Felix Francis - Triple Crown

The good was what Tony had said about the accuracy of law-enforcement officers with their guns. He’d told me that the New York City Police hit barely a quarter of their human targets at distances up to six feet. However, the bad news was that he had also said that his special agents were trained to shoot multiple rounds to make up for that. And, at present, the distance between Bob’s gun and my back was a lot less than six feet, more like six inches. He was hardly likely to miss from there.

How could I make the distance greater?

Running away might help, but not if he shot me before I had taken enough steps.

‘Turn round,’ Bob said, holding my shoulder so that I turned with both he and Steffi always behind me. That was a good sign, I thought. They were still trying to make sure I didn’t see their faces.

‘Walk.’

We were in a corridor that ran the full width of the grandstand from the lift at the back to the stewards’ room at the very front. It had been built into the depth of the roof.

‘Where are we going?’ Steffi asked, a slight nervous timbre in her voice giving away her anxiety.

‘There’s a door into the roof space down here,’ Bob said. ‘We’ll put him in there.’

Dead or alive?

I could hear the commentator trying to engender some excitement as the last race of the day drew to a close and I wondered how Debenture was doing. The stewards would soon be coming along this corridor on their way down to ground level.

I walked a little slower but Bob wasn’t having it.

He prodded me in the back with his gun. ‘Faster.’

I speeded up fractionally. If the stewards did come the other way, he could hardly shoot them all.

Sadly, we arrived at a door on the left before there was any sign of departing officials.

‘Open it,’ Bob said from behind me.

I did as he instructed.

Through the door was a world that the racegoer usually never sees — the void between the upper and lower skins of the grandstand’s vast cantilevered roof.

I was expecting to find only the inside of the roof but there was far more than that. Apart from the vast labyrinth of steel girders that supported the huge structure, there was a maze of pipework providing drainage together with miles of wiring and a gigantic electrical switching box, similar to mine at home but about twenty times bigger.

Stretching away into the distance was a wooden walkway with metal-pipe handrails down either side. The walkway appeared to extend the full length of the grandstand and above it at about twenty-foot intervals were hung a series of naked light bulbs to provide illumination.

I started to move along the walkway and the two of them followed, closing the door to the corridor behind them.

‘Stop,’ Bob instructed. I stopped.

‘Waste him,’ Steffi said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ Bob said. ‘Let’s find out who he is first.’

‘Why?’ Steffi said. ‘Just waste him.’

I heard an automatic being cocked behind me.

Was this the end of the road? Was it time to play the only remaining trump in my hand?

‘Tony Andretti and Norman Gibson know all about you two,’ I said. ‘You’re finished. You kill me and you’ll both be executed for killing a federal officer.’ It was the first time I’d spoken and I had dropped the Irish accent.

There was a silence that seemed to go on for ever.

Had I misjudged? Was I about to get a bullet in the back of my skull?

‘He’s bluffing,’ Bob said calmly into the stillness.

‘I’m not bluffing,’ I said quickly. ‘Your names are Bob Wade and Steffi Dean and the cops are already on their way.’

Bob grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me round to face him. He tore off the dark glasses I was still wearing and stared at me.

‘You?’ he said, clearly seeing straight through my disguise. ‘But you went back home to England.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been chasing your tails and now I’ve caught you.’

‘You seem to be forgetting something,’ Bob said, smiling and waving his silenced Glock 22C in my face.

‘Are you really going to kill a federal agent?’ I asked.

‘You’re not a federal agent,’ Steffi said.

‘As good as. I was invited here by your Deputy Director as a temporary member of FACSA. I am sure the jury will consider me as a federal agent when they choose to give you the death penalty.’ I hoped it was so, even though I doubted it. ‘Do they still electrocute murderers in New York?’

All the while I had been talking, I’d been moving myself further away from them, fraction by fraction, simply by rocking from foot to foot, shuffling an inch or so backwards each time.

‘The death penalty is abolished in New York State.’ Steffi sneered at me as she said it.

‘Not for federal crimes,’ I said. ‘Sizzle, sizzle.’

‘Shut up,’ Bob shouted in my face. Another inch away. ‘I tell you, he’s bluffing about the cops.’

‘And about the ten grand in Steffi’s purse?’ I said. ‘George Raworth has been most helpful.’

He wasn’t to know otherwise.

Another couple of inches away.

I looked at Steffi’s thick black hair, tied back in a ponytail. ‘They’ll shave all that lovely hair off your head,’ I said to her. ‘To make a better contact. The current will fry your brain inside your skull.’

I was quite certain that ‘Old Sparky’ had, in fact, long been consigned to history, replaced by the banality of a lethal injection. Equally as effective, no doubt, but far less dramatic. Nevertheless, Steffi was clearly rattled.

‘Shut him up,’ she demanded. ‘Or I’ll do it.’

She reached into her bag, presumably for her gun.

Bob Wade began as if to say something and he took his eyes off me as he, too, looked down towards Steffi’s bag. I didn’t need a second invitation.

I reached to my left and grabbed the handle on the front of the electrical switching box and rotated it a quarter-turn from ON to OFF.

With a loud clunk, all the lights went out.

I turned and ran down the walkway into the darkness as if my life depended on it, which it probably did, at the same time bending down to reduce my target size.

I didn’t hear any guns being fired behind me over the sound of my own footsteps, no doubt on account of the silencers, but I certainly heard the bullets as they whizzed past me before ricocheting off the steel roof girders.

I didn’t stop but bolted onward at full pelt, guiding myself by running my hands along the handrails on each side and praying that no one had left anything on the walkway that I would trip over.

I was still running at top speed when the lights came on again, just in time for me to see the walkway ahead take a sharp zigzag to the left round a large vertical pipe.

As I negotiated the turns, I glanced behind me.

I had run a good forty yards in the dark and neither Bob Wade nor Steffi Dean had followed. They were standing where I’d left them next to the switching box, and they were looking in my direction.

I hoped and half expected that they would give up and leave but they clearly had other ideas as they both started down the walkway towards me. Steffi fired at me, not that I heard the retort of the pistol, but the bullet zipped past somewhere close to my left arm and I heard that all right.

It was all the incentive I needed to keep going along the walkway deeper into the roof space.

I looked to both sides for some sort of weapon but the only thing movable I could find was a five-tread wooden stepladder, no doubt left behind by some idle workman who hadn’t returned it to its rightful storage place.

It was far too cumbersome to use as a club but I picked it up nevertheless and went on swiftly down the walkway using the ladder to break each light bulb above my head as I passed by. If they were going to find me, they would have to do so in the dark.