J. Jance - Without Due Process

People in front of the car stopped us again while the pounding on the back of the squad car continued. It was on the back panel now, just behind my shoulder, angry and insistent. Next the hammering started on the window beside my head.

Gary Deddens looked at the window with a sharp, involuntary intake of breath. I turned to see what had caused it.

The distorted angry face of a young black man was pressed against the glass. Abruptly the face was jerked away as someone grabbed the man from behind and pried him from the car. Only then did I recognize the face. Knuckles Russell stood there struggling furiously and gesturing toward the patrol car.

Something had happened, and Knuckles was trying to let me know.

“Stop the car and let me out,” I demanded.

“What do you mean let you out?” the driver returned. “You got a death wish or something?”

“Goddamnit,” I insisted. “I said let me out!”

Reluctantly, he stopped the car and unlatched the door. Sue jumped out to open it. “What the hell is going on?” she began.

But I didn’t reply. Instead, I leaped to where Knuckles still stood, trying to free himself from the unrelenting grasp of the King County police officer who had nabbed him.

“What is it?” I demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“Come on,” Knuckles answered urgently. “Ron Peters says you gots to come with me.”

“It’s okay,” I said to the officer. “Let him go. I know this man.”

The car horn was still sounding, closer now and more insistently. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ron Peters’s Reliant pressing its way toward me through the massed humanity. Taking Knuckles by the arm, the two of us started for the slow-moving car. Without waiting for Ron to come to a complete stop, Knuckles clambered into the backseat while I climbed into the front.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

“Curtis Bell,” Ron Peters answered, still trying to escape the crush of people and the endless row of vehicles that was already queuing up to form the funeral cortege. Ron’s specially equipped car with all its push-button controls would have been a complete mystery for me to operate, but he drove it with the consummate ease and confidence of a speeding juvenile delinquent.

“Curtis Bell? What about him?”

“You should have seen him. He came through the door of the church just as you were moving Deddens toward the car. As soon as he saw what you were up to, he took off like a dog with firecrackers tied to his tail.”

“But I thought he was selling…”

“Evidently more than insurance,” Ron Peters finished. “No wonder he was so interested in getting appointments with you and Big Al. My guess is he thought one of you would slip and tell him how much you knew.”

“I’ll be damned. He was trolling for information the whole time.”

“You’ve got it,” Peters replied. “Looking for leaks and trying to cover his tracks all at the same time.”

We finally negotiated our way through the last of the milling crowd. With squealing tires, Ron Peters sent the car rocketing forward. He turned westbound onto Madison.

“So where is he?” I asked.

“See that blue car,” Knuckles Russell asked, pointing from the backseat. “The one just now goin‘ over the top of the hill? That’s him.”

Curtis Bell’s blue Beretta crested the rise and momentarily disappeared from view as we sped up the steep grade behind him.

“He’s ahead of us,” Peters agreed grimly, “but not that far and not for long. You two keep an eye on him, and we’ll catch up.”

“And what do we do then?” I asked.

“I’m gonna smoke the mother,” Knuckles Russell murmured.

Even barreling hell-bent-for-leather down the street, Ron Peters managed to dredge up a shred of his customary sense of humor.

“That’s probably a bad idea, Ezra,” he cautioned reasonably. “There’ll be too many other people in line. You might hit the wrong person.”

“What if he gets off?” Knuckles demanded.

“He won’t. We’ll see to it.”

There was no way right then to tell who had done what, but in the state of Washington, regardless of who had been running the show and regardless of who actually wielded the weapons, all those involved would be considered equally guilty. In this state, murders committed by others in the course of a conspiracy to commit a felony offense damn all the conspirators. Not only that, Curtis Bell was a crooked cop besides.

“Killing’s too damn good for him,” I said heatedly. “Look! He’s turning north on Sixth. Where’s he going?”

We were turning onto Sixth only a block behind him as the light at Spring turned green ahead of us and he sped in a sharp right-hand turn onto the southbound on-ramp to I-5. Peters followed suit, but dropped back and stayed far enough behind so we could keep him in view without arousing suspicion.

“Five bucks says he’s headed for the airport,” Ron Peters breathed.

“I never placed no bet with cops before, but you’re on,” Knuckles asserted from the backseat. His eyes never left the back of Curtis Bell’s car.

Previous encounters with Ron Peters had taught me the folly of betting money against him on anything. It was a valuable lesson Knuckles Russell would have to learn for himself the hard way.

“It’ll be coming out of your student loan,” I told him.

And actually, that was probably fair. I figured it would prove to be an educational experience.

For months now people in the media have complained bitterly about the growing traffic problems in the Puget Sound area. When you live and work primarily in the downtown core, it’s easy to ignore the fact that Seattle’s freeways often deteriorate into vast parking lots, and not just at rush hour, either.

At four P.M. that Saturday afternoon some major cultural or sporting event must have let out minutes earlier, because the southbound lanes of I-5 were crammed. After merging into traffic, we literally inched our way past the I-90 interchange and the city’s perpetual Kingdome exit construction projects. Curtis Bell’s blue Beretta was only six or seven cars ahead of us as we crawled along.

“I could probably sprint fast enough to catch up with him,” I said, itching to jump out of the car and collar the bastard.

“And what happens then?” Peters returned. “What happens if Bell takes off and you end up causing a chain reaction accident? We’ll be stuck here with no backup and no way to send for any. We’re better off waiting until we know for sure where he’s going.”

I might have argued with him, except he was probably right. When you’re dealing with that kind of traffic volume, any slight fender bender can result in hours of delay for everyone. Under those circumstances, police and emergency vehicles are only marginally better off than civilian ones.

The good thing about being stuck in traffic was that it was easy to keep track of exactly where Curtis Bell was and what he was doing, without it being blatantly obvious to him that he was being tailed. The bad part was that if he somehow did catch on and start making evasive maneuvers, it might be difficult for us to react. I breathed a sigh of relief when he went straight past the Spokane Street and Michigan exits. I was happy when he skipped Martin Luther King Junior Way as well. It was looking more and more like Sea-Tac all the time.

About then my pager went off two different times in rapid succession. Once the readout gave me Tony Freeman’s number and once Captain Powell’s, but without a radio or a phone in the car, there was no way for me to respond right then.

“You really ought to have a cellular phone in here,” I told Peters. “It would make our lives a hell of a lot easier right about now.”