Without Due Process

CHAPTER 26

For months now people in the media have complained bitterly about the growing traffic problems in the Puget Sound area. When you live and work primarily in the downtown core, it’s easy to ignore the fact that Seattle’s freeways often deteriorate into vast parking lots, and not just at rush hour, either.

At four P.M. that Saturday afternoon some major cultural or sporting event must have let out minutes earlier, because the southbound lanes of I-5 were crammed. After merging into traffic, we literally inched our way past the I-90 interchange and the city’s perpetual Kingdome exit construction projects. Curtis Bell’s blue Beretta was only six or seven cars ahead of us as we crawled along.

“I could probably sprint fast enough to catch up with him,” I said, itching to jump out of the car and collar the bastard.

“And what happens then?” Peters returned. “What happens if Bell takes off and you end up causing a chain reaction accident? We’ll be stuck here with no backup and no way to send for any. We’re better off waiting until we know for sure where he’s going.”

I might have argued with him, except he was probably right. When you’re dealing with that kind of traffic volume, any slight fender bender can result in hours of delay for everyone. Under those circumstances, police and emergency vehicles are only marginally better off than civilian ones.

The good thing about being stuck in traffic was that it was easy to keep track of exactly where Curtis Bell was and what he was doing, without it being blatantly obvious to him that he was being tailed. The bad part was that if he somehow did catch on and start making evasive maneuvers, it might be difficult for us to react. I breathed a sigh of relief when he went straight past the Spokane Street and Michigan exits. I was happy when he skipped Martin Luther King Junior Way as well. It was looking more and more like Sea-Tac all the time.

About then my pager went off two different times in rapid succession. Once the readout gave me Tony Freeman’s number and once Captain Powell’s, but without a radio or a phone in the car, there was no way for me to respond right then.

“You really ought to have a cellular phone in here,” I told Peters. “It would make our lives a hell of a lot easier right about now.”

The irony of what I’d just said wasn’t lost on me, and Ron Peters didn’t miss it either. He glanced at me sideways. “Ralph Ames has created a technological monster out of you, hasn’t he?” Ron said with a laugh. “Maybe I should have a portable fax in here as well.”

I didn’t want to talk about who owned a fax and who didn’t, but joking around helped ease the tension in the car. It gave us something to think about besides the grim reality of the coming confrontation.

And grim it was. It’s one thing to go up against crooks. They may be armed to the teeth, but they’re also like untrained guerrilla warriors who often can be outflanked and outmaneuvered by the strategic thinking of even a much smaller force. Unfortunately Curtis Bell was a fellow police officer. He would be armed, probably the same way I was armed-with an automatic weapon-and he had been trained the same way I had been trained, probably by some of the same people. More important, he was desperate. That made him doubly dangerous.

“What do you think he’ll do when he realizes he’s being followed?” I asked.

“He’s likely to recognize the car,” Peters said. “If he thinks I’m alone with no way to summon help, maybe we can trick him into coming after me.”

“No way! That’s risky as hell.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

I didn’t. Every mile we traveled was taking us closer and closer to Sea-Tac Airport, but the traffic jam had broken up and the average highway speed had increased dramatically. We were zipping along at an unlawful but traffic-pacing sixty-six. Now there were only two cars between us and Curtis Bell. As I watched, one of them switched on a turn signal indicating a planned exit at Tukwila. Bell moved into the far right-hand lane just past that same exit.

“Sea-Tac it is,” Peters said grimly. “You two had better get down. He’s bound to notice the car sooner or later.”

Peters’s rooftop wheelchair carrier isn’t entirely unique-I’ve seen one or two others like it in my travels-but it is very distinctive and through a special dispensation from both the chief and the mayor, Ron is allowed to park it in a specially designated handicapped spot just inside the department’s parking garage. Everyone on the force sees it on an almost daily basis.

As of that moment, Peters’s plan, risky or not, was the only one available. I did as I was told and scrunched down in the seat, assuming that behind me Knuckles Russell was doing exactly the same thing.

Peters switched on his own signal, and the Reliant swerved slightly to the right. “Southcenter?” I asked.

He nodded. “Hang on. I’m going to narrow the gap now, let him know I’m back here, and see what he does about it.”

What Bell did next was obvious in Ron Peters’s reaction. He accelerated to warp speed. There’s something about riding blindly down a highway in a speeding vehicle with your shoulder seat belt dangling improperly around your neck to give you yet another glimpse of your own mortality. Almost like dodging the bullet in a drive-by shooting. Almost like having a life insurance salesman pay a call, but I kept my mouth shut and didn’t tell Peters to slow down. People who can’t see the road shouldn’t backseat drive.

Overhead, the shadow of an overpass blinked across the windshield while we angled first to the right and then to the left. That meant we were turning onto the private road approaching the airport. Theoretically, that stretch is heavily patrolled by port police. Maybe, with any kind of luck, both vehicles would be stopped for speeding and Peters and I would have some help after all, but of course, that didn’t happen. Traffic cops are hardly ever anywhere around when you need them.

