Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

“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.