Scent of Evil

18

"How did it go with Arthur Clyde?”

“I think it surprised the shit out of him,” Klesczewski said. “If there’s anything incriminating in all that junk, I think we’ll find it, ’cause he didn’t strike me as someone who’d swept his dirt under the rug. He looked totally stunned, and got madder than hell.”

“Did you call in Willette to help sort it out?”

“Yeah. Dennis and him are working on it now. Better them than me.”

I looked over at him. He seemed more relaxed than I’d seen him in a long time-in fact, since his elevation to second-in-command. If nothing else, I thought, this double homicide and its attending chaos was going to make him more comfortable with taking the initiative. That was a personal vindication for me, since Brandt had voiced serious reservations about my decision. He’d favored Tyler-an obvious choice and, I’d thought, a perfect opportunity to see the Peter Principle at work.

E-Z Hauling had its truck depot on the Old Ferry Road, somewhat of a no-man’s land on the edge of town where the north Putney Road becomes Route 5 heading toward Putney and Westminster. The area has been taken over by a mismatched scattering of metal buildings, some modest in size, housing conventional businesses like American Stratford typesetters, others so enormous as to defy the imagination, like the seven-acre main shipping and receiving terminal and the four-and-a-half-acre freezer building of C amp;S Wholesale Grocers, arguably the largest business in the whole state of Vermont, and one of the ten most profitable companies in New England. In between were operations like Pepsi-Cola Bottling, Northeast Cooperatives-a health food distributor-UPS, Boise Cascade, and various trucking firms. It was no scenic wonderland, but considering it was designed to keep the majority of the area’s heavy truck traffic away from downtown, I’d always thought both planners and developers had done a halfway decent job.

Nothing could alter a metal building’s basic lack of aesthetic appeal, especially if it approached the Pentagon in size, but site location, lots of trees, and self-deprecating paint jobs helped.

Klesczewski slowed at the traffic light and turned right onto Old Ferry, paralleling the length of the main C amp;S building, which occupied the inside corner of the intersection. E-Z Hauling owned a small lot at the top of a low crest about a quarter mile up the road, also on the right, with a view of the C amp;S freezer building’s roof.

“What’s this guy’s name again?” I asked.

“Cappelli, Mark Cappelli.” Ron checked his watch. “The dispatcher wasn’t too clear on when he’d be pulling in; just said sometime late this morning.”

It was now 11:35. Ron had bumped into me just as I’d handed Harriet my notes on the Blaire Wentworth interview. The chance to get out of the office and play second fiddle while Klesczewski dealt with Cappelli was too attractive to pass up. Not only would it give me a breather and let me see Ron at work, it would allow me time to think over, once again, the growing pile of evidence in both cases.

“What did you learn about that other guy, the one who didn’t have a profession listed?”

Klesczewski drove through the gate and pulled up opposite a battered metal door in a totally windowless corrugated wall. The door was labeled OFFICE. “Jake Hanson. Not much. I found out through the town clerk that he owns a couple of old warehouses on Birge Street. My guess is he lives off the rent.”

We got out of the car. I always felt I should wear a jacket around town, if for no other reason than to hide the gun on my belt, but as I twisted around, trying to pluck the fabric free of my sweat-soaked back, I cursed my sense of etiquette. Ron had no such scruples; he left his coat in the car.

The gum-snapping girl in the office directed us around to the back, where the trucks were parked. It turned out the building was mostly a glorified garage, with three large, open bay doors revealing spaces where trucks could be pulled in for repair and maintenance. About six eighteen-wheelers were parked, side by side, in the rear lot.

We stepped into the slightly cooler shade of the garage, blinking away the sun’s brightness. At the back of the bay, only visible as a shadow, a man’s figure moved back and forth along an extended workbench.

Ron, squinting as I was, spoke up beside me. “Excuse me. Could you tell us where to find Mark Cappelli?”

My vision, adjusting more rapidly now, saw the figure twist around and freeze for a moment, its face pale against the dark back wall. Whoever the guy was, he seemed more focused on Klesczewski than on me, which made me instantly think of Ron’s gun, hanging out in plain view. “Better tell him we’re cops.”