“Where’s he going?” I asked, automatically starting to slide back up in the seat.

“The parking garage. Stay right where you are,” Peters ordered.

I slid back down, banging my knees on the bottom of the dashboard as we screeched to a sudden halt at the wooden control gate that allows only one car at a time access into Sea-Tac’s parking area. Peters rolled down his window as the buzzer sounded. He grabbed the ticket. I was glad he’d stopped. Otherwise, the Reliant would have been wearing a hunk of two-by-six Douglas fir as a hood ornament.

“Good, he’s headed up the ramp,” Peters said, reporting what was going on outside my line of vision like some macabre play-by-play sports broadcaster, but this was no game. In the next few minutes, there was going to be a gunfight and someone was liable to get hurt. Considering the small number of people involved, the odds were pretty damned high that a fast trip to Harborview’s Trauma Unit was looming in my future.

We started moving forward again, going up and around the circular ramps. “Ezra,” Peters was saying. “Are you listening?” Our passenger had been so quiet for so long, I had almost forgotten Knuckles Russell’s presence, but Ron Peters hadn’t.

“Yo,” Knuckles responded.

“Listen to me. I’m going to throw you out. Run like hell into the terminal and alert security. Have them seal off the garage. Tell them not to let anyone in or out until they hear from Detective Beaumont or me. Got that?”

“Got it!” Knuckles replied.

I felt a surge of elation. It wasn’t just Peters and me after all. Knuckles was there. If he could go for help fast enough, there was a chance he could save us all.

On what must have been the inside curve of the next ramp, Peters stopped long enough for Knuckles to leap out. “Get going!” he ordered, but Knuckles paused momentarily outside the door.

Ron pressed the button to roll down the windows. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“What if they doan listen?”

“Make them!” Peters barked. “You’ve got to.”

Moments later I heard the first echoing slaps of Knuckles’s retreating Reeboks, then Peters continued two-wheeling us up that gut-wrenching circular ramp.

My heart sank. Every single day, cops make life-or-death judgments based on appearances alone, on how the people they’re dealing with look, act, and sound. Ezra Russell looked fine. He wasn’t wearing gang-type clothing, but he still sounded like a street tough. There was nothing in the way he spoke that announced he had changed his ways and matriculated at an institution of higher learning as a respectable college student. I worried about what kind of call the port police would make with all our lives hanging in the balance.

“What if he’s right?” I asked. “What if they don’t believe him?”

“That’s a risk we’ll have to take, isn’t it?” Peters returned. “Hold on. You get out here. It looks to me as though he’s on his way up to the top floor.”

“But…” I objected.

“No buts. This is seven, the end of the line. Come up either the stairs or the elevator. As far as he’s concerned, I’ll be a sitting duck. I’m counting on you to see to it that isn’t the case.”

Peters paused barely long enough for me to clamber out of the car. Luckily I landed on my feet. The next thing I knew, I, too, was racing through the almost deserted parking garage. The place was full of cars, but empty of people. Evidently Saturday isn’t a primo flying day.

Never before had I noticed how unbearably long those aisles were. They must have stretched forever while behind me I heard the squeal of tires as Peters rounded the last curve that would take him onto the eighth level of the parking garage, the top and unroofed level.

I ducked my head and ran that much faster, dreading with every step the reverberation of a gunshot echoing off concrete that would mean the end of Ron Peters.

Overhead I heard a terrible crash followed by the scraping of metal on concrete. There was no way to tell what had happened. The sound seemed to come from behind me, from what was now the far side of the garage. By then there was no point in running all the way back to the ramps and making my way up from there. I was already far closer to the elevators and stairwells.

Between stairs and elevator, there was no contest. I knew from bitter firsthand experience that a stairwell can be as bad as a blind alley, a trap, or a box canyon. But at least a stairway exit door wouldn’t ring a bell and point an arrow announcing my arrival.

I dashed through the door marked STAIRS. On the first landing I paused for a moment to hear if anyone was headed either down from above me or up from below, but there were no echoing footsteps. The place was empty. Relieved, I pounded up the remaining set of steep concrete stairs, covering three steps at a time. By then, my breath was coming in short, sharp gasps, there was a splitting pain in my side, and one ankle was giving me trouble.

Damn! I still expected my body to respond like it had twenty years ago, but it didn’t. Couldn’t. Even if I didn’t want to accept the idea that middle age was setting in with a vengeance, my body knew it. I had to wait outside the heavy metal door to catch my breath before I dared open it and go on.

Without my consciously being aware of it, the 9 mm automatic appeared in my hand. Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open a crack.

