Pursuit: A Novel

15

Buffalo was not a huge town. Whenever Prescott had asked somebody how to get to his next stop, the person would say, “It’s about fifteen minutes away.” In Los Angeles they would usually say, “It’s about an hour from here,” and they would mean on the freeway, if traffic was moving. Earlier today, he had sometimes found himself in sluggish spots, but not like the ones at home. By evening the lines of cars had thinned out, and the fifteen-minute drives could be done in ten.

He had made twenty-two stops before it got to be too late in the evening to go on. He had made a list of the places where this particular killer probably spent time. There were only seven gyms in the area that would have appealed to this man. Those were the ones that were fairly new and spacious, had huge numbers of people coming in each day, and catered to the twenty-to-thirty crowd. The small, hard-core places that were in tiny, dark buildings and smelled of ancient sweat would not have seemed safe to this man: his best defense was protective coloration. The old iron works where men turned themselves into something like small steers would have been too intimate for him. But Prescott was sure that this killer was in the habit of going somewhere to work out, so he had put pictures in every gym where nobody stopped him.

Prescott believed that this man also spent some time shooting. He was too accurate not to be getting regular practice. Prescott had found only four ranges in the area where people were allowed to shoot handguns, and all were private clubs. None of them seemed to Prescott to fit his image of the man. Two of the clubs were meeting places for men cradling Purdy shotguns over their forearms and wearing sport coats with suede padding patches at the right shoulders. The other two were a bit more plebeian, but both seemed to consist of older men biding their time until hunting season—not practicing, exactly, but rehearsing.

Prescott was not hopeful about the gun clubs. They didn’t feel like places that would attract this killer. But men engaged in a pastime sometimes saw others engaged in the same pastime without socializing, so he knew the clubs were not a waste of time. He had left his pictures and moved on. He had tried a few gun shops, but he had not felt hopeful about those, either. Nobody who engaged in shooting sports wanted to be reminded that guns were used to kill people. The topic was depressing, and the shopkeepers were not enthusiastic, because it might put a damper on sales. But Prescott had kept at it until he had hit all the larger stores.

All that had to happen was that the killer come along and see his own picture, so any place might work. He put a few pictures up near big shopping malls. Then he drove back toward his new office. It would be one more day before the place was exactly as he wanted it, but he had begun posting the pictures as soon as the trap was strong enough to hold a man.

It was late when he returned to the spot where he had planned to park while he watched his office, but when he reached Cumberland Avenue, he could tell that he had arrived too late. There was a crowd of people in sweatshirts and T-shirts, and even pajamas and bathrobes, all gathered in the street and staring toward his building.

He could see four police cars, two of them with flashing light bars above their roofs, alternately turning his building red and blue; two that were dark; a fire truck; and an ambulance. He pulled his car to the curb and stared through the windshield. He forced himself to breathe normally. He hoped there wasn’t another body, some innocent bystander who happened to be in this man’s way at the wrong time. He hoped it was . . . He didn’t finish the thought. The ambulance doors weren’t open, and it wasn’t in a hurry to get moving, so either there was nobody in it, or the occupant was dead.

He got out of his car and walked up the street toward the low building. As he came closer he could see the police officers milling around in front, on the sidewalk and the street, but there seemed to be more of them in the back. He came to the corner, and started down toward the rear of the building. He could see the yellow POLICE LINE tape blocking the entrance to the little parking lot, and now he could see a big panel truck. He slowly, patiently made his way through the crowd to the police tape, saying over and over, “Excuse me, that’s my building. Excuse me, that’s my office.” People parted, not so much to make room as to spin their bodies to the side so their heads could turn enough to see him. When he reached the tape, he took out his wallet, opened it, and waved it at the nearest cop.

The cop was a tall black detective who had been giving orders to a couple of uniformed officers at the edge of the parking lot. The detective’s eyebrows went up as he looked at Prescott, and Prescott watched him decide that whatever this man meant by waving his wallet around, it had better be pertinent.

“Did you want something, sir?” The controlled tone was a warning to Prescott.

“Yes, officer. My name is Prescott. I’m the one who is renting that space on the end, there.”

The detective’s eyes followed Prescott’s gesture to the building. He reached down and pulled up the yellow tape so Prescott could step under it. “We’ve been looking for you.” He led Prescott into the lot, and Prescott saw the rear window. The bars had been torn out of the wall, but not as though they had been pulled. Bricks around the window were chipped and cracked apart. Above and below the window, there were big, fan-shaped marks that were part black carbon, and part gouges and nicks.