He never got the words out. There was a metallic scraping sound from the bench as the figure ahead of us made a violent movement, and I suddenly sensed more than saw something spinning toward our heads. I instinctively raised my right arm and began to duck and turn away. A burst of pain whacked my forearm, numbing my hand, and a crescent wrench clanged at my feet.

Ron seemed riveted in place, staring at me doubled over in agony, my arm tucked into the pit of my stomach. “Son of a bitch. Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not fucking okay-damn.”

Crouching, we both recovered quickly and fanned out to either side of where we’d been, but the dark outline at the bench had vanished. I glanced at Ron, his gun out and ready. I’d left mine in its holster, since I still had no sensation in my lower arm and couldn’t shoot worth a damn with my left hand. “See anything?”

He scrutinized the gloom as if concentration alone could give him the vision he lacked. “Cappelli, come on out. We’re from-”

Again, he was cut short as a gunshot rang out and sent both of us flat on the grease-stained ground. No more flying tools, I thought; now we were getting serious. There was the sound of running feet and the clang of a metal door.

“Over there-to the left.”

“Watch it, Ron. He may not be gone.” I was sweating freely now, the pain in my arm superseded by an adrenalin rush that made my heart pound and my pupils dilate.

My vision of the garage now entirely cleared, I could see a line of oil drums running parallel with part of the bench, forming an aisle to a doorway mounted in the left-side wall. I gestured to Klesczewski to circle out to where the drums met the wall, while I made an approach more in line with the aisle, so that by merely poking my head out, I might see all the way to the door. I too now had my gun cradled in my still-tingling right hand.

The aisle was empty. I straightened from the crouch I’d unconsciously assumed. “He’s gone.”

Ron vaulted over the drums and beat me to the door, turning the knob, kicking it open, and tucking himself behind the jamb, all in one fluid movement. We were looking into the same office we’d visited upon our arrival. The gum-chewing secretary was standing between us and the front door, her mouth open at the sight of our weapons.

“Oh, my God.” She backed up several steps, caught her desk with the backs of her thighs, and went tumbling head over heels, vanishing on the far side with a crash and a flash of upturned legs.

I checked the office quickly as Klesczewski ran up to the desk. “We’re cops. Where did that man go?”

The girl, from the floor, pointed toward the front door.

“Was that Cappelli?” I shouted, already moving.

She answered yes, as we made for the exit.

Outside, we saw Cappelli disentangling himself from three strands of barbed wire strung along the top of a low chain-link fence separating E-Z’s yard from the C amp;S lot. The huge, dark-brown freezer building just beyond loomed like Jonah’s whale, lying ready to swallow our man whole.

I ran across toward the fence, yelling to Ron. “Drive to the far entrance. Radio everyone and get ’em out here… And give them a description.”

I began struggling with the fence, just six-feet tall, trying to keep my hands free of the barbs while scrambling for toeholds in the wire. Ahead, I could see our quarry, now almost at the bottom of the grassy slope between me and C amp;S’s tarmac apron. Cappelli was of medium height, broad-shouldered, with long black hair and a mustache. He was wearing jeans, work boots, and a bright-red T-shirt with black lettering on the back. I couldn’t see a gun and presumed he’d pocketed it for convenience. I hoped Ron had noticed as much for his description to the troops.

Cursing my own clumsiness, I finally stripped off my jacket, laid it across the top of the fence to absorb the barbs, and half fell into the grass on the far side just as Cappelli vanished around the corner of the distant building. Running downhill, I forgot radio protocol as I unclipped my portable from my belt: “Ron, he’s gone into the freezer. Try to seal off the perimeter gates somehow and then block the connecting tunnel into the main warehouse. Maybe security can help.”

