Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear Read Online Free Page A

intersection, the traffic light changed from green to yellow. Narindra sped through it. It turned red before the Audi reached it, but they sped through as well. A chorus of honking erupted behind them.
    “Who are these men?” Narindra shouted back at Gabriel.
    “They are hired killers, abductors,” Gabriel said, testing the limits of his Punjabi vocabulary. “They have taken a friend of mine and…mean to…” Damn it, what was the word? “Harm her.”
    “Why?”
    “If I could tell you that,” Gabriel muttered, in English this time, “I wouldn’t be here in the first place.” He bent forward over the front seat, thankful to have gotten into one of the minority of cabs in New Yorkthat didn’t have a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas between the driver and the passengers. He rifled through the pile of odds and ends cluttering the passenger seat: a thick, spiral-bound book of maps, a handful of ballpoint pens, half a sandwich, an unopened bottle of Snapple. Narindra turned the wheel sharply to the left, throwing Gabriel against his shoulder, and then swung it back to the right.
    “Do you have anything we could use as…” Gabriel’s language skills petered out again. Desperately he resorted to English. “A weapon—a gun…a, a, a jack, something heavy—anything you could use as a weapon?”
    Narindra shook his head. “A weapon? This I do not have.”
    Up ahead, Gabriel saw the black car speeding up, pulling away. A glance at their own speedometer showed they were doing close to fifty themselves.
    From behind, meanwhile, came the crack-crack-crack of gunfire. Narindra cut across two lanes and then back.
    Beggars can’t be choosers. Gabriel grabbed the Snapple bottle and, turning in one swift movement, cocked his arm and launched the bottle through the open space where the rear windshield had been. The driver of the Audi pulled to one side to avoid it, but the bottle struck, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in the glass.
    That was something—but hardly enough. And now he was out of projectiles completely.
    An arm holding a gun emerged from the Audi’s passenger-side window and fire erupted from the barrel. Gabriel dropped to his knees in the cab’s footwell. A line of bullet holes stitched across the back of the front seat, throwing puffs of padding into the air. That it was only shreds of foam rubber raining down on him and not blood was just dumb luck, Gabriel knew—two feet to the left and he’d have been hurtling down Park Avenue in a cab with a corpse at the wheel.
    He peeked over the front seat again, looked at the dashboard. There had to be something —
    The meter.
    Mounted on a metal bar, tallying up his fare in 40-cent increments, a curl of cash register tape trailing from the receipt slot at the top—it was a compact unit but looked heavy, the perfect combination. It also looked firmly attached, but what had once been mounted had to be removable. It would be easier with the proper tools, of course, but—
    Gabriel lunged forward, took hold of the meter with one hand on either side, and wrenched it violently.
    “What are you doing?” Narindra cried. “I am responsible for that!”
    “I’ll—” Gabriel wrenched at it again. “I’ll pay—” One more time. Come on. “I’ll pay for it,” he shouted, pulling and twisting till with a snap of breaking plastic and metal the unit came free. It made a sad little grinding noise as it lost power. “And the windshield,” Gabriel said breathlessly. “I’ll cover it all, just keep driving.”
    “Crazy, you are crazy,” Narindra said, and Gabriel didn’t bother to argue. Instead, he turned back, crawled halfway out onto the trunk of the cab and, anchoring his feet against the back of the rear seat, rose up on his knees, hefted the taxi meter in both hands, took aim, and hurled it directly at the Audi’s windshield.
    A direct hit would smash the glass this time—it was already cracked. And whatever smashed the glass would continue on through the