P Deutermann - Darkside

“The roof! He’s going for the roof,” someone shouted, and Jim whirled, jumped over to the window, and looked outside. To his amazement, there was Booth, about ten windows down the hall, hanging by his fingertips from the fourth-deck ledge. Then he dropped like a cat, landing on the next ledge and grabbing the wall for an instant before letting go again and dropping to the next ledge. A TAC cop brushed Jim aside and leaned out to take a shot, but by then Booth had levered himself through a window on the second deck and disappeared. The TAC cop swore and made his report into a shoulder mike.

Jim brushed himself off, checked to make sure he hadn’t peed his own pants, and went out into the hallway, where everyone was getting back up. It was hard to see or even breathe in all the gun smoke. Shoulder radios were chattering away everywhere. A big cop in full tactical gear, wearing a sergeant’s shield, walked up to Jim.

“Nice going, Mr. Hall. You gave us all the time we needed. Got the girl. She’s up on the roof with Branner.”

“She okay?”

“Yes, sir, she is,” the sergeant said, taking off his face mask and turning down the volume on his tactical radio. The other cops had fanned out down the passageway and were checking rooms. Jim’s Yard cop came out of his room, obviously dazed, bleeding from the ears and nose. The TAC guys got him to sit down on the floor and sent for medical assistance. “One of our flash-bangs went slow fuse on us. Fucker picked it up and threw it back out the window just as we hauled the girl up onto the roof. Scared us all to death. Then he caught the next one, and apparently pitched it out here, got your guy. That’s how he got away.”

“No help from me,” Jim said. “I was trying for China after he combed my hair with that forty-five.”

“China’s good,” the sergeant said with a grin. “Ah, and here comes Ms. Branner now.”

Jim turned, to see Branner’s bottom easing backward through the window in the room where he’d been. Behind her were two TAC cops, who held a white-faced Julie Markham between them on the ledge until she, too, could climb through the window. One of the medics who had come up from the third floor took her in tow and wrapped a blanket around her. Branner turned to Jim and blew out her cheeks. “Some guys do all the work; some guys just sit and flap their jaws,” she said. The cops grinned.

“Agent Branner here was the one on the end of the rope,” the sergeant said. “She was the lightest one up there, so she hung out there to tie the harness on while you kept him busy.”

“Thank God you guys could hear us talking.”

“Yeah. And it was all recorded down in the ops van. We catch his ass, he’s DA meat.”

The radio squawked out a relay call from the perimeter cops. “Suspect broke the perimeter,” someone yelled. “Academy cops say he’s going into Lejeune Hall.”

Jim looked at Branner. “He’s trying for his lab access.”

“No way-that’s all flooded,” she said.

“Not anymore-they drained it, remember?” Jim said. He turned to the TAC sergeant. “Tell them to get people into the basement, down where the swimming pool piping is. There’s a storage room, where they keep the chemicals for the pool. That’s where he’s been getting into the tunnels.”

The TAC cops got on it while Jim and Branner started trotting down the hallway. “Can he make it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, turning down the cross corridor, suddenly aware of his burning back again. Funny how that. 45 had taken the pain away, he thought. “If the approach tunnels to the magazines did collapse, then the magazines still ought to be flooded-nowhere for the water to go, right?”

They ran down the stairs and outside, Branner flashing her badge as they raced through the perimeter of police vehicles and watching cops. When they finally got to Lejeune Hall, there were more cops milling around outside. By the time they worked their way down to the basement and found the storage room, the door was open and there were TAC squad guys poking flashlights down into the access hole. The big metal plate was still hanging askew, dimpled with bullet holes.

“Is it flooded?” Branner asked.

“Nope,” one of the cops said. “Can’t really see shit down there, but it doesn’t look flooded. Somebody better call Public Works. They’ve got crews down there.”

“So,” a TAC cop asked no one in particular, “who’s volunteering to go down there after his ass?”

Before anyone could answer, there came a deep sustained rumbling sound from beneath their feet, with the clatter of individual pieces of falling masonry echoing up from the access hole. Then it became very still. The access hole exhaled a small cloud of damp cement dust out into the storage room.

“May be a moot point,” Jim said, staring at the hole. “With any luck, that right there was bye-bye, Dyle.”

Just after sundown, a subdued Ev Markham was staring out into Chesapeake Bay from the fantail of the Not Guilty. Liz and Julie were down below, doing something in the galley, and he was sipping some scotch and reflecting on the day’s events. The boat was back alongside its moorings at the Annapolis Yacht Club after a two-hour cruise out on the Severn and its estuary. Ev was very proud of the way Julie was bearing up after her ordeal at the hands of Dyle Booth. She’d been virtually uninjured, unless you counted some bad bruising around her midriff and knees from hanging out the window and a small knot on her head from the rescue exertions. He was mostly relieved that the whole thing was finally over, and that they now knew who’d been behind all the awful things happening at or around the Academy. He heard footsteps approaching out on the floating pier and swung around in his deck chair. It was the security officer, Jim Hall, and Agent Branner. He got up and unlatched the railing gate.

“Come on aboard,” he said. “Liz is down below. I’ll get her.”

The two came up the plastic steps on the pier and walked onto Not Guilty ’s pristine deck. Hall was wearing a gray business suit, and Branner was wearing a form-fitting blue blazer over a gray skirt. She kicked off her low-heeled leather shoes as she stepped aboard, in deference to the shining deck. They both looked tired, and Ev offered them a drink, but they both declined.

“I’d love one,” Hall said, “but then I’d probably fall asleep right here on the boat. We just came by to give you and Julie a quick sitrep. She is here, isn’t she?”

“Here they are now,” Ev said as Liz and Julie came up the companionway and out onto the stern lounge area. Liz repeated Ev’s offer of a drink, but they again politely declined. Everyone sat down. Ev noticed that Hall was being careful not to rest his back against the curved Naugahyde sofa.

“I imagine there’s been some paperwork to do after all this,” Liz said.

Branner smiled. “Many trees’ worth,” she said. “Many trees. With all those cops out there this morning, there’s paperwork about the paperwork. Plus, the Bureau got into it.”

“When will they want to see Julie?” Liz asked.

“With any luck, they won’t,” Hall replied. He told them about a three-hour meeting with the commandant earlier that afternoon, after some semblance of order had been restored in Bancroft Hall. With the exception of the room that had been flash-banged, and several bullet holes and lots of broken glass up and down the fourth-deck corridor, the actual damage had been minimal. The mids, disciplined as ever, had reoccupied their building, cleaned everything up, and returned to their routine.

“We went over the entire case with the supe and the dant during that meeting. I did the part about the tunnel runner, Branner here did the Dell case, and we jointly went over the parts where the two came together. Then we had a separate meeting with our cops, the town cops, and the Bureau people.”