Winter Moon Read Free Page B

coming through the shattered door was no longer chilly but hot, and the phantasms swarming over the walls were reflections of fire. The maniac with the Uzi had shot up one or more of the gasoline pumps.
    Cautiously Jack pulled himself up against the counter, putting no weight on his left leg. Though his misery still seemed inadequate to the wound, he figured it would get worse suddenly and soon. He didn’t want to precipitate it by any action of his own for fear that a sufficiently fierce flash of pain would make him pass out.
    Under considerable pressure, jets of burning gasoline were squirting from one of the riddled pumps, splashing like molten lava onto the blacktop. The pavement sloped toward the busy street, and scintillant rivers of fire spread in that direction.
    The explosion had ignited the roof of the portico that sheltered the pumps. Flames licked rapidly toward the main building.
    The Lexus was on fire. The lunatic bastard had destroyed his own car, which in some strange way made him seem more completely out of control and dangerous than anything else he’d done.
    Amid the inferno, which became more panoramic by the second as the gasoline streamed across the blacktop, the killer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d regained at least some of his senses and fled on foot.
    More likely, he was in the two-bay garage, coming at them by that route rather than making a bold approach through the shattered front entrance. Less than fifteen feet from Jack, a painted metal door connected the garage to the office. It was closed.
    Leaning against the counter, he gripped his revolver in both hands and aimed at the door, arms extended rigidly in front of him, ready to blow the perp to hell at the first opportunity. His hands were shaking. So cold. He strained to hold the gun steady, which helped, but he couldn’t entirely repress the tremors.
    The darkness at the edges of his vision had retreated. Now it began to encroach again. He blinked furiously, trying to wash away the frightening peripheral blindness as he might have tried to expel a speck of dust, but to no avail.
    The air smelled of gasoline and hot tar. Shifting wind blew smoke into the room—not much, just enough to make him want to cough. He clenched his teeth, making only a low choking sound in his throat, because the killer might be on the far side of the door, hesitating and listening.
    Still directing the revolver squarely at the entrance from the garage, he glanced outside into whirlwinds of tempestuous fire and churning shrouds of black smoke, afraid he was wrong. The gunman might erupt, after all, from that conflagration, like a demon out of perdition.
    The metal door again. Painted the palest blue. Like deep clear water seen through a layer of crystalline ice.
    The color made him cold. Everything made him cold—the hollow iron-hard
thunk-thunk
of his laboring heart, the whisper-soft weeping of the woman huddled on the floor behind him, the glittering debris of broken glass. Even the roar and crackle of the fire chilled him.
    Outside, seething flames had traveled the length of the portico and reached the front of the service station. The roof must be ablaze by now.
    The pale-blue door.
    Open it, you crazy sonofabitch. Come on, come on, come on.
    Another explosion.
    He had to turn his head completely away from the door to the garage and look directly at the front of the station to see what had happened, because he had lost nearly all of his peripheral vision.
    The fuel tank of the Lexus. The vehicle was engulfed, reduced to just the black skeleton of a car enwrapped by greedy tongues of fire that stripped it of its lustrous emerald paint, fine leather upholstery, and other plush appointments.
    The blue door remained closed.
    The revolver seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. His arms ached. He couldn’t hold the weapon steady. Could barely hold it at all.
    He wanted to lie down and close his eyes. Sleep a little. Dream a little dream: green pastures,