The two C amp;S buildings are gigantic rectangles when seen from the top, linked by a thin, umbilical-like surface tunnel for forklifts. The long southeastern walls of both buildings house rows of some fifty loading bays each-square holes punched into the wall about four feet off the ground to accommodate the thousands of trucks that back up to them every week. The rest of the thirty-five to forty-foot-tall walls, including the one I was skirting at a dead run, are relatively free of doors or windows, and enclose a dizzying array of gigantic rooms, some two hundred and fifty by three hundred feet, which are interlaced with thirty-five-foot-tall racks. Loaded with boxed produce, they look like solid walls. Both buildings are manned twenty-four hours a day by a total of some six hundred stockpilers and machinery operators, all motivated by an incentive-pay system to keep twenty-one thousand products moving toward retailers over a good part of New England as fast as possible. Where Cappelli had just disappeared, in other words, was like an entire town under one single three-hundred-and-ten thousand-square-foot roof-not a bad place to hide, and a bitch to control.

I skidded around the corner, almost in time to be killed by a fast-moving tractor, and found Cappelli had vanished from sight. It was perfectly possible he had disappeared into one of the cabs or was hiding behind the wheels of one of the many eighteen-wheelers backed up to the building, but my instincts told me otherwise.

I double-stepped up a short flight of concrete stairs to a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” pulled it open, and slipped inside.

The shock left me breathless for a moment. From blazing, white-hot, suffocating daylight, I had stepped into a huge, artificially lit, cold cave. The sudden contrast made me feel I’d been transported forward in time to the gloom of late fall, and the unexpected cool air was like a splash of water in the face.

The room was approximately one hundred feet long, forty feet wide, and another forty feet tall. There were two enormous doorways in the long concrete wall opposite the row of loading doors, both of which were blocked off by overlapping strips of heavy plastic hanging from above. Behind them was the freezer room, almost one hundred thousand square feet of it.

I was in the dock area, where piles of boxed frozen goods were stacked on pallets, either fresh from or ready for the truck bodies that extended like dead-end doorless hallways from the open loading bays. Blinking away the outside brightness, I scanned the large room, looking for Cappelli’s distinctive red shirt.

“Hey. What’s up?”

I whirled around. A man dressed in insulated overalls, gloves, and a wool cap stood slightly behind one of the stacks along the wall, a clipboard in his hands. His eyes widened at the sight of the gun strapped to my belt.

“I’m a cop. Did you see a guy in a red T-shirt run in here?”

“Yeah. He went in there. I thought-”

He pointed toward the plastic-curtained door to the freezer. Just then, a lightning-bright muzzle flash exploded and crashed against the metal walls around us. The bullet tore the clipboard from my guide’s hands just as I threw myself against him and sent us both sprawling behind some boxes.

“Holy shit. What the hell is going on?” His cap had slid over one ear, and he looked like the village drunk propped up against his cardboard shelter.

“I’m going in there. As soon as you think it’s safe, get out and take as many people with you as you can. Don’t waste time doing it and don’t be a hero. Just spread the word and get the hell out. I got troops on the way.”

He nodded dumbly, his eyes wide, as I got to my knees and peered around my barricade. The shadow I’d seen behind the muzzle flash was gone.

Tucked low, I scuttled from pallet to pallet, working a zigzag course toward the freezer door. Finally, with my back against its cold concrete edge, I pulled out my radio. “Ron, you there?”

I released the key button and waited. Some two seconds of static came back at me.

“Ron? Do you copy?”

More static.

“I can’t read you. Maybe it’s the building. I’m about to go into the main freezer room.” As I replaced the radio on my belt clip, I noticed its side had been badly gouged, presumably from my nose dive to the cement floor. That probably accounted for the static; it also meant I was all by myself.

I leaned around the edge of the doorway and peeled back one of the plastic strips, shivering as the blast of cold air hit my sweat-soaked shirt. I was about to slip through the narrow opening when I heard a sudden loud whining bearing down on me. I looked around frantically and then spun back as the plastic strips burst around me, yielding to a fast-moving forklift that missed me by two inches.

“Get the fuck out of the way, you moron. I almost killed you.” The operator stopped abruptly, his eyes like his predecessor’s, glued to my gun.

I gave him the same set of instructions, adding that he should run to the far end of the building as quickly as possible to get the cops.

He did so, abandoning the fully loaded forklift.

