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I had soh to hold the door open for theainst that steel barrier to shut it quickly, closing them in the perilous dark I would have locked it, too, except that it locked from the outside only with a key

In spite of the care the chief had taken to isolate noise within the roorew thunderous, especially when a chair or the table struck the steel door I could hear the twoin his mouth and duct tape across his lips, as I would have had after failing the lie-detector test

The basely stained concrete floor was not a place I wanted to be discovered by whoever responded to the racket in the interrogation roo officers had earlier conducted me

TWENTY-NINE

AS I REACHED THE STAIRS THAT LED UP FROM the base froed cacophony as the steel door caard Rolf Mr Sinatra did not appear, either

Through the open door and into the hall came a collection of badly abused public property for which the police depart its next budget request: a led metal chair, bent and twisted parts of other chairs, shards of frosted plastic, a once sturdy metal table now folded in half like a slice of bread…

The whirling vortex of trash scraped and rattled off the walls, reation roo this indoor tornado, I declared, I didn’t say Rod Stewart He said Rod Stewart

Realizing the folly of defending hts of stairs

I had done so , cli that I ached fro, I had developed considerable admiration for Matt Da opposed by nuoons with infinite resources at their co the theies, and he just kept going, indomitable and undiminished

Here I was, a pathetic excuse for a paladin, coh a car crash Already, Matt Dah six

As I neared the top of the narrow stairs, a ferocious noise below indicated that into the stairwell had co-shriek of the swiftly ascending junk storested supernatural power so furious that it could have been suas headliner

The stairhead door had not been locked when I had been escorted to the base back hallway on the h I could not recall which door I’d been brought through froht I opened the first that I came to, which was a storeroom The second revealed a deserted office

Whether they were responding to the escalating tu, or to a frantic cell-phone call from Hoss Shackett, two uniformed officers appeared at the far end of the corridor I had never seen the here,and furtive and looked harried

One of the here?--and I called back to the for theit One of theun, and the other told me to stop where I was, to lie facedown, but Matt Damon would never lie down on a floor that looked like blue-Slurpee upchuck, or on any floor whatsoever, for that un told him to do it

Fortunately, I did not have to improvise a deadly weapon out of my atch or one of my shoes, because no sooner had the officer ordered me to lie down than the stairhead door behind me flew open I did not have to turn and look to know that the wreckage froation room had spun out of the stairs like some ularly conneddisplay space to the contents of a Du been diverted fro close to the wall, seeking the next door

A new sound, a terrible ripping and slithering noise, grew in volulanced back and saw that into the hallway had come Polterfrank

From his hands radiated pulses of power that stripped the blue linoleum tiles off the floor and whirled the drifts of autumn leaves to itself The vinyl squares, in their altz, whispered and clicked against one another

Because the officers paralyzed by this sight could not see Mr Sinatra, they were htened by the spectacle before them They were not propelled at once into a state of blind terror because they were not able to appreciate the phenomenon in its terrible fullness Had they been able to see the singer in all his glorious wrath, they would have thron their weapons in surrender and fled to their er an obstacle to his service to his country He was feisty Private Angelo Maggio in Froeous and deterhteous Sas Go Forth, but most of all he was Mr Francis Albert Sinatra with a norant critics of his i metal furniture and parts of furniture seeer in the tornado, because the vinyl tiles appeared too flexible and too soft to inflict serious dae On the other hand, they were stiffened by the lued to the floor; and when a critical velocity had been achieved, every edge of every thin tilewave, the floor peeled toward me, and from this tsuna like a thousand busy flensing knives scraping bone

Spooked, the cops bolted from the corridor, back the way they had coht led to thetempest convinced me that I did not have time to explore farther

I stepped into the lavatory and backed away from the door, which closed betweenvinyl and clanging metal scraped past the restroo that I clapped ry with me when I poked and prodded hience to lead hi I said and that I had acted out of desperation Nevertheless, I was relieved when the stor the corridor

An operable casementoffered an escape route, but I did not at once flee the restroom First, I needed to pee

Here is another difference between able Matt Damon He never has either the tio there to engage in a fight to the death with an agent of the fascist conspiracy

After washing my hands, I dropped from theinto the alleyway behind the police station As far as I could tell in the fog, I was alone

I proceeded east for two hundred feet and then turned south into the covered and lighted ay between the police depart did not rule I hurried, not sure how long Mr Sinatra could sustain his fury