Extreme Denial by David Morrell Read Free Book Online

courtyard and collapsing next to his father, pressing his face against his father’s head. “Didn’t mean to.”
    “Help me,” Decker said. “We have to get him to the car.”
    “Didn’t know who he was.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Didn’t realize.”
    “ What?”
    ‘”Thought he was one of them” Brian sobbed.
    “You did this?” Decker grabbed Brian, finding that he had a revolver in his jacket pocket.
    “I couldn’t help myself. He came out of the darkness.”
    “Jesus.”
    “I had to shoot.”
    “God help ...”
    “I didn’t mean to kill him.”
    “You didn’t.”
    “I’m telling you, I—”
    “He isn’t dead!”
    In the darkness, Brian’s stunned look was barely discernible.
    “We have to get him to the car. We have to take him to the hospital. Grab his feet.”
    As Decker reached for McKittrick’s shoulder, a bumblebee seemed to buzz down past Decker’s head. A projectile whacked against the wall behind him.
    Flinching, Decker scurried toward the protection of a crate. The shot—from a sound-suppressed weapon—had come from above him. He aimed fiercely upward, blinking from the rain, unable to see a target in the darkness.
    “They won’t let you,” Brian said.
    “They?”
    “They’re here.”
    Decker’s heart felt squeezed as he realized why Brian had been yelling in the street. Not at the sky or God or the Furies. He’d been screaming at the terrorists.
    Brian remained in the open, beside his father.
    “Get over here,” Decker told him.
    “I’m safe.”
    “For God sake, get over here behind this crate.”
    “They won’t shoot me.”
    “Don’t talk crazy.”
    “Before you got here, Renata showed herself to me. She told me the best way to hurt me is to let me live.”
    “What?”
    “So I can suffer for the rest of my life, knowing I killed my father.”
    “But your shot didn’t kill him! He isn’t dead!”
    “He might as well be. Renata will never let us take him out of here. She hates me too much.” Brian pulled his revolver from his pocket. In the gloom, it seemed that he pointed it at himself.
    “Brian! No!”
    But instead of shooting himself, Brian surged to his feet, cursed, and disappeared into the darkness at the back of the courtyard.
    Amid the pelting rain, Decker—shocked—heard Brian’s footsteps charging up an exterior wooden staircase.
    “Brian, I warned you!” a woman shouted from above. The husky voice was Renata’s. “Don’t come after me!”
    Brian’s footsteps charged higher.
    Lights came on in balcony windows.
    “I gave you a chance!” Renata shouted. “Stay away, or I’ll do what I did at the other apartment buildings!”
    “You’re going to pay for making a fool of me!”
    Renata laughed. “You did it to yourself!”
    “You’re going to pay for my father!”
    “You did that yourself!”
    Brian’s footsteps pounded higher.
    “Don’t be an idiot!” Renata shouted. “The explosives have been set! I’ll press the detonator!”
    Brian’s urgent footsteps kept pounding on the stairs.
    Their rumble was overwhelmed by thunder, not from the storm but from an explosion whose blinding flash erupted out of an apartment on the fourth balcony at the back. The ear-stunning roar knocked Decker backward. As wreckage cascaded, the ferocity of the flames illuminated the courtyard.
    A movement to Decker’s left made him turn. A thin, darkhaired man in his early twenties, one of the brothers whom Decker had met at the café the night before, rose from behind garbage cans.
    Decker stiffened. They must be all around me, but in the dark, I didn’t know it!
    The young man hadn’t been prepared for Renata to detonate the bomb. Although he had a pistol, his attention was totally distracted by a scream on the other side of the courtyard. With wide-eyed dismay, the young man saw one of his brothers swatting at flames on his clothes and in his hair, which had been ignited by the falling, burning wreckage. The rain didn’t seem