I stepped onto the tiny driver’s platform at the back of the machine and studied the controls for a moment. Then, crouching down, I operated the reverse and backed through the curtain as fast as I could.

On the other side was a wide traffic lane, running parallel to the cement wall and at right angles to an endless row of three-story-high stocking racks. I drove fast and straight toward the nearest aisle, using the machine and its speed as cover. It almost wasn’t enough. Another bullet whacked into the control panel, showering my head with shattered plastic. I jumped for the temporary safety of the aisle just before the forklift crashed into one of the racks.

The sudden silence was electrifying. With the forklift stilled, I became aware of the all-encompassing low-toned rumble of the refrigeration compressors, as seemingly permanent and pervasive as the sound of a distant sea.

I picked myself up off the icy floor and began to look for a way west, through the middle of the towering racks and in the direction of the last shot. I was now beginning to feel the cold. My breath hovered before my face. Overhead, ominous icy stalactites reached down from the steel cross-bracing and water-sprinkler pipes high above, reminders of how briefly I could survive in this environment. I began to shiver as I squeezed between two stacked loads on the bottom shelf and wriggled my way into the next aisle.

Aisle by aisle I progressed, slowly, cautiously, and without sound, looking up and to the sides, never knowing where Cappelli might be lurking, not even sure he was still in the freezer. My hands and feet became numb. My shivering developed into an uncontrollable shaking. My jaw muscles began to ache from clamping my chattering teeth together.

I decided to speed things up a bit by running to the far end of one of the aisles and proceeding up the distant traffic lane, thereby sparing myself the additional discomfort of sliding between the frozen boxes.

It was the shortcut Cappelli was waiting for. I rounded the first aisle without mishap or reward, but as I dashed across the open space for the sanctuary of the next line of racks, now almost sure I was alone, I heard the faintest of sounds overhead and looked up just in time to see several boxes come hurtling down on me, the flash of Cappelli’s T-shirt behind them.

I twisted out of the way, tripped, and landed on my back, my revolver going off accidentally. There was a loud metallic crack following the blast, and one of the overhead water pipes blew up. I watched in slow terror as a fountain of freezing water sprang free and came at me, a huge, expanding, life-threatening shower. As I rolled over to catch the brunt of it with my back, I wondered incongruously why Cappelli hadn’t simply shot me. The answer, of course, lay in my hand. He, like I, had no feeling left in his fingers, and no ability to willfully pull the trigger.

The water hit me like icy lava, burning my body and changing my entire focus from pursuit to survival. At first crawling, then staggering to my feet, and finally lurching down the hundred-foot aisle, I made a beeline for the exit, fully aware that any caution now would mean my freezing to death. As I ran, I could feel my clothes stiffening against my skin.

Cappelli must have been in the same situation. About halfway down the aisle, I saw another flash of red before me as he darted across the opening, making for one of the huge curtained doors. He was a good fifty feet ahead and long gone by the time I half fell between the long plastic strips.

I looked around, standing in the open, my hair and eyebrows glistening with ice, my gun hanging useless at the end of an arm without feeling. Several heads were visible peering over the tops of various boxes.

“Where did he go?” I asked in my head, but not in fact. My mouth was numb, and the sounds from it made no sense.

Someone nevertheless pointed to another curtained opening which separated the cold portion of the building from what the workers called “Phase B,” a second hundred-thousand-square-foot addition that was slated to become a freezer, but which for the time being was uncooled.

With none of the caution I’d displayed earlier, I stumbled through the connecting archway into Phase B.

The shock of coming from the cold into the warm was not as brutal as the reverse. My body was so numb, it took a while to adjust, but I was aware of the change and of the salvation it represented. That mere instinct sharpened my senses.

“Where?” I asked the first person I met.

Word had obviously gotten out, however filtered. Here, as in the freezer, the steady whirring of forklifts had been quieted by the crisis Cappelli and I represented, but the sense of threat had suffered in translation, or had been diminished by our weather-beaten appearance. In any case, the workers were just standing around looking baffled.

“What’re you guys doing?” The man I’d addressed was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that said, “Five hundred thousand cows can’t be all wrong-Visit Vermont.”