“What kind of bomb was it?” he asked.

The detective glared at him sharply. “What kind were you expecting?” He led Prescott around the building to the front. “This is Mr. Prescott,” he said to the two uniformed cops loitering beside a patrol car. “Let them know we’ve got him.”

The two cops quickly and expertly whirled Prescott around and began to frisk him.

He said evenly, “I’m not carrying anything dangerous.”

The cops finished patting him down, then one of them conferred in a whisper with the detective, and returned. He didn’t handcuff Prescott, just opened the door to the back and said, “Have a seat.”

Prescott ducked down to sit, and the side window just ahead of him shattered, showering the inside of the car with bits of flying glass. The report of the rifle reached Prescott a half breath later. He was already curled into a crouch. He ducked to the pavement and rolled as the next three shots punched through the door of the police car. The two cops scattered, one to the rear of the car and the other to the front, where they knelt, drew sidearms, and aimed uselessly into the darkness, their heads swiveling to find the target.

Prescott’s mind carried several thoughts at once: The bullets had not exited through the opposite window, so the angle meant the killer was high. Prescott’s roll was a practiced move, and he knew that it had taken him much farther from the car than the killer would anticipate. The old sniper’s motto burned in his brain: “If you run, you’ll just die tired.” He had to get out of sight.

He came up from his shoulder roll already leaping forward, because the shooter would already have adjusted the elevation of his rifle for the next shot. Prescott dived at an angle to the left, and the shot he’d known was coming pounded into the sidewalk to his right, throwing chips and powdered concrete into the air. Prescott saw the open door of his office and scrambled into it as the next shot pierced the carpet at his feet. He moved to the left, and three more shots smacked the thick bullet-proof glass of the front window and ricocheted into the sidewalk.

He could see by the light of the empty-framed rear window that the office was a ruin. The desk was moved, the ceiling tiles were covering everything. He could see that the answering machine was on the ground, its cord severed. He heard an insistent beep. Could the telephone have survived? He looked at the phone jack and followed the cord a couple of feet before it disappeared under acoustic tile. He could not ignore the sound. He leapt across the open doorway to the most likely area, kicked a few tiles aside, and found it. He pushed down the button under the cradle, heard a dial tone, and punched 911. He spoke calmly and crisply as soon as he heard the click, cutting into the voice. “We have police officers under rifle fire at Cumberland Avenue and Maplestone Street. The sniper is up high about one block to the west, possibly on a roof. He is a white male, twenty-five to thirty years old, one hundred seventy-five pounds, dark brown hair.” He heard a female voice begin to say, “Who—” but he interrupted, trying to be sure all of it was said, if only to be preserved on the tape recording that kicked in on emergency lines. “It is essential that the units responding approach from the west, behind the sniper.”

“Yes, sir. What is your—”

He left the phone off the hook and stepped away quickly. He knew that the shooter was out there trying to change his angle enough to fire into the doorway. Prescott couldn’t close the steel door, because the first cops to arrive had battered it so much it had bent inward. He wasn’t sure whether the police officers outside were calling in contradictory messages on their radios. He couldn’t tell from their actions whether they knew that he was the only target.

He waited, looking at the ruined room, piecing together what had happened. The front wall and part of the floor had been peppered with holes. He looked more closely and saw a couple that were perfect outlines of short roofing nails, and a few that looked like jagged strips of scrap metal: a pipe bomb.

The killer had not come here, pounded in the back window, and tossed in a bomb. He had come in here to set up a booby trap, and gotten stuck. He had used his bomb to free himself. Prescott slowly overcame his shock. He had been surprised that the man could have found the place and coolly destroyed it so quickly. But he had not. The desk had not been blown into the safest corner of the room: it had been pushed there by the killer. He had used it for protection from the blast.

He thought about the man, and the hairs on the back of his neck began to rise. The man had fallen for the trap, just as Prescott had predicted. But he had not uselessly pounded on brick walls, or waited for Prescott with the gun he’d brought, or even sat in the corner and used that gun to blow his own brains out. He had placed the antipersonnel bomb he’d prepared at the only possible exit, the weakest part of the trap, maybe eight feet from his own head, and set it off. He was like a wolf caught in a trap that was willing to gnaw through its own leg to get away.

Prescott heard a sudden volley of shots, all in rapid succession, the popping sounds of handguns. He listened for the louder, sharper report of the rifle, but it did not come. One of the cops must have gotten optimistic and mistaken a shadow for the real thing. The wolf had already slipped off into the night.