Seize the Night

and diplomats and gentle persons everywhere, I pulled the trigger.
    I was hoping to hit him in the shoulder or arm, though I suspect it's only in movies that you can confidently calculate to wound a man rather than kill him. In real life, panic and physics and fate screw things up.
    Most likely, more often than not, in spite of the best intentions, the polite wounding shot drills through the guy's brain or bounces among his ribs, off his sternum, and ends up dead-center in his heart or kills a kindly grandmother baking cookies six blocks away.
    This time, though I wasn't firing another warning shot, I missed his shoulder, arm, heart, brain, and everything else that would have bled.
    Panic, physics, fate. The bullet tore into the club, spraying his face with splinters and larger fragments of wood.
    Suddenly convinced of his own mortality and perhaps recognizing the incomparable danger of confronting a marksman as poor as I am, the weasel pitched his makeshift cudgel, turned, and ran back toward the elevator alcove.
    I juked when I saw he was going to throw the club, but my Big Bag of Really Smooth Moves was empty. Instead of ducking away from the club, I cunningly dodged straight into it, got rapped across the chest, and fell.
    I was getting up even as I was going down, but by the time I made it to my feet again, my assailant was nearing the end of the hall. My legs were longer than his, but I wasn't going to be able to catch up with him easily.
    If you're looking for someone to shoot a man in the back, I'm not your guy, regardless of the circumstances. My attacker safely turned the corner into the elevator alcove—where he switched on a flashlight of his own.
    Although I needed to nail this creep, finding Jimmy Wing was an even higher priority. The boy might have been hurt and left to die.
    Besides, when the kidnapper arrived at the top of the ladder, a toothy surprise would be waiting for him. Orson wouldn't let the guy get out of the elevator shaft.
    I scooped up the flashlight and hurried to the third in the line of doors along the hall. It was ajar, and I pushed it all the way open.
    Of the three chambers I'd thus far explored, this was the smallest, less than half the size of the other two, so the light swept from wall to wall. Jimmy was not here.
    The only item of interest was a balled-up yellow cloth about ten feet beyond the threshold. I almost ignored it, eager to try the next door along the corridor, but then I ventured inside and, with the same hand that held the gun, I plucked the rag off the floor.
    It wasn't a rag, after all, but the soft cotton top from a pair of pajamas. A crew-neck pullover. About the right size for a five-year-old.
    Across the chest, in red and black letters, were the words Jedi Knight .
    A sudden foreboding made my mouth go dry.
    When I'd followed Orson away from Lilly Wing's house, I had already reluctantly decided that her little boy was beyond saving, but subsequently, against my better judgment, I had allowed myself to hope too much. In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future.
    Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart. Because I had loved Lilly for so many years—now as a friend, in other days, more deeply than one loves even the dearest friend—I had wanted to spare her from this worst of all calamities, from the loss of a child. I had wanted this more desperately than I'd realized and consequently I'd been running across a bridge of hope, a high arched span, which now dissolved like gossamer and directed my attention to the chasm beneath me.
    Clutching the pajama top, I returned to the corridor.
    I heard the boy's name, “ Jimmy ,” before I realized that I was the one who had softly spoken it.
    I called to him again, not sotto voce this time but at the top of my voice.
    I might as well have spoken in a murmur, because my shout drew no more response than my whisper. No surprise. I hadn't expected a reply.
    Angrily, I wadded the thin pajama top and stuffed it in a coat pocket.
    With the illusion of hope dispelled, I could more clearly see the