Deadly Pursuit

6

The front door was unlocked. Lovejoy flung it wide and entered, his Smith sweeping the four salesmen at their desks and the messenger with a lurid magazine in his lap.

“Freeze, FBI!” Lovejoy shouted as his colleagues fanned out, covering the room. “Put your hands up!”

Moore was scanning the faces and frowning hard. “Where’s Dance? Where’s Dance?”

“Where’s your fucking boss?” Patterson yelled at the salesmen.

One of them showed an insolent smile. “Haven’t seen him.”

Lovejoy talked into his Telex headset. “Outside posts, stay alert. Jack isn’t home.”

As he completed the transmission, the two Dallas detectives charged in from the rear.

“Any way he could’ve gotten past you?” Lovejoy demanded.

“No chance,” the first cop said. “Nothing back there but a toilet and a closet, and we checked them both.”

“Peter.” Moore pointed at the far corner. A door under a red Exit sign. It had been shut hastily, but the latch had not caught. As they watched, the door drifted slowly ajar, revealing a staircase: metal treads and railings.

“Shit.” Lovejoy had studied blueprints of the strip-mall complex. The staircase led to a second-floor storage room. Dance must be up there already.

Dead end, though. The room was windowless. There were no exits. Still, he could make a stand. If he had a weapon, he could fire on the arrest team from the top of the stairs. Everyone was wearing vests, but the Kevlar offered no protection to the head and limbs.

An assault was no good, then. This was a job for somebody with a bullhorn.

Moore was thinking the same thing. “Think he’s gone barricade?”

“It, uh, it appears…” Lovejoy tried to control the breathless shaking of his voice. “It appears we’ll have to play it that way.” He turned to Patterson. “Better get SWAT in here. We’ll need a negotiator and containment. In the meantime, LAPD can evacuate the building. That is… if you think that’s the best option.”

Patterson nodded. “It’s our only option.” He hurried off to give the orders.

“This isn’t a disaster, Peter.” Moore patted his shoulder. “He’s ours. Either he gives himself up, or SWAT takes him out.”

“In all probability.” Lovejoy sighed. “But in this instance the probabilities may not apply.”

Jack had never expected to face arrest again. The precious-metals scam was too subtle, almost borderline legal, not the kind of thing the authorities would come down on.

They had, though. They meant to put him out of business. That was the reason for the bust. It had to be. The law couldn’t have found out about his other activities. He’d handled the murders with meticulous care, leaving no clues. There was no chance he could have been linked to even one of the homicides.

No, it was only a fraud charge. But that was bad enough. It could put him in jail.

He had sworn he would never go back. And because he’d meant it, he had taken precautions to ensure that he could extricate himself even from a tricky situation like this.

Alone in the low-ceilinged storage room with the door locked, Jack groped along the side wall till he found a vertical crack in the whitewashed plasterboard. He pushed at the edges of the crack. A three-foot-square section of the wall yielded to the gentle pressure of his fingertips, loosening, and tipped free.

Jack slipped through the gap, then replaced the panel, taking care to wedge it precisely back into position. He was in another storeroom, above the temporary-employment agency next door to CSGI. The room was crowded with empty cartons that had once contained word processing equipment and telephone gear.

Behind one of the cartons, months ago, he had hidden a large plastic bag. It was still there, thank God.

Inside was an olive green jumpsuit with a homemade insignia stitched onto the chest. The suit was a reasonably close facsimile of the outfits worn by the exterminators who visited the complex on an irregular basis, spraying for cockroaches and ants.

Jack slipped into the costume, easily donning it over his suit. He rummaged in the bag and produced a matching green cap, then a spray gun with a long nozzle and a bulky canister.

Carrying the tool, he eased open the storeroom door and peered down the stairwell. Empty.

Quickly he descended. He could hear the commanding tones of an authoritative voice from the offices outside. A cop.

He caught the word “evacuate.”

Despite himself, despite everything, Jack smiled. He had known they would do that. Once they believed he was holed up in a locked room, the next step was to clear out the building.

He waited until sounds of confusion, of hurried footsteps and mingled voices, bled through the hollow door to the stairwell. Then he took a breath of courage and emerged into the office.

For a few precious seconds nobody saw him. The trainees and job applicants were shutting off their computers and gathering up their personal items, the supervisors doing the same as they told everyone to hurry up, get moving, come on. From the rear of the building half a dozen other employees were herded forward by two plainclothes cops with stern faces.

Jack shuffled through the room and blundered into the crowd, mumbling in Spanish. He knew enough of the language to get by.

“Move along, folks,” one of the cops snapped, then saw Jack and frowned. “Where’d he come from?”

Jack kept his head low, the bill of his cap covering much of his face. He gestured as if confused, a steady stream of Spanish flowing from him like a derelict’s vapid muttering.

“He’s one of the bug people,” a helpful employee said. “You know, Rid-a-Pest.”

“Didn’t know they came on Thursdays,” someone else put in, but the words were lost in the babble of voices.

“Policia,” the second cop said to him, flashing his badge. “Siga. Siga todo derecho.” Walk straight ahead.

Jack stumbled in a half circle. The cop shoved him.

“Dese prisa!” Hurry up!

Nodding his head mechanically, Jack got into step with the rest of the crowd.

The scene outside was a circus. Employees, cops, and curious passersby milled everywhere. Jack made his way through the throng of people, not looking back.

A black SWAT war wagon screamed into the mall as he reached the sidewalk. Overhead, an aerial-surveillance unit chopped the air with its rotor.

He kept walking, heading west, putting distance between himself and the territory that would be the focus of the aerial observer’s scrutiny.

After three blocks he veered onto a side street, then entered an alley. He discarded the spray gun and cap, stripped off the uniform, smoothed his jacket and pants. He was a businessman again, in a blue Brooks Brothers suit.