Level 8 in the Sea-Tac Airport Parking Garage-the uncovered, rooftop portion-is the floor of last resort when it comes to parking cars. Usually it’s relatively open. Not so that particular day, and not because cars were parked on it either. Instead, the whole place had become a construction material staging area for the massive expansion of the parking garage. The place was strewn with stacks of lumber and iron rods, rolls of metal mesh fencing, piles of sheet metal, and several parked forklifts.

Where I expected a clear line of vision from the stairs to the ramps, instead the view across the floor was totally obscured. Over the noise of a departing jet, I could hear nothing. The only way to find out what was happening with Peters was to leave the relative safety of the stairwell.

I stepped out onto the concrete rooftop. At that exact instant, Curtis Bell’s Beretta came hurtling past my line of vision. Heading toward the exit ramp and busy dodging among the piles of construction material, I don’t think he even saw me. Raising the 9 mm, I assumed the proper shooting stance, hoping to squeeze off a shot at him before he disappeared down the ramp, but then I saw Peters.

Nosing his car straight through a stack of fencing, he sent huge rolls of the stuff spinning off in all directions. But the maneuver had accomplished its desired effect, creating a shortcut that took him to the top of the exit ramp and cut off Curtis Bell’s only remaining avenue of escape. With a sickening crunch the speeding Beretta plowed into the Reliant’s rider’s side. The grinding, sheet metal-devouring crash that followed made me grateful that I wasn’t sitting there in Peters’s car on the rider’s side. If I had been, I would have been holding the front end of the Beretta’s V-6 engine.

Instead of moving forward toward the melee, I stood as if frozen, still holding my weapon. There was no way for me to pull the trigger. If I had, Ron Peters would have been directly in my line of fire.

The dust settled slowly. At first glance I didn’t see either Ron Peters or Curtis Bell. Then, just when I’d almost convinced myself that they were both either dead or too badly injured to move, the clamshell top on the wheelchair carrier shot up and with a whir Peters’s wheelchair lowered down beside the car. So Ron was all right. He was getting out, moving himself expertly from car to chair.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I started forward, but then I saw movement in the Beretta as well. Curtis Bell, his head bloodied, crawled out through the rider’s side window. There was no need to shout a warning-they saw each other at precisely the same moment.

Midafternoon sun had finally managed to burn through the cloud cover. I saw the reflected glint of sunlight on metal and knew without a doubt that Curtis Bell had a gun in his hand.

My main problem was one of distance. Physics and reality to the contrary, it seemed as though the eighth floor aisles must have been far longer than those on the seventh, longer at least by half. I tried to shout a warning across the intervening space, but the sound was swallowed up in the roar of a departing jet. My only hope-Ron Peters’s only hope-was that I close the distance between us. Knowing I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting there in time, I ducked my head, said a silent prayer, and ran.

It was like running in slow motion or in water or sloughing through deep sand. The vast distance that separated us didn’t seem to get any smaller. Partway there, I could see that Ron Peters and Curtis Bell were speaking earnestly back and forth across the hood of Ron’s car, but I wasn’t close enough to hear their voices. I wondered if they were negotiating about which one would end up having to give up and let the other one go.

With less than a quarter of the distance to go, a blaring alarm began sounding from somewhere inside the terminal itself. Thank God, I thought with relief. Knuckles had done it. He had somehow sounded the alarm and airport security was coming to help, but before that could happen, Curtis Bell swung around and saw me.

He saw me and pulled the trigger all in the same movement. He didn’t pause, didn’t have to think about it. He aimed and fired, hoping to gun me down without even the slightest pretense of hesitation. A long way from any cover, I hit the ground and skidded along the rough concrete surface just as the first bullet whizzed by overhead.

Curtis Bell was carrying the same kind of automatic I was. There should have been a whole barrage of bullets, but there wasn’t. Not exactly. There was a second shot-I heard it-but it didn’t hit anywhere near me.

I heard a single outraged screech of pain and I saw Curtis Bell crumple to the ground. Ron Peters may have looked like a sitting duck, but he wasn’t. And maybe his aim wasn’t all it had been once, before his accident, but it was close enough for government work, close enough to do the job and save my life.

I scrambled to my feet and hurried over to where Curtis Bell lay writhing on the ground, clutching his bleeding gut. Picking up his weapon, I left him lying there and walked past him to check on Ron Peters.

“You all right?” I asked.

“My car’s screwed,” he answered, “but I’m okay.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about your car as long as you’re fine.”

With a whir of his electric wheelchair, Ron Peters rolled up beside me, and we both looked down at the injured and helpless Curtis Bell. Neither one of us leaped forward to administer first aid.

“He’s not, though, is he?” Ron said casually. “Looks as though he’s hurt pretty bad…”

“You shot him real low,” I said. “Looks like you hit him well below the vest.”

Ron shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Can you imagine that. Guess I’m still not used to shooting from this angle. Maybe I need more practice.”

“I wouldn’t want you to change a thing,” I told him. “And neither would Big Al.”