The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Travis, shoving the door fully aside as she came on.
    There was no chance of getting past her and onto the landing. Even if he did, he wouldn’t get away. She’d be faster than him. Much faster.
    Travis staggered back and hit the coffee table with his calves. He lost his balance and went down hard in front of the couch, the woman already descending on him, getting a fistful of his shirt. Half of Travis’s attention was on her, and the other half, like a mental split screen, was on Ruben Ward. Lurching and bracing. Lurching and bracing. Probably halfway to the intersection by now. Once he reached it, there was no telling which direction he’d go, but in any direction there were places he could duck into within the next hundred feet. Which he might well do, out of fear that hospital staffers were right behind him—he’d have no way to know they weren’t.
    Ward could reach concealment in the next thirty or forty seconds. Could be gone in the next thirty or forty seconds.
    Travis became aware of the woman screaming at him. Asking who he was. Grabbing for both of his arms and trying to pin them. She got one. Went for the other. Travis yanked it away and did the only thing he could think of: put his index and middle finger together into a fused, rigid spike, and stabbed her in the eye with it.
    She cried out and let go of his other arm, both of her hands flying to her face to feel for damage.
    Travis twisted beneath her, got hold of one of the couch’s legs and pulled himself free. He heard her cursing and shouting and felt a rush of air as her hand just missed his back.
    Then he was on his feet, bounding over the coffee table and toward the doorway.
    The bedroom doorway.
    Behind him he heard the woman’s tone change from anger to fear. Maybe she understood what he had in mind. The table clattered as she shoved it away and came after him.
    The doorway was just ahead now. He hooked the frame with one hand as he went through, swinging his body like a sideways pendulum toward the nightstand. He got his free hand on the drawer pull just as the woman crashed into him from behind.
    The drawer came fully free of its seat. Its contents flew. Reading glasses. A little box of tissue. The snub .38. Travis’s hand closed around its grip as he went down, and then he tumbled, knees and elbows hitting the floor in random sequence.
    He came to rest with his shoulder blades against the far wall, the pistol in his hand and leveled back toward the direction he’d come from. Toward the woman.
    She pulled up short six feet away, frozen on all fours like a cat in the last instant before pouncing.
    Her eyes were locked onto the pistol’s barrel.
    “Take it easy,” she said.
    “It’s only a memory,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger.
    The bullet shattered her collarbone and she collapsed, screaming and holding the wound. Travis was already up and sprinting, ignoring her, going right over her and through the doorway.
    Across the living room. Through the still-open entry door and onto the landing. He was two flights down before he realized he still had the gun. He stuffed it into his front pocket coming off the final step, hit the exterior door’s latch bar and burst out into the cool night.
    He faced the intersection, and the north stretch of Johns Hopkins beyond it.
    No sign of Ward at either one.
    The man was already out of sight. He’d reached the crossroads and made a turn, one direction or another.
    Travis broke into a sprint toward Broadway. He dissected the situation as he ran. Ward couldn’t have crossed Broadway and continued along Monument—Travis would’ve seen him already in that case. He also couldn’t have gone into the parking structure; there was no entry to it anywhere near this street corner. That left north or south on Broadway, and south would keep Ward right next to the hospital for another eight hundred feet. The place he was desperate to get away from.
    North, then. Had to be.
    Travis was already looking in that direction as he passed the last townhouse. The whole width of Broadway slid into his view.
    Ward was nowhere on it.
    Travis spun to look south. No Ward there, either.
    He faced north again. Looked for places the man could’ve ducked into. Only two were close enough to be plausible options: an alley behind the row of academic buildings to the east, and another behind the row of town houses to the west.
    Something metal crashed onto concrete. Maybe a trash-can lid. Definitely in one of the