He breathed deeply, then exhaled. Again. Again. Gradually his heartbeat returned to nearly normal.

Three blocks farther west, an RTD bus groaned to a stop, collecting passengers. Jack joined the line.

He looked eastward as he boarded. The helicopter was a gnat in the distance, still buzzing the arrest site, glinting silver in the sun.

It was standard procedure for SWAT snipers, politely called containment officers, to station themselves as close as possible to the barricaded suspect without giving their presence away.

Two of them were deployed in the stairwell, flanking the negotiator, who used a bullhorn to address the closed door at the top of the stairs. There was no phone in the storeroom and no window through which a field phone could be tossed. The suspect would have to shout through the door when he was ready to talk. So far he hadn’t made a peep.

In the boiler room of Consolidated Silver amp; Gold, a technician on a ladder was holding a stethoscope to the ceiling, listening for footsteps upstairs. He’d heard none.

Another technician, accompanied by two SWAT commandos with shotguns, entered the storeroom above the employment agency. The storeroom shared a common wall with the room in which the suspect was holed up. The technician quietly attached an electronic eavesdropping device to the wall, then slipped on headphones.

No sounds at all. The equipment was sufficiently sensitive to pick up a person’s breathing in close quarters. There ought to be something.

Frowning, he removed the device and moved a few feet down the wall. The two snipers covered him. The thin plasterboard offered no protection against a gun on the other side. If the suspect heard someone moving there, he might open fire. A bullet would punch through the layers of felt and gypsum like a knife through paper.

The technician started to reattach the bug, pressing the suction pads into place. Then he paused.

The wall had moved.

No, not the whole wall. Only a piece of it. A loose section.

His flashlight beam revealed a movable panel, three feet square.

Patterson, Lovejoy, Moore, and the SWAT commander were in the storeroom ninety seconds later. They looked at the secret panel, still in place, and spoke in whispers.

“He slipped out that way,” Moore said.

Patterson shook his head. “Then where is he? We checked downstairs.”

Lovejoy spoke up. “He could have blended in somehow with the civilians we evacuated.”

“Impossible,” Patterson hissed. “Every member of the task force was looking for him.”

“It’s conceivable he changed clothes, disguised himself.” Lovejoy shrugged, a heavy, hopeless gesture, then added with a faint note of optimism, “Unless he’s still inside.”

“Want us to go in?” the commander asked.

Lovejoy looked at Patterson. The assistant SAC called it. “Go in.”

Instructions were relayed via radio headsets. The negotiator cleared out of the stairwell. The two snipers stationed there moved quickly up the stairs.

In the adjacent storage room, the other two containment officers covered the panel, ready to fire if it moved.

At the top of the stairs, the first sniper shot the storeroom door open, and then he and his partner were inside, scanning the dark, windowless chamber.

Empty.

Nothing to see, not even cartons of junk.

They flicked on the overhead light. White walls and cheap short-nap carpet.

Lovejoy and the others waited tensely in the parking lot, outside the kill zone.

There was still a possibility Dance was in there. Maybe he’d given up, shot himself. Maybe he was dead.

Please, Jesus, let him be dead.

Lovejoy realized he was praying. Catholicism had a way of coming back to you at times like this.

Over his earphone, the SWAT commander’s voice; “We’re in.”

“And?”

“He’s flown.”

Moore slumped her shoulders. Patterson pulled off his headset and swore.

“Understood,” Lovejoy said.

He turned to the assistant SAC and spoke rapidly, squeezing all emotion out of his voice.

“There’s a chance he’s still in the vicinity. Better have LAPD broadcast an alert and deploy any unit they can spare to cruise the area. West L.A. Division can stake out his apartment building in case he’s stupid enough to return. His girlfriend works at Bullock’s in Westwood. It would be advisable to take her into protective custody and squeeze her for anything she knows.”

Patterson nodded. “I’ll alert security at all the local airports, the bus station, the train station.”

“Rental car companies,” Moore said. “And his bank-he may try to withdraw funds, close out his accounts.”

“Got it.” Patterson moved off to speak with the LAPD Valley Bureau commander, who had just arrived on the scene.

Lovejoy waited till the assistant SAC was gone before permitting any crackup of his surface calm. Then he lowered his head, wrestling with the urge to scream.

“Fuck. We blew it. Blew it.”

A wet sneeze shook him. Suddenly his allergies were back, as if in punishment for failure.

“We’ll get him, Peter,” Moore said gently.

“That’s what we thought this morning.”

“Next time-”

“Next time may be too late. I mean… he’s done seven already. Who’ll be number eight?”

Moore took his hand, squeezed it tight. She had no answer.

Jack sat in a window seat at the back of the bus, watching the smoggy wasteland of the San Fernando Valley shudder past. He felt calm and confident and wonderfully self-possessed.

He had beaten them. Beaten them all. Cheated the law of its prize.

Across the aisle, a little boy was practicing coin tricks while his Latino nanny looked on.

The boy smiled at Jack. “I can do magic.”

Jack nodded. “So can I.”

“Really?”

“Let me show you.”

He took out a quarter and passed it deftly from hand to hand, then palmed it. A simple illusion he’d learned years ago while running a street-corner shell game.

“Wow,” the boy said. “You made it disappear.”

“I can do better magic than that. I can make myself disappear.” He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “In fact, I just did.”

He couldn’t stay invisible for long, though-not in this city. He had to get out. And he knew where to go.

Jack checked his watch. Ten o’clock. He could make it to LAX by eleven-thirty at the latest. There had to be a noon flight to Miami. He would land by nine p.m. Eastern time.

From there it was less than a two-hour drive to Islamorada… and Pelican Key.