Wesley didn't hesitate. His finger compressed the trigger of his hidden .32 pocket pistol.
PFT.
The suppressed round caught Jack high in the chest, right below his collarbone. The force punched him backward two steps, his boots skidding across the carpeted aisle, but he didn't drop. Pain flared white across his vision, snapping the Synchronization meter in his peripheral sight up to a jagged [6.8%... CRITICAL INJURY... HYPER-ADRENAL OVERRIDE].
Jack didn't yell. He just bit down on his tongue until he tasted iron and slammed his thumb onto the Mark III’s quick-release valve.
PFT-SSSSSSSS!
The cylinder didn't spray a gentle mist. Driven by three hundred pounds of internal pressure, a concentrated jet of dense, sickly green aerosol blasted out of the brass nozzle, filling the enclosed courtroom in seconds.
ADA Tower shrieked, dropping his pen as he scrambled backward, knocking over his chair and diving under the heavy oak bench. "My eyes! God, my eyes—"
Wesley threw his sleeve over his face, lunging for the side exit behind the judge's dais. "Tower, the folders!"
The aerosol hit the open manila docket on the bench. The heavy, oil-based solvent soaked into the paper instantly, dissolving the fresh ink signatures and turning the official court order into a wet, dark green sludge that dripped off the edge of the desk onto the carpet.
Jack stumbled forward through the thick fog, his dead left arm pinned under his coat, his right hand dragging the empty titanium cylinder behind him.
He didn't pursue Wesley. He didn't execute Tower.
He reached down to the judge’s desk, grabbed the single surviving carbon copy of the registration manifest with his teeth, and hauled his broken body through the rear window of the courtroom, shattering the glass with his shoulder.
He hit the fire escape three floors up, falling hard onto the wet iron grate.
Down in Foley Square, the sirens were already screaming. Four black Suburbans screeched to a halt at the courthouse steps, federal agents spilling out with assault rifles drawn, scanning the upper windows.
Jack lay on the cold iron fire escape, his chest rising and falling in short, bloody gasps.
The gunshot wound below his collarbone was bubbling red, mixing with the rain that washed down his neck. The registration docket wasn't filed; it was ruined, dissolved in a puddle of chemical waste inside Room 302. But the city was wide awake now. The sirens were closing in from every direction—the precinct, the feds, and Fisk’s paid shooters.
Jack dragged himself up against the iron railing, clutching the wet paper in his teeth.
His eyes were half-blind with fever, but as he looked down at the tactical teams surrounding the plaza below, his cracked lips pulled back into a wide, bloody grimace.
"...dare..." he whispered through his teeth, his voice swallowed by the roaring sirens and the freezing rain. "...dare... dare... dare..."
He pulled himself over the iron railing and dropped into the dark alley below.
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