Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

"I've got people with them," the detective said. Then, to the pedestrians: "Everybody! Police action here! Clear the street!"

People scattered instantly.

"My family!" Grady called desperately. "You're sure?"

"They're fine."

"But Weir -"

"Faked the shooting in detention. He's out and somewhere around here. I've got an armored van on its way."

Turning again, squinting, surveying the scenery.

Roland Bell finally reached Grady and stood over him, his back to the dark windows of the government office building across the street.

"Just stay right where you are, Charles," Bell said. "We'll get out of this fine." And pulled his handy-talkie off his belt.

• • •

What was this?

Hobbs Wentworth watched his target below him – the prosecutor – cowering on the sidewalk behind a man in a sports coat, a cop obviously.

The crosshairs of Hobbs 's scope poked around the officer's back, searching unsuccessfully for an unprotected shot at Grady.

The prosecutor was low, the cop standing. It seemed to Hobbs that if he shot through the cop's lower back he'd probably hit Grady in the upper chest, since he was crouching. But the risk was that the shot would be deflected and Grady'd only be wounded and fall to safety behind a car.

Well, he had to do something pretty soon. The cop was talking on his radio. There'd be a hundred more of 'em here in a minute. Come on, sharp operator , he said to himself. Whatcha gonna do?

Below him the cop was still looking around, covering Grady, who squatted like a bitch retriever peeing.

All right. What he'd do was shoot the cop in the upper leg, the thigh. That way, most likely, the cop would fall backward, exposing the prosecutor. The Colt was semiauto so he could fire five shots in two seconds. Not perfect but it was the best Hobbs could think of.

He'd give the cop a moment or two longer to step aside or sway out of the way.

Both eyes open as the right one stared through the scope, painting the back of the detective with the crosshairs and thinking that when he got back to Canton Falls he'd make up a Bible story about this. Jesus would play his role and would be armed with a kick-ass compound bow, about to ambush a bunch of Roman soldiers, who'd been torturing Christians. Julius Caesar would be hiding behind one soldier and thinking he was safe but Jesus would shoot through the soldier and kill the son-of-a-bitch.

Good story. The kids'd love it.

The cop was still huddled over the prosecutor.

Well, that's it , Hobbs thought, clicking off the safety of the big Colt. No time left. Burn in brimstone, Christ-killing Romans.

He centered the crosshairs on the back of the cop's leg and began to apply slow pressure on the trigger, thinking that his only regret was that the officer was white, not black.

But one thing Hobbs Wentworth'd learned in life: you take your targets the way you find 'em.

Roland Bell smelled the distinctive plastic/sweat/metal scent of the Motorola handy-talkie as he clutched it to his face.

"ESU Four, you 'bout ready, K?" he drawled into the mike.

"Roger that, K," one of them replied.

"Okay, now -"

Which is when the muffled cracks of multiple shots resounded through the canyon of the street.

Bell jumped.

"Gunshots!" Charles Grady cried. "I heard shots! Are you hit?"

"Just stay down," Bell said as he dropped into a crouch. He spun around, lifting his gun and squinting hard at the government office building across the street.

He was counting furiously.

"Got the location," he called into the radio. "I make it the third floor, fifth office from the north end of the building." Then Bell examined the glass. "Ouch."

"Say again, K?" one of the officers called.

"I said, 'Ouch.'"

"Uhm. Roger. Out."

Grady, lying on the sidewalk, said, "What's going on?" He started to get up.

"Sit tight there," the detective told him, standing up cautiously. Turning now from the window and scanning the sidewalk around him. There was a possibility that more shooters were nearby. A moment later an armored Emergency Services van pulled up and five seconds after that Bell and Grady were inside, squealing away from the attempted hit and taking the prosecutor back to the Upper East Side and his family.

Bell glanced behind him to see more ESU troopers streaming into the building across the street from the courthouse.

Don't worry… He'll find us.

Well, he sure as hell had.

Bell had concluded that the best way to try to hit Grady would be from the office building across the street. It was most likely that the killer would break into one of the lower offices facing the sidewalk. The roof was unlikely because it was monitored by dozens of CCTV cameras. Bell had remained in the open as bait because of something he knew about this particular building from the hostage situation he'd run there: the windows, as in many of the newer government buildings here, couldn't be opened and were made from bomb-proof glass.

There'd been a small risk, he supposed, that the shooter would use armor-piercing rounds, which might penetrate the inch-thick glass. But Bell had recalled an expression he'd heard during a case a couple of years ago: "God don't give out certain."

He'd taken the chance of luring the sniper into shooting, in hopes that the bullet would spider the window and reveal the man's location.

And his idea had worked – though with a variation, as Bell had mentioned to the ESU team. Ouch …

"ESU Four to Bell. It's Haumann. You were right, K."

"Go ahead, K."

The tactical commander continued, "We're inside. Scene is secure. Only what do they call those? The Darwin Awards? You know, where criminals do stupid things, K?"

"Roger that," Bell responded. "Where'd he hit himself, K?" Bell had spotted the shooter's location not because of cracked glass but because of a large spatter of blood on the window. The ESU chief explained that the copper-jacketed slugs that the man had fired toward Bell had ricocheted off the glass, shattered and struck the shooter himself in a half-dozen places, most significantly his groin, where they apparently severed a large artery or vein. The man had bled out by the time the ESU team had made its way to the office.

"Tell me it's Weir, K," Bell said.

"Nup. Sorry. It's somebody named Hobbs Wentworth. Address, Canton Falls."

Bell scowled angrily. So Weir and maybe others working with him were still around. He asked, "Find anything that'll give us a clue what Weir's up to or where he might be?"

"Negative," said the raspy-voiced commander. "Only his ID. And, get this, a book of Bible stories for kids." There was a pause. "Hate to say it but we got another victim, Roland. He killed a woman to get into the building, looks like… Okay, we're going to secure the place and keep looking for Weir. Out."

The detective shook his head and said to Grady, "No sign of him."

Except that, of course, that was the whole problem. Maybe they had found plenty of signs of Weir, maybe they'd even found Weir himself – in the form of another cop, a med tech, an ESU officer, a reporter, a soft-clothed detective, a passerby or homeless man – and they simply didn't know it.

• • •

Through the yellowing window in the interview room Andrew Constable could see the grim face of a large black guard peer in and look at him. The face disappeared as the man stepped away from the door.

Constable rose from the metal table and walked past his lawyer to the window. He looked outside and saw two guards in the hall, speaking gravely to each other.

All right then.

"What's that?" Joseph Roth asked his client.