Pursuit: A Novel

16

After the first salvo, the shooting stopped, and the silence returned. Prescott sat with his back against the brick wall and waited. There would be a SWAT team searching the streets to the west, and then some kind of sweep of the neighborhood before the police would be willing to relinquish their state of readiness. Everything about these situations worked that way. It was oddly comfortable for a man used to fighting to be crouched behind a car with a gun in his hand, even when he knew that the car was not much protection from a high-velocity rifle round, and that a suspect with a good scope could pick out the place on his chin that he had nicked with his razor that morning. Readiness was something that cops found hard to give up. As long as they remained in a standoff, the opportunity was prolonged: there was still a chance to see the shooter and get him. The moment the bosses gave the all-clear signal, the chance was over. The man who had shattered the public tranquility and done his best to kill somebody had gotten away with it.

The end of the emergency was also the end of clarity. A man cornered while firing a gun at police officers was finished. But if he stopped and got rid of the gun before they saw him, he entered the realm of lengthy, unpromising investigations, painstaking accumulations of evidence, formal accusations, and snide counterattacks by defense lawyers. Prescott was sorry for the cops. They felt the way he did.

He had done his best to take advantage of his chances, but each time, the same thing had gone wrong: this killer had gotten to the trap before it was fully cocked and baited, and gotten out again. This time he had done it especially convincingly, and Prescott had found himself doing shoulder rolls on a concrete sidewalk to get himself out of the crosshairs. Now he seemed doomed to sit here in his own brick-and-mortar box waiting for first light to show at the window so the cops would feel safe enough to finish arresting him.

He had gone into this with a strange, almost unnatural feeling that he understood this man. He had looked at the sights that the killer had seen, put his feet on the spaces where the killer had stepped, and discovered that he could imagine the killer’s thoughts, maybe even think them. But tonight this killer had done the unexpected, and the unexpected was something unnerving. He had done what—given the predicament he was in and what he had to work with—Prescott would have done.

For the past twenty years or more, Prescott had hunted men. He had devised a great many deceptions and snares. Always, the purpose of them was to put Prescott and some killer in a place by themselves, where no external force could intervene.

It had been a mind-enlarging experience for some of them, a moment when they had suddenly realized that their most deeply held belief about themselves was completely wrong. Even mired in the self-hatred and guilt that had given them a certain attraction to risk, their desperation was not dependable. It had only worked in their favor while they were courting risk, playing with it, doing things that might put them into real danger but probably wouldn’t. When positive, verifiable danger arrived in the form of Roy Prescott, they found that their immunity to fear had involved a certain amount of self-deception.

Prescott was a man who would not give up, could not call for reinforcements, and would not stop coming. For him, defeat while he was still alive was not unthinkable merely because he had made a rule for himself that he wouldn’t allow it; it was unthinkable because it had not, literally, been thought. Each time he met one of these men, he had already determined that only one of them was going to be able to walk away. Tonight, Prescott was having his own moment of revelation. This killer was not as different from Prescott as the others had been. He was doing what Prescott would have done.

Suddenly Prescott stood up. The killer wasn’t gone. Prescott moved through the doorway quickly, striding along at his full height. He stepped around the building. He found the detective he had spoken to before, crouching beside a black-and-white patrol car, the microphone in his hand and his eyes on the tall trees on the far side of the next row of houses. When he saw Prescott, he looked as though he were watching a man in the process of stepping off a cliff. “Get down!”

“No need,” said Prescott. “He’s not up there anymore. He’s moved a couple of blocks down.”

“What are you talking about?”

Prescott allowed one of the other cops to lurch closer and pull him down behind the police car. He said patiently, “He’s not interested in bagging a cop tonight. He’s completely focused: the only person out here he can even see is me. He broke into my office carrying a bomb he was going to use to make a booby trap. He saw that he was locked into the office, so he used the bomb to blow off the bars on the window. Then he went out there to wait, because he knew that sooner or later, I would show up.”

“Interesting story,” said the detective. “So what?”

“So I know where he is. He saw me arrive, he took his shots, and he knows he missed. For a lot of people, that would be enough. There are a few dozen cops around, and he can’t fight all of us. But for him that won’t be enough.”

“Won’t be enough?”

“He knows I must have driven here. He saw the direction I came from when I walked up to the building. He knows that right now you’ll think he’s gone home, because it’s the only sensible thing for him to do. But he hasn’t, he’s just moved down the street a couple hundred yards.”

“What for?”

“To get a clear, unimpeded shot at my car.”

The detective’s eyes passed across the faces of two uniformed cops moving toward Prescott. “What is it that you’re trying to get us to do?”

“Make it look like the emergency is over. Send everybody out of here except a few cops who look like they’re collecting evidence and a couple to secure the scene. Then you hide two cars out of sight up on that end of the street, and two at the other end, and let me walk down to my car alone. He’ll make another try.”

