Tampa Police Department HQ was situated at the junction of Franklin and Madison, little more than two minutes away. Luckily for me all the responding squad cars must have been out cruising round downtown when the call had gone in about the shooting in the Channelside district. The sirens sounded as though they were all responding via Franklin, the way I’d come in. I had a free run all the way up Jefferson and under the Crosstown Expressway before anyone was astute enough to set up roadblocks. Didn’t mean I was free, it just gave me a wider area to move in before the cordon tightened round me.
The pursuing squad car was growing larger in my mirrors and the cop on board would be coordinating other units to block me somewhere ahead. I shot through intersection after intersection, then past the impressive George E. Edgecomb Courthouse, and another squad car idling at the corner of Zack Street while it waited for the lights to change. As I zipped by, I saw the blue lights come on and it pulled out in pursuit, falling in behind the other cruiser.
There was a major junction ahead, and I went through it laying my hand hard on the horn. Only fortune saw me through the junction safely, but all round me I saw vehicles screeching to a halt, some fishtailing in the road. The cop car behind me slammed into the back end of a pick-up truck, spinning out both vehicles.
I hoped everyone was OK: I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, but neither could I go back and offer assistance. I pressed the throttle harder and kept going, taking Orange Avenue north, knowing that Interstate-4 was somewhere ahead. If I could get beyond it my options for escape would become much greater.
The cop car that had been near the courthouse took up the chase and it cut down my lead every second. Until now I hadn’t been pushing the Audi for fear a pedestrian might step out in front of me, but now there was nothing for it: I tromped the gas pedal.
There was no way I could get into a duel with the pursuing cop car so I relied instead on speed, pushing the Audi under the interstate, and taking a quick left on to surface streets of a residential neighbourhood I didn’t know. The cop car was still behind me, but a series of turns left him confused at the direction I’d taken. Conscious now that there could be kids playing in the streets, I slowed down to a more sensible speed and continued to traverse the neighbourhoods, heading north-west through Riverside Heights and out towards the suburbs of the city.
I had a place on the Gulf Coast up near Mexico Beach but I couldn’t go there. That would be the first place the cops would think to look. My best friend and the man I officially worked for, Jared Rington, had an office in the downtown district and a condominium in a wooded area outside Temple Terrace. Rink would help hide me, but I couldn’t go to either of his registered properties because they would be points two and three on the cops’ radar. At this moment it was dangerous even to make contact with Rink by the usual avenues; his phones would be checked for any calls from me and they’d try and press him for my whereabouts. Rink wouldn’t tell them, and they might charge him with harbouring a felon. Something like that wouldn’t help his private investigations business.
We had other ways of making contact, set up for dealing with situations just like this one.
Priority was to ditch the Audi: an APB would have gone out and police cruisers from the outlying districts would now be searching for it. Under bogus details, I’d rented a covered garage a couple miles north of here. I drove there watching for a tail, and pulled in unobserved. From a hidden safe in the floor, I took out spare ammo, fake documents and a change of clothing; exchanging my shirt and trousers for the more anonymous baseball cap, hooded sweatshirt and jeans. Finished, I pulled down the shutters and snapped a lock in place, heading out in a Taurus I’d previously parked in the garage, searching for a public telephone booth.
Back in the day, Rink and I worked for a joint task force that pulled from various UN Special Forces teams. We utilised a network of safe numbers to communicate between team members and our controllers. I used one of those numbers now to send a coded message to my friend’s pager and I only had to wait a few minutes before Rink got back to me. In the meantime, our call would be shunted between satellites halfway round the world: untraceable.
‘Tell me that you weren’t involved, Joe.’
‘Whatever you’re being told; it wasn’t me.’
‘I knew that,’ Rink said. He had wanted to hear it from my lips.
‘The police have already been at the office asking about me?’
‘I gave them a bum steer, but they’re not idiots. They’ll be back soon enough.’
‘Did they give a reason why they were looking for me?’
‘They wouldn’t say, but I’ve heard word on the streets. It seems someone has fingered you for a murder in Ybor a couple days ago.’ Rink held his breath for a moment. ‘Someone took a punk hostage, beat the living shit outa him to teach him a lesson.’
‘Can see how they drew the conclusion,’ I admitted.
‘Didn’t end there, though, Joe. Whoever this guy was, he killed the guy’s daughter right in front of his eyes.’
A sliver of ice wormed its way through my guts. ‘And the cops think that was me?’
‘They don’t know you the way I do.’ Rink was apologising for having raised the question earlier. ‘Apparently the punk survived long enough to describe his attacker. He even told the cops his attacker’s name.’
‘My name?’
‘Yup. The police don’t know that you’d never harm the woman. They’ll be coming for you.’
It was confirmation that the shooter had set me up, but he’d made a glaring mistake. He should have killed the man and left the woman as a witness. That would have been much more difficult to deny. Since leaving the military I’ve earned a name as a vigilante. I’ve gone up against some bad people, stopped them from hurting the innocent: but I don’t make war on women.
‘There are some cops who admire what you’ve done — not that they’d ever publicly admit it — but they ain’t gonna let you go when they think you’ve murdered an innocent.’
Some cops. Like Castle.
But there wouldn’t be a cop from Tampa PD — or from anywhere else in the country — who would be sympathetic towards me now.
I told Rink what had just happened down by Garrison Channel.
‘Goddamnit! Why didn’t you just put down your gun? We could’ve cleared this up in no time.’
‘Couldn’t do it, Rink. I’m being set up for something. For a start, the shooter would’ve known his plan was finished with. Probably he’d have just shot me dead.’
Rink cursed and ranted for a while, but he knew that I was right.
‘The only way I’m going to put this right is to find him, Rink.’ Giving him the registration number of the Ford, I asked him to check it out. ‘It’s most likely a stolen vehicle, but it’s a start.’
‘I’ll get on to it. Y’know, I had a bad feelin’ that somethin’ was going down.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Got a call from an old friend of yours, said he wanted to speak to you.’
‘Who?’
‘You remember Bryce Lang?’
How could I forget?
Somehow I had the feeling that things were only going to get much worse.