“Where did the man in the red shirt go?”

“Into the tunnel.” He pointed to the far end of the room.

The tunnel was a ten-foot by ten-foot boxed-in metal corridor that connected the freezer building to the main warehouse. It was restricted to forklifts only and designed to allow them free access to both buildings regardless of the weather. Unfortunately, it wasn’t short or straight. Despite the proximity of the buildings, they were on sharply different levels, so, to avoid too harsh an incline, the tunnel had been built as a long, gradually descending V, with a one-hundred-sixty-degree switchback crimping the middle. I ran toward it, feeling more limber with each step, knowing that as soon as I was in its embrace, I’d stick out like a target in a shooting gallery. Again, I tried my radio, and again I got no results.

The first fifteen feet were no problem, since they were a straight shot from the building to the top of the V’s first leg. At the corner, however, things literally and otherwise went downhill. I glanced at the convex mirror mounted in the far corner, but the distortion was too great to distinguish much detail. Cappelli could be tucked alongside one of the hundreds of metal ribs that held the tunnel roof up and not be seen until I stuck my nose out.

I did stick it out, briefly, and saw nothing, just a hundred feet of gray corridor stretching away like a near-bottomless well. I began walking down it, keeping to the middle, ready to move right or left, depending on his angle of fire. I flexed the fingers of my right hand. At least now I could fire back.

But again, he didn’t shoot. As I was about twenty feet shy of the switchback, I thought I saw a movement in the second distant mirror. I moved to the left, progressing from protective rib to protective rib, so tense I thought I could hear my socks rubbing my pants legs. My eyes were glued to the mirror, willing its image to flatten out and enlarge, to tell me more of what lay hidden just a few feet away now. There was another movement, along the wall, tiny and distorted-an arm, holding a revolver.

“Stop where you are and throw your gun out. This is the police.”

I froze. It was Klesczewski.

“Ron?”

“Lieutenant?” In the mirror, several bodies appeared from behind the metal wall supports, all but Klesczewski’s in police uniforms.

“He didn’t get away, did he?” I asked as we met at the hairpin corner.

Klesczewski looked totally frazzled. “No, no. We don’t have him yet, but I’m sure he’s still in the building. Why didn’t you use your radio?”

I patted his shoulder, more grateful than I cared to admit for his company, as we all four jogged back toward the main building. “It’s broken. How many troops do you have now, and where are they positioned?”

“Eight or so, including some of the local security people. I put some of them outside, along sight lines near the perimeter fence, just to make sure he didn’t slip out between us.”

“That’s great.”

“I’m trying to get the building evacuated, but the P.A. system failed, and I only found someone who’d take responsibility a few minutes ago. Half the people are still unaware of what the hell’s going on.”

“Well, I chased him this far. He’s got to be in the main warehouse. Let’s keep the evacuation going, lock the place up, and send in the Special Reaction guys. Should be just a matter of time, as long as he doesn’t squirt out somewhere between now and then.”

We’d arrived at the tunnel’s far end, into a room that totally dwarfed the two I’d been in before, covering almost seven acres of floor space and reaching four stories up. As Ron had mentioned, the bustle of forklifts, “hi-lo’s,” and manual loaders had been only slightly reduced, although I could see several men in white shirts and ties using bullhorns, trying their best to wind things down.

“There aren’t many doors on the northwest side,” Ron continued, “and I think I got them all covered. It’s the loading dock and all these damn bays that have me worried. I never figured it would be that complicated to shut a place down.”

We heard a startled shout and a gunshot from one of the most distant of those bays.

“Oh, shit,” Ron muttered, and began to sprint down the length of the loading dock, cutting right and left around stacks of produce like a football player going for a touchdown.

I paused a moment. A forklift operator clutched his arm as Mark Cappelli bolted through a crack between one of the bay doors toward a truck backing up to the bay. I ran out another door, set on heading him off outside.

Unfortunately, I was still several hundred feet away and had a long line of trucks to get around. I was about fifty feet from where I thought Cappelli had left the warehouse when I heard a loud crash and the roar of a diesel engine in distress.