The detective’s eyebrows knitted and his face acquired a fluid expression: genuine surprise that shaded off into a smirk. For a moment, he made his features assume a parody of contemplation. Finally he said, “This is a case that’s beyond my previous personal experience. I do have a certain memory for things I’ve seen and heard. One of them is that most of the time, when you get a small, nondescript building that gets its windows blown out by explosives, it turns out that it isn’t because somebody blew it up. What you find out is that it was an accident. Somebody was using the place to build bombs, and made a mistake or didn’t know how to store them.” He turned a steady gaze on Prescott. “Now, you may be telling me the truth, and your theory may even be correct. But I did notice that we had a certain amount of quiet around here until the officers started to put you into their patrol car to take you downtown. Then somebody started shooting, and what got hit was the car, which has POLICE in foot-high letters down the side of it. Now, what I’m going to do is similar to what you want. You could even call it a compromise.”

“Compromise?” said Prescott.

“Right. I’m going to move out most of these people, just as you requested. I’m going to leave a few officers to secure the scene so the forensics team can do their work. If there is some kind of maniac who is down there waiting to shoot you in your car, he’s got to stay where he can see it. I’ll have units stationed all around it, where they can move in if he shows himself. What I won’t do is let you walk down there by yourself and get into your car.”

“Then he won’t show himself.”

“You seem to be an intelligent man, too intelligent to imagine you can get in and drive off. But you also seem too intelligent to think it’s a good idea to walk in front of a rifle. It’s a contradiction.”

Prescott shook his head. “He’s down there, and this is the chance to get him. All he wants is me. The other officer already took my wallet and keys. You can hold on to them, and I can’t drive away.”

“Thank you.” He turned to the two uniformed cops. “Take him downtown.”

The two policemen began to help him to his feet. “He’s only here because it’s my place.”

The detective’s expression turned stony. “It was your place until a bomb went off in it. Now it’s a crime scene, and that makes it my place.” He said to the cops, “Take him around the back, and up the side street to the east, so you can’t be seen from the front of the building.”

Prescott sighed and shook his head wearily. He let the two cops handcuff him, then push him into the back seat of a car. As they drove off, he didn’t look back at the building again.

About five hours later, when the detective came into the interrogation room, he looked at Prescott with frank irritation. He sat down at the table across from Prescott and set a file in front of him that was already half an inch thick. “I’ve been reading about you. I also read the statement you gave Lieutenant Mussanto. Does your statement contain any inaccuracies that you know of?”

“No.”

“How about your record?”

Prescott asked, “Where did you get it?”

“It was faxed to us by the Los Angeles police.”

“Then it’s probably close enough. It was last time I looked at it.”

“You think this is the same man who killed the two police officers and the security guard in the office building in L.A.?”

“I know it is.”

“I can see why you don’t work at home.”

Prescott nodded, but said nothing.

“What is either one of you doing in Buffalo?”

“I think he’s been living here. I don’t know how long. I came to find him.”

“Looks like he saw you first.”

Prescott sat in silence, neither conceding the point nor contesting it, merely waiting.

After a time, the detective nodded, then took a deep breath and let it out. “There’s a local ordinance against remodeling your own office so a person who goes in can’t get out: a fire regulation. The fine will be a thousand bucks, and they’ll send you a summons you can pay by mail. I’ll try to get you out of that, but when firefighters get called out on something like this, they’re pissed off. It doesn’t seem fair to them to have to get shot at.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you try to get me out of it?”

The detective stared down at the closed file folder for a moment. “What would you have done if I had let you go down to your car by yourself?”

“Tried to draw his fire,” said Prescott. “If I could survive one miss, I figured I could probably get to him. He was up high somewhere—I think closer to the car than he’d been to the office. It’s hard to hold a moving man in the field of a powerful scope. Lowering your aim when a man is running toward you fast is hard to do. The scope is mounted above the barrel, so if you try to look past it, the gun itself is in your line of vision.”

Prescott saw that the detective was listening politely, so he continued. “I picked out his problem when he shot the first time. He had a lot of rounds: at least ten in the magazine. He’s young and angry, and he let the fact that he had a semiautomatic rifle make him squander that first shot. The first recoil kicked the barrel up, and so he had to horse it down for the next one, and that gave me time to duck and roll. He’s better than that, but I think he let his anger overcome his judgment.”

“So you could get him. If you survived one miss,” the detective repeated.

“Yeah. That would let me see the muzzle flash.”

“I see,” said the detective. “If I’d known more last night, I still wouldn’t have let you do it. But I would have been sorry—curious to see what would have happened. It’s why I want to get you out of the fine. You don’t need a fine, you need to be put in a home somewhere so you don’t do this anymore.” He paused. “You can pick up your belongings at the desk.”

Prescott took a cab to his hotel and requested that his locked cash box be removed from the main safe. He brought it upstairs, opened it, and took out the gun he had bought in Pennsylvania. From now on, he would probably be needing it.