Archer Mayor - Tucker Peak

I took the stairs, having learned the hard way about the reliability of elevators in such buildings, and opened my coat wide, both to cool off and to give me better access to my gun.

At the second-floor landing, I came to a T-junction of poorly lit hallways and took the one heading straight back, reading what numbers there were off the battered hollow-core doors. One-fourteen was the last one on the left.

I knocked loudly. Willy had described Don Matthews as tall, nervous, skinny, and wearing a ponytail, not at all like the hairless round runt who opened the door after the third pounding. So much for Matthews’s catching some sleep after a factory shift.

I showed this man my shield. “Police. Who’re you?”

His thin, unshaven face paled. “What?”

“You’re not Don Matthews, so who are you?”

He groped for an answer. “Ah… Ted… Smith.”

“I need to talk to Don-right now.”

His eyes darted over my shoulder, checking the hallway. “Oh… Yeah. Well, he’s kind of busy right now.”

“Let me in. I’ll wait.”

He looked slightly alarmed. “Hey, no. I mean, he’s in the bathroom… Look, it’s not my place, like you said, so I can’t really let people in uninvited. It may not be legal or something, right?”

“You got something in there you don’t want me to see?” I asked.

He licked his lips. “I don’t got nuthin’. It’s just private property, is all.”

There was a sudden sound of glass breaking behind him. Startled, Smith turned to look, inadvertently opening the door wide enough for me to see a man standing on a table against the far wall, his hand halfway through the window he’d been trying to open. His description fit Don Matthews.

“Don’t move,” I yelled. “Police.”

I might as well have fired a starter’s pistol. The man on the table threw himself at the window, falling outside, while Ted Smith made a feeble attempt to push me across the hallway. I pushed him back as I entered the room but tripped over his legs when he stumbled before me. I fell to my knees and felt his hands groping for the gun under my coat. I twisted around, rolled onto my back, and planted a heel between his eyes, stunning him like a cow.

“You son of a bitch,” I snarled, “consider yourself busted.” I then regained my feet, ran to the now empty window, and yelled outside, “Willy-he’s coming down the fire escape.”

A noise behind me made me spin on my heel, my gun out, in time to see Smith crawling out the door. “Don’t move, Ted, or I’ll shoot your ass off.”

He froze, his upper body already out in the hall. I pulled out my handcuffs, dragged him back inside, and attached him to a water pipe running up the wall. “Stay there. I’ll be back.”

I returned to the window, being careful of the broken shards, and climbed out onto the wooden fire escape, leaning over the railing to see the alley below. Willy’s thin, pale face was staring up at me.

“You got him?” I shouted.

“Almost,” he answered calmly and then gestured with his arm as if directing traffic. “Come to Poppa, Don.”

I started down the rickety stairs through the opening in the landing and almost immediately saw our quarry poised on the next level between me and Willy below-gaunt, hollow-eyed, his ponytail almost reaching his waist.

I pointed my gun at him. “Stay where you are. We’re police officers.”

But he obviously knew I wouldn’t shoot unless he threatened me, and he had other things in mind than fighting. Instead, he jumped up onto the railing, positioned himself like a diver as I came off the stairs to stop him, and threw himself into the void, sailing over both Willy’s head and a sagging chain-link fence cutting the alleyway in two, and landing with a crash onto the roof of a parked car, blowing out its windshield in the process.

Willy stared helplessly through the fence. The man on the other side rolled off the roof, landed in the snow on the car’s far side, and scrambled to his feet to race down the alley for a clean getaway.

“Get the car, Willy,” I yelled as I continued down the fire escape as fast as I could, opting against the airborne route.

Instantly accepting his inability to climb the fence with just one arm, Willy took off in the other direction as I struggled with the wobbly chain link, landing in an untidy but intact pile on the same semi-destroyed car.

I still had our man in sight, his greasy hair swinging like a horse’s tail behind him. He was as scrawny as a scarecrow and, from the quick glance I’d gotten, seemed nearly as fit. If I managed not to lose him, I figured even I could wear him out. There was no way this clown would last too long on adrenaline alone. I hoped.

Unfortunately, his athletic prowess wasn’t put to the test. After rounding the corner at the alley’s mouth, I found myself staring at an empty sidewalk.

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.

I saw a man across the street, sitting on a bus stop bench, looking up from his reading, staring at a spot only thirty feet ahead of me, as if he’d just seen something interesting. It was all I needed. As the spectator returned to his newspaper, I jogged to the spot, found a door between two businesses, and waited until Willy drove into view a block away. I waved at him, pointed to the door, and entered.

I was in a lobby facing a broad set of stairs heading up to the second floor. Unlike the apartment building I’d just left, this place was quiet, odorless, and except for the fluorescent lighting humming overhead, seemingly abandoned.

I unholstered my gun again. Wisdom dictated waiting for backup. Experience suggested my quarry would take that time to disappear entirely.

I headed upstairs.

On the landing, I found four doors, all labeled, three with business names-a lawyer, a barber, and an accountant-and the last a rest room. Apparently, business was bad enough that either everyone had gone home or had simply died at their desks years back. I could hear no phones, no keyboard tapping, nothing except the lighting and the same muted mechanical murmur that all commercial buildings seem to exude, like a person’s breathing.

Logic suggested the bathroom. It was possible the guy went to a friend’s office or was behind one of those doors holding the occupants hostage, but more likely he’d holed up where he felt more at ease, around a bunch of toilets.

Unless he’d gone in there to use another window.

I decided not to take the chance. I approached the door, planning to open it from the knob side, so as not to be in its way when it swung back, when it suddenly did just that. The door hit my foot and threw me off balance, and the long-haired man came barreling out, slamming into me like a linebacker on his way back down the stairs. I went flying against the opposite wall, my gun clattering across the floor, and felt the wind get knocked out of me by the impact.

“Damn,” I swore, by now seriously angry. I staggered to my feet, lurched to the top of the stairs, ripped a fire extinguisher off its wall bracket, and threw it with all my strength at the man about halfway to the ground floor.

It caught him behind the knees and sent him sailing head first into the lobby, where he landed with a terrific crash.

I quickly retrieved my gun at the far end of the landing. When I reappeared on the stairs, however, Matthews was no longer alone. Standing over him, smiling, was Willy Kunkle, a pair of handcuffs in his hand.

“He still alive?” I asked him.

Willy chuckled and leaned over to apply the cuffs. “Not happily, but yeah. Are you?”

Don Matthews eyed me warily from his hospital bed. “You gonna read me my rights?”

“I hate to tell you this, Don, after all you’ve been through, but we weren’t there to arrest you. We just wanted to ask you a few questions.”