The noise had been caused by a Freightliner cab-over being driven away from its box without the support legs being dropped. I rounded my last obstacle in time to see the box lying with its nose in the tarmac like some religious penitent. The cab, shuddering and belching black smoke as Cappelli slammed it through its gears to gain speed, was already peeling away. He was headed west, against the prescribed traffic flow, bound for the far corner of the building and the entrance gates leading out to Ferry Road.

A trucker, his mouth half stuffed with a sandwich, was gesticulating near the front of the box. “He stole my cab, for Christ’s sake; that’s my fucking truck.”

I saw Ron standing at the edge of the adjacent loading door. “Where’s your car?”

“Follow me.” He bent down and swung me up onto the dock before leading me through the entrails of the building on a roughly diagonal tack to the building’s dressed-up front door to the west. As we both burst out onto the parking lot, Cappelli’s fire-breathing behemoth screamed around the far corner, heading for the closed front gate.

“Guess we better let ’em know what’s happening,” I said, as we piled into his car, just as the truck blew through the gate with a shriek of complaining metal. Leaving parallel crescents of black burnt rubber on the pavement, Cappelli slewed onto Ferry Road, heading toward the Putney Road traffic light. In a squeal of spinning tires, Ron backed out of his parking space and gave chase, while I began giving orders over the radio.

We had two major problems: We didn’t have enough time to get roadblocks properly organized, and we didn’t know which way Cappelli would take. If he turned right at the light, he could go north up Route 5 to grab the interstate at Putney, or try to vanish along the byways crisscrossing the hills around Dummerston, the next township. If he turned left, which I suspected he would, his choices were downtown Brattleboro, a couple of miles straight ahead, Route 9 East into New Hampshire, or I-91’s Exit Three, both located at the crossroads less than a mile down the road. I told Dispatch to contact the Vermont State Police and the Windham County Sheriff’s Department for anything north of our position, the New Hampshire cops for anything east, and ordered all available units to converge on Exit Three.

Another disadvantage was that most of our patrol units were behind Klesczewski and me, which left precious little to put between the truck and the open road. As Cappelli skidded through the light and drove south, I modified my instructions over the mike.

“This is Oh-three. I want all available units to move onto I-91, north and southbound. Rolling roadblocks.” I hung up the radio. “Ron, you better let at least one of the patrol units by. We aren’t exactly legal here.”

He slowed slightly and waved one of our tailgaters on, but only one; he wasn’t about to concede the chase, despite the rule that high-speed pursuits and roadblocks were only to be performed by recognizable patrol units.

“Why put everybody on the interstate?” he asked. The crossroads were coming up with amazing speed. I noticed both my feet were pressed flat against the floor.

“Gut call. It’s a wide-open road. That’s what I’d do.”

As if I’d willed it, the Freightliner slid into the crowded intersection, sideswiped several cars, and peeled out toward I-91. Another police unit screaming up the Putney Road from downtown almost added to the wreckage, barely missing us and a man who’d leapt from his vehicle to check the damage. I looked over my shoulder as Ron swept around the corner. That put three units behind us and one in front. I wondered what was left to stop Cappelli. I also wondered how much hell I was going to catch for putting this demolition derby into action.

As soon as I saw the truck commit to the first on-ramp, I grabbed the radio again. “All units from Oh-three. The truck’s heading north on the interstate. All units respond accordingly.”

But I shook my head as soon as I’d delivered the message.

Klesczewski saw me. “What?” he half shouted over the noise of the engine and the sirens.

“Why would he head north?”

“Why not?”

It was a legitimate response. Neither choice was rational, nor was the whole premise, for that matter. How Cappelli hoped to escape, driving a Freightliner with a bunch of cops on his tail, was beyond me. But if he was stupid enough to think he could, he was stupid enough to think that heading south toward Massachusetts and beyond held more options than tearing up the pavement for a hundred miles toward Canada.

I grabbed the mike again. “All units from Oh-three. Who’s on the interstate now?”

“Oh-three from One-five. I’m just north of Exit Two right now.”

“Set up a roadblock southbound just below the West River bridge.”

