City of Endless Night

57

A chill wind moaned and whistled around the corner of the building as Pendergast crouched on the outside ledge, ten stories of empty space below him. The projecting brick coping and the four-inch stone lintels offered a precarious foothold. With his Les Baer in his right hand, he aimed down, bracing himself against the façade for the recoil, waiting for the moment when Ozmian stuck his head out the window to check whether Pendergast had escaped that way, after establishing he was not hiding in the bathroom.

Pendergast had taken the deception as far as he could. He had indeed exited the room by the window, leaping first from the bathroom interior to the bed frame — closing the door with one hand as he did so — and from there to the outer sill, so as not to leave tracks. He’d edged out on the sill, as he hoped Ozmian would ultimately assume. But then he had scaled the decorative brickwork to the tenth floor, taking up an unexpected vantage point. Ozmian would expect him either right or left on the ledge outside the ninth-floor window — not one story above. Or so he hoped. The man would be anticipating an ambush…but from the wrong direction. Still, in mulling over the plan, Pendergast had to admit that so far Ozmian had outplayed him in the game of reverse, double-reverse, and double-double-reverse psychology.

He waited. And waited. But Ozmian did not appear.

Perched on the ledge, in the freezing gusts of wind, Pendergast now understood he had made another error in judgment. Again the man had not responded as expected. Either he had been outmaneuvered again, or Ozmian was engaged in some other strategy of his own. For perhaps the first time in his life, Pendergast felt stymied and anxious. Nothing he had done so far had worked. It was like a nightmare in which, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get his legs to move fast enough. And now, he had made himself a perfect target, crouching on the ledge. He had to get back inside the building as soon as possible.

Even as he crept along the ledge, he was thinking. As every hunter knew, the key to a successful stalk was to first understand the behaviors and thought patterns of your prey. You had to “learn” your quarry, as his mentor had once told him. In this case he was now “learning” Ozmian; how he thought, what he wanted, what motivated him. And he had a surprising revelation, one that might allow him ultimately to prevail — if Ozmian acted as he hoped.

He moved along the ledge to a broken window on the tenth floor, paused, and gave a swift glance inside. It was another padded, cell-like room, bathed in a streak of moonlight and empty save for the skeleton bed and chair. Lightly as a cat, he leapt from the sill onto the floor and crouched again, sweeping the room with his gun. Empty. He went to the door, turned the handle.

Locked — from the outside.

This was precisely the situation he had anticipated, spinning around to cover the bathroom door, but he was too late. Ozmian had emerged from it with amazing speed and stealth, and Pendergast felt the icy barrel of Ozmian’s 1911 pressed into his ear as the man’s other hand seized him by the wrist, giving it a sharp wrench calibrated to jerk the Les Baer free of his grip. It clattered to the floor.

Now was the moment of truth.

After a long, agonizing silence, Pendergast heard a sigh.

“Eighteen minutes?” came Ozmian’s voice. “Is that all you could manage?” He released the wrist and took two steps back. “Turn around. Slowly.”

Pendergast complied.

“Those misleading footprints into the bathroom. Not bad. I almost wasted a couple of rounds firing through the door. But then I realized that was too easy; of course you’d left by another route — the window. You were waiting on the ledge. That much was clear. But then it occurred to me that you wouldn’t be waiting on the ledge one might expect, to the left or right of the window. No — you’d add an additional layer of deception by climbing up a story! So while you were inching up the façade, I took the stairs at my leisure, figured what room you would end up in, and set up my trap. Recall, this is a psychiatric hospital, and the patients were locked into their rooms — not the other way around. How convenient for me that you seem to have overlooked that small point.”

Pendergast said nothing. Ozmian couldn’t resist gloating, toying with him. It led Pendergast to believe that his risky guess was correct: if Ozmian caught him this early in the game, he would give him a second chance. Too much of Ozmian’s sense of self-worth was riding on this hunt for Ozmian to end it so quickly. But it was more than that; not killing him right now would say something important to Pendergast about the power this place held over Ozmian, and it would give him a deep and revealing glimpse into Ozmian’s psyche.

“I expected better from you, Pendergast. What a disappointment.” Ozmian aimed the gun at his head, and as Pendergast saw the man’s finger tighten on the trigger, he suddenly realized he was wrong: Ozmian wasn’t going to give him a second chance. As he closed his eyes, bracing himself for the roar and ensuing oblivion, an image jumped into his mind, utterly unexpectedly — the face of Constance — just before the hot explosion of the shot.