Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

Two of the backup officers began CPR on their unconscious colleagues, while an A-team cop grabbed the handles of the battering ram and swung it into the door, which burst open. The team raced inside, guns up. Sachs followed.

It took only five seconds to learn that the apartment was empty.

Bo Haumann called into his radio, “B Team, B team, we’re inside. No sign of the suspect. Get downstairs, sweep the alley. But remember – he waited around at the last scene. He goes for innocents. And he goes for cops.”

A desk lamp burned and when Sachs touched the seat of the chair she found it was warm. A small closed-circuit TV sat on the desk, the fuzzy screen showing the hallway in front of the door. He’d had a security camera hidden somewhere outside and seen them coming. The killer had gotten away only moments ago. But where? The officers looked around for an escape route. The window by the fire escape was covered with plywood. The other was uncovered but it was thirty feet above the alley. “He was here. How the hell’d he get away?”

The answer came a moment later.

“Found this,” an officer called. He’d been looking under the bed. He pulled the cot away from the wall, revealing a hole just big enough for a person to crawl through. It looked like the unsub had cut through the plaster and removed the brick wall between this building and the one next door. When he saw them on the TV monitor he’d simply kicked out the plaster on the other side of the wall and slipped into the adjoining building.

Haumann sent more officers to check the roof and nearby streets, others to find and cover the entrances into the building next door.

“Somebody into the hole,” the ESU commander ordered.

“I’ll go, sir,” a short officer said.

But with his bulky armor, even he couldn’t fit through the gap.

“I’ll do it,” Sachs said, by far the slimmest of the officers present. “But I need this room cleared. To save the evidence.”

“Roger that. We’ll get you inside then pull back.” Haumann ordered the bed moved aside. Sachs knelt down and shone her flashlight through the hole, on the other side of which was a catwalk in a warehouse or factory. To reach it she had a four-foot crawl through the tight space.

“Shit,” muttered Amelia Sachs, the woman who’d drive 160 miles per hour and trade shots face to face with cornered perps but came close to paralysis at the hint of claustrophobia.

Headfirst or feet?

She sighed.

Headfirst would be spookier but safer; at least she’d have a few seconds to find the umsub’s firing position before he could draw a target. She looked into the tight, dark space. A deep breath. Pistol in hand, she started forward.

What the hell’s the matter with me? Lon Sellitto thought, standing in front of the warehouse beside the herbal goods importer, the building whose front door he was supposed to be guarding. He stared at this doorway and at the windows, looking for the escaped unsub, praying the perp would show up so he could nail him.

Praying that he wouldn’t.

What the hell’s the matter?

In his years on the force Sellitto had been in a dozen firefights, taken weapons off cranked-up psychos, even wrestled a suicide off the roof of the Flatiron Building, with nothing but six inches of ornate trim separating him from heaven. He’d gotten shook sometimes, sure. But he’d always bounced right back. Nothing’d ever affected him like Barry’s death this morning. Being in the line of fire had spooked him, no denying that. But this was something else. Something to do with being so close to a person at that one moment…the moment of death. He couldn’t get the librarian’s voice out of his head, his last words as a living person.

I didn’t really see -

Couldn’t forget the sound of the three bullets striking his chest either.

Tap…tap…tap…

They were soft, barely audible, faint slaps. He’d never heard a noise like that. Lon Sellitto now shivered and felt nauseous.

And the man’s brown eyes…They were looking right into Sellitto’s when the slugs hit. In a fraction of an instant there was surprise, then pain, then…nothing. It was the oddest thing Sellitto had ever seen. Not like drifting off to sleep, not distracted. The only way to describe it: one moment there was something complicated and real behind the eyes and then, an instant later, even before he crumpled to the sidewalk, there was nothing.

The detective had remained frozen, staring at the limp doll lying in front of him – despite the fact that he knew he should be trying to run down the shooter. The medics had actually jostled him aside to get to Barry; Sellitto had been unable to move.

Tap…tap…tap…

Then, when it came time to call Barry’s next of kin, Sellitto had balked again. He’d made plenty of those difficult calls over the years. None of them easy, of course. But today he simply couldn’t face it. He’d made up some bullshit excuse about his phone and let someone else do the duty. He was afraid his voice would crack. He was afraid he’d cry, which he’d never done in his decades of service.

Now, he heard the radio report on the futile pursuit of the perp.

Hearing, tap , tap, tap …

Fuck, I just want to go home.

He wanted to be with Rachel, have a beer with her on their porch in Brooklyn. Well, too early for beer. A coffee. Or maybe it wasn’t too early for a beer. Or a scotch. He wanted to be sitting there, watching the grass and trees. Talking. Or not saying anything. Just to be with her. Suddenly the detective’s thoughts shifted to his teenage son, who lived with Sellitto’s ex. He hadn’t called the boy for three or four days. Had to do that.

He -

Shit. Sellitto realized that he was standing in the middle of Elizabeth Street with his back to the building he was supposed to be guarding, lost in thought. Jesus Christ! What’re you doing? The shooter’s loose around here somewhere, and you’re fucking daydreaming? He could be waiting in that alley there, or the other one, just like he was that morning.

Crouching, Sellitto turned back, examining the dark windows, smudged or shaded. The perp could be behind any one of them, sighting down on him right now with that fucking little gun of his. Tap, tap …The needles from the bullets tearing flesh to shreds as they fanned out. Sellitto shivered and stepped back, taking refuge between two parked delivery trucks, out of sight of the windows. Peering around the side of one van, he watched the black windows, he watched the door.

But those weren’t what he saw. No, he was seeing the brown eyes of the librarian in front of him, a few feet away.

I didn’t…

Tap, tap…

Life becoming no life.

Those eyes…

He wiped his shooting hand on his suit trousers, telling himself that he was sweating only because of the body armor. What was with the fucking weather? It was too hot for October. Who the hell wouldn’t sweat?

“I can’t see him, K,” Sachs whispered into her microphone.

“Say again?” was Haumann’s staticky reply.

“No sign of him, K.”

The warehouse into which Unsub 109 had fled was essentially one big open space divided by mesh catwalks. On the floor were pallets of olive oil bottles and tomato sauce cans, sealed in shrink-wrap. The catwalk she stood on was about thirty feet up, around the perimeter – level with the unsub’s apartment in the building next door. It was a working warehouse, though probably used only sporadically; there were no signs that employees had been here recently. The lights were out but enough illumination filtered through greasy skylights to give her a view of the place.