherrill pushed him aside, saw a puddle of blood in the middle of the carpet. “How do you stop it?” she asked.
    “Pull the red emergency stop button.”
    She saw it, a red knob the size of her thumb, and pulled it out. “That’ll do it?”
    “Yeah, that . . .” The security guard looked up at the numbers above the elevator doors. “The other one’s coming down.”
    “Oh, fuck. Get out of the way.” She stood back from the elevator doors, her pistol at gut level: remember the chant, Two in the belly and one in the head, knocks a man down and kills him dead . . .
    Then the elevator doors opened and she saw Lucas on the floor with his gun pointing at her chest and blood streaming into his eyes and Sherrill screamed, “Lucas, Lucas, Jesus . . .”
    • • •

    T HE ELEVATOR SEEMED to move at a deliberate and insolent crawl; Carmel pushed herself up, realized that her arm was burning; looked, and saw more blood. Her body was on fire. She staggered into the hallway at five, out to the parking ramp. The stairwell came up just inside the parking-ramp door, and somebody was on the stairs, coming up. “Fuck you,” Carmel screamed down at the man. She could see his arm, still three flights down. He stopped and looked up at her, and she fired the gun, once, twice. S LOAN BRACED HIMSELF. He was only at three and a half, confused. Carmel? Two shots sailed past, and he aimed blindly up, and fired once.
    Carmel, fearless now, the pain tightening her, fired another shot, then another, and then got a click. She’d used up the clip. “Fuck you,” she screamed again, and lurched out into the ramp. A dozen steps, and she was at the bloody-murder-red Jag, which was right there. Fumbling with her keys. On fire, she was on fire.
    She backed out, aimed the Jag down the ramp and stepped on it. S LOAN HEARD the parking-ramp door bang shut. He took another quick peek, then another, then ran up to the next landing. He heard the Jag start, screech away. He was at four and a half now. He ran back down, through the fourthfloor door, heard her coming all the way. He lifted the .38, and as she turned the corner, fired a shot at the windshield. No effect, and the car’s back end twitched out as Carmel gunned it again, and he fired another shot at the driver’sside window as she passed him; but he was slow, and the shot smashed through the back window and then she was down the ramp and around the corner.
    Sloan ran back through the door and down to three, but at three, she was already going by, and he ran down to two, and she was coming and he knew he was too late, so he kept going, and at one he burst into the lobby and screamed at Sherrill, “She’s coming down the ramp.”
    As he ran