Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

The door of the van burst open and Kresge squinted against the blinding light. "Which way?"

"Follow me." Neale began running across the street. Past a scabby field overgrown with weeds and strewn with rusted hunks of metal. Kresge could see block after block of one- and two-story warehouses. Most of them dilapidated. Some burnt out.

A perfect hiding place for someone on the run.

A perfect vantage place for a sniper.

An Econoline van screeched to a stop nearby. Five SWAT officers jumped out. Kresge heard: "Load and lock. Green team, deploy south. Blue, north. Hug the river. Go, go, go!"

Neale pulled up in front of the first building. "Deputy?"

Kresge looked at him and saw he was motioning to Kresge's pistol, still in its holster.

"Oh." Kresge unsnapped the thong and drew the gun. He pumped a round into the chamber and slid his right index finger parallel to the barrel. He felt a monumental spurt of energy surge through his chest. Neale pointed to himself then to the right. Kresge nodded and turned the opposite way, toward the river. A minute later Kresge found himself in a long alleyway through which ran rusted narrow-gauge rail lines. It was filled with thousands of black doorways and windows and loading docks.

"Oh, boy," he sighed, and jumped over a small stone abutment, as he ran into the war zone.

The first five buildings were pure hell. Spinning, ducking, aiming his pistol at shadows and garbage bags and shutters. Then having gotten this far without being shot, Kresge grew bolder. Gilchrist didn't want to get trapped. His whole point's to escape. He's not going to back himself into a closed warehouse.

Though it was in a warehouse that Kresge found him.

The deputy stepped into a huge abandoned space, pillars of jagged sun coming through the broken panes of skylight.

And there was the man he sought. Not fifty feet away, hiding beside an old boiler. He held no weapons, just an old suitcase. He looked benign and small next to the huge tank, a slight man, blond, ashen and nervous. It occurred to Kresge that this was the first time anybody involved in the investigation had actually seen Leon Gilchrist. It wasn't much of a sighting; the light here was dusty and diffuse.

Kresge shouted, "Freeze."

The man did, but only in shock and only for a moment. Then very slowly he turned his back to Kresge and started to walk away as if he were reluctantly leaving a lover.

"Stop! I'll shoot."

Step by step he kept going, never looking back.

Kresge aimed. A clear target. Perfect. Better than on the small arms range at Higgins. His finger slipped into the guard and he started putting poundage on the trigger. About halfway to its eleven pounds of pull he lowered the gun and muttered, "Shit." Then took off at a full gallop.

Ahead of him the silhouette became a shadow and then vanished.

One of the patrolmen temporarily assigned to FelAp, the Fitzberg Felony Apprehension Squad, was Tony LaPorda, a great, round chunk of a man, who wore his service revolver high on his belt and his illegal.380 automatic in a soft holster under his pungent armpit. He was a small-city cop – a breed halfway between the calm, slope-shouldered civil servant urban police of, say, New York and the staunch cowboys of Atlanta or San Antonio.

LaPorda wore a leather jacket with a fur collar and dark slacks and a hat with a patent-leather brim and checkered band around the crown. He was typical of the five patrolmen working North Side GLA, who'd been told to volunteer for a couple hours at time and a half to collar some professor from New Lebanon who'd stuck the big one to a student of his.

For this assignment LaPorda was given a special frequency for his Motorola and a flak jacket but not an M-16 (nobody but SWAT had rifles, this Leon Gilchrist not being a terrorist or anything but a fucking professor). LaPorda was not very excited about the project especially when it turned out that the perp was on the move. LaPorda hated running even more than he hated the riverfront.

He trotted lethargically toward one large warehouse where he figured he might sit the whole thing out. He pulled up with a stitch in his side, thinking, Jesus Christ, this fucking aerobic fucking Jane Fonda crap is what they pay fucking SWAT for.

He leaned against a warehouse wall, listening to the staticky voices of what a buddy had dubbed the Felony Apprehension Response Team (nobody was faster than cops with this sort of acronym). LaPorda called in too, saying that he'd had no sign of the perp but was on his way to the riverfront for further investigation. Then he dug into his jacket pocket for his Camels. He shook one out and put his lips around it.

He was startled when a polite voice next to him said, "Need a match?"

When LaPorda turned he didn't see who was speaking. All he saw was a rusty pipe, four inches wide and about four feet long, as it whistled square into his face. The ponk echoed off the walls nearby. LaPorda collapsed in a large pile and began to bleed heavily. He did not lose consciousness at first and was aware of hands rifling his shirt. The hands were persistent but delicate; the man they belonged to didn't seem very strong. Professor's hands, he thought then he passed out.

Wynton Kresge caught him lifting the fallen patrolman's service revolver out of its holster. Kresge wondered if Gilchrist had killed the officer. "Hold it right there." He turned and their eyes met. The two were alone. There were no footsteps, no crackles of walkie-talkies. The rest of the teams had passed them by. "Don't move," Kresge said. He aimed at the darting, dark eyes then remembered the Deputy's Procedural Guide. Rule 34-6. The chest, not the head, is the preferred target in an arrest situation.

Kresge said, "Drop the gun."

The sunlight bounced off a high window and illuminated the men in pale light.

"Drop it."

"Let's talk about this."

Kresge nodded at the man's gun. "Now!" It was a double-action revolver. All Gilchrist had to do was aim and pull the trigger. No safety, no slides. Rule 34-2. Identify suspect's weapon immediately. "I'm not going to tell you again."

"Do you want some money? How much do you want? A thousand? No problem." He nodded toward the cop. "That was an accident. He fell. I was trying to help him. You want two thousand?" He gestured casually toward his suitcase, which moved the muzzle of the revolver closer to Kresge.

He remembered the silhouette targets on the Higgins range. He said, "I'll count to three."

"Hey, why don't you just count to ten and give me a chance to go away? What could be easier than that? Two thousand dollars cash. I've got it right there in my suitcase."

"If you don't drop the gun immediately," Kresge said, "I am going to shoot you."

"Oh, I don't think so, Officer."

"He moved. He said something."

"Detective Corde?" the nurse said.

"I don't know what it was exactly," he explained.

"Telephone for you, sir."

Corde said to her, "He moved. He said something."

The nurse, who knew all about sleep-deprivation hallucinating, glanced down at Jamie's immobile form "That's wonderful."

"He sat up."

She had also read Jamie's chart and she knew that he was as likely to fly loop-de-loops through the room as he was to sit up and utter one syllable. "That's wonderful."

"Don't you want to tell the doctor?"

She said, "It's a policeman in Fitzberg on the line. He said it's urgent."

"Okay." Corde turned his red eyes to the phone. He walked groggily toward it.

"No, sir, it's out here. We don't put calls through to the ICU."

"Oh."

Standing at the nurses' station Corde accepted the phone and said, "Hello?"

He heard Wynton Kresge ask, "How's your son?"