“I thought he was heading north.” The voice was high-pitched with incredulity.

“He is. I think he’ll turn around.”

“Oh-three from One-two. I’m coming onto Exit Two from West Bratt. Want me to join One-five?”

“Ten-four.”

Klesczewski’s face was tight with concentration as he tried to keep out of the ditch rounding the corner of the on-ramp. “You better be right, or we’re going to look like a bunch of assholes.”

I grinned at this rare profanity; in fact, I knew that soon, especially in the eyes of several of our town leaders, we would earn the label regardless of today’s results.

Cappelli’s truck was swerving slightly from side to side, making it impossible for the patrol car behind him to pass. As he drew abreast of the interstate at the top of the ramp, he added to the obstacle course by clipping a Subaru station wagon and causing it to twirl into a series of multiple pirouettes, which made all of us slam on our brakes to avoid joining in. Thus shielded, Cappelli cut into a controlled slide and sliced across the emergency U-turn lane a bare hundred feet away from the ramp. He was going for the southbound route.

The unit immediately behind him missed the U-turn completely, since it had veered to the wrong side of the dizzying Subaru and was hurtling north in the far breakdown lane. Klesczewski was luckier, as were the two units behind us.

“One-two and One-five from Oh-three. He’s headed your way.”

The thousand-foot-long West River bridge, one hundred feet above the water and now just a mile ahead of us, was undergoing repairs. The entire southbound span was closed, and traffic had been rerouted to one half of the northbound span, which was split down the middle by a row of heavy concrete dividers. The speed limit, for good reason, was forty. We were going ninety-five.

The approach to the bridge is a slightly descending slope. Units Twelve and Fifteen, their blue lights twinkling fiercely, were clearly visible on either side of the single southern lane at the far end of the bridge. Real roadblocks, unlike those in the movies, should always allow an exit. They are supposed to show the bad guys that escape is fruitless, not to provide them with cinematic opportunities to create mayhem. At midpoint on the bridge, in the gap that separated the two spans, workmen were operating acetylene torches from a long wooden platform, suspended by cables from the railing above. The flames from their torches looked like minuscule chips of sunlight.

“Ease up a little, Ron, the switch-over is bumpy.”

Klesczewski slowed down. Cappelli did not. His truck hit the thin, ripply asphalt overlay linking the southbound lane to its half of the northbound bridge, bounced once, and began to twist sideways, spewing several small rooster tails of burning rubber.

“Holy Christ, he’s going over.” Klesczewski slammed on the brakes hard, making my seat belt cut across my chest.

The truck hit the bridge sideways, with its rear wheels in the lane, its middle straddling the guardrail, and its cab hanging over the gap between the two spans. I could see the looks of horror on the faces of the workmen on the platform as the Freightliner screamed toward them, riding the guardrail sideways like some huge bizarre toy run amok. Now, added to the black smoke from the burning tires and the diesel exhaust, there was a shower of flaming sparks cascading from where the railing cut the truck undercarriage as it slid.

Slowly, as if tantalizing us, the cab began to peel forward off the chassis, exposing the engine beneath and throwing the whole disastrous mess off balance. For a moment, the truck’s wheels left the pavement and then, with the last of its momentum, it flipped on the guardrail like an acrobat somersaulting on a tightrope. The cab flew high in the air, its driver catapulting through its front window like a champagne cork. The chassis settled back onto the road, a smoking, twisted wreck, while Cappelli and the cab landed with an explosion onto the wooden platform below the bridge. We watched transfixed as the cab, surrounded by debris, spun silently through the hundred feet down into the shallow river. The platform, hanging on by a single cable, swung in a wide arc, and below it, swinging in turn by his leg, which was tangled in the remains of the other cable, was Mark Cappelli. The workers, hooked to their safety harnesses, were glued to the metal undercarriage of the bridge like insects to flypaper.

There was a deathly quiet as Ron and I left the car and stepped out onto the bridge. All traffic had frozen in place, all the topside workers were as still as statues at the railing; the one sound I could hear distinctly for that brief moment was the gurgling of the water far below as it swirled around its newfound obstacle.

I began to run.