Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

The road wound a bit to stay beside the big, dark river, then straightened and opened up into four lanes. Farrell unfolded the road map on his lap and checked it against street signs. After a few minutes he called the other vehicle on the radio. "Pull ahead of us now, Unit Two. We're going to fade into the background for a while. Give her lots of space and don't spook her."

The black Dodge followed Jane through little towns along the river, past a cluster of oil refineries, then onto the Thruway just before the Buffalo city line. Farrell studied the map, and as they approached each landmark, he would announce it. "There's a big park up ahead. Riverside Park. If she takes the exit, we might be able to pull her over there." She didn't. "Up ahead is the Peace Bridge over to Canada. That could be where she's heading." But it wasn't. The dark water beside them widened into Lake Erie.

Jane turned off the Thruway at Route 5 where it became Fuhrmann Boulevard and hugged the shoreline into the city of Lackawanna. Ahead of Farrell and Barraclough on their right loomed an enormous complex of old brick factory buildings behind a high chain-link fence. "What's that?" asked Barraclough.

"The map calls it the Gateway Metroport Industrial Center. It used to be one of the biggest steel mills in the world. I was here a couple of times in the early sixties, before it closed down. You couldn't breathe unless there was a strong west wind. It goes on like this for four or five miles." He stared through the high fence. "Looks like they're renting a couple of nooks and crannies of it to a few half-assed businesses now."

The radio crackled. "Unit One, this is Unit Two."

"Go ahead."

"We can't see her anymore."

Barraclough's head snapped to the right to stare at Farrell in intense concentration. "She must have made them."

Farrell spoke into the radio. "Is there any chance she just outran you?"

"No. We think she must have turned off on one of those little streets on the left."

"Then turn down the next one and circle - "

Barraclough snatched the radio out of Farrell's hand. "Negative. Cancel that. She didn't turn left, she turned right, or we would have seen her go across three lanes ourselves. Go back to where you saw her and look for railroad tracks."

Farrell held on as Barraclough swung the Pathfinder around on the icy street. What had Barraclough seen? They had been bumping over old railroad tracks for a long time. "You're thinking there's a way into the factory? But all the tracks lead smack into the fence."

"There has to be a line that goes in," said Barraclough. "They might have closed down the spurs that went to different parts of the plant, but to ship coal and ore in and steel out, there must be a regular railroad right-of-way. That doesn't go away just because something beside it stops making money. And they don't put a gate across it."

More than a mile back, Barraclough found the tracks. There was a functional-looking railroad-crossing light at a little rise just beyond a curve in the road. The big brick buildings on both sides of the boulevard would have obscured the view of her car just long enough for her to turn off her lights and coast up the tracks.

Barraclough turned the utility vehicle onto the railroad ties to straddle the tracks and slowly bumped along them. The tracks went only fifty yards into the dark shadow of the mill before they passed through a gap in the fence. "Here it is," said Barraclough. "She lives around here, remember? She's probably driven by here in daylight a hundred times." He wrenched the steering wheel to lurch off the tracks into the freight yard of the factory and waited until the black Dodge caught up.

Barraclough had already found her trail. The snow was clear and unmarked except for two deep parallel lines from a set of tires that ran deeper into the old steel mill. Barraclough trained his headlights on the tire tracks and sped up. He drove past a few small buildings in the complex that had new signs and recent paint on the doors, but as he went farther, immense brick buildings with dark windows loomed on both sides like the ruins of an abandoned city. He judged he had driven nearly a mile before he saw her car.

It was parked in the shadows on the lake side of a brick building, away from the distant lights of Fuhrmann Boulevard. Barraclough pulled to a stop when he was still a hundred feet away from it and let the Dodge pull up beside him. He said into the radio, "Watch the car and the doors of the building. We'll call when we need you." He handed the radio to Farrell and accepted the gear Farrell handed back: pistol, night-spotting scope, flashlight, nylon wrist restraints.

The two men stepped down from the Pathfinder and walked to Jane's car. Barraclough took off his glove to gauge the warmth of the hood of the car, then winked at Farrell happily. Then he studied the footprints leading from the driver's door. They led around the big building. Barraclough paused at the corner to draw his pistol, then quickly stepped beyond it.

He could see that the footprints led along the side of the building. He bent low to walk beside them, staying near the wall and keeping his head below the level of the windows. There were banks of thousands of little panes of glass along the side of the building, many of them broken and all of them opaque from at least thirty years of grime. The footprints led to a place where two of the panes had been hammered in and the frame had gone with them. "She must have heard us coming and gone in."

Barraclough looked ahead of him, but he could not see where the building ended. He stepped outward away from it to get a better view, then lifted the night scope to his eye, but he still could not see the end. The brick wall seemed to go on forever.

Farrell saw it too. "It's a big place. How do you want to work it?"

Barraclough peered cautiously through the broken window with the night scope, then pushed the switch to infrared. There was nothing nearby that gave off body heat. "We'll have to go in after her ourselves. We can't leave the cars unguarded, and if she can lose those two on an empty road, there's no telling what she'd do to them inside the dark building." He slipped the flashlight into one pocket, the wrist restraints into the other where he could reach them quickly. "When you see her, train your laser sight on her right away. She's not stupid; if she sees that bright red dot settle on her chest she'll forget about trying to outrun the bullet." He hoisted himself to the row of bricks that formed a sill below the missing windows, then squeezed himself inside.

When Farrell joined him inside the building, Barraclough drew his pistol again and turned on his night scope. They were in a huge, empty, unheated brick enclosure with a bare concrete floor, a fifty-foot ceiling, and a slight glow of stars above where panes of glass were missing. Barraclough turned his scope to the floor where Jane had entered. A few wet, snowy partial footprints led toward the other end of the cavernous room.

Barraclough walked beside the footprints, under an arch that was big enough for a truck to pass through, and beyond it into another high, empty room. To the right were a set of barn doors that must once have opened onto a loading dock.

They stalked through room after room. At each doorway they would pause, slip through the entrance low, and crouch a few yards apart around the corner. Barraclough would flick on his night scope, rapidly scan the space ahead for the shape of a woman, and only then venture to cross the open concrete floor. When they reached the end of the long building, they found a door open with snow just beginning to drift inside.

The footprints led to the door of another building. There was a half-rotted sheet of plywood on the ground that had once covered the empty upper panel of the door. Barraclough's heart was beating with excitement. They always made some mistake, and she had just made hers. She had gambled that she could drive into the enormous ruin of a factory, wait ten minutes, and then drive back up the river. Now she was alone on foot on a cold, snowy night. She was trying to hide in a complex that had been so thoroughly gutted that there wasn't anything to hide behind. She was running from two old cops who had been trapping fleeing suspects in dark buildings for half their lives. He would be able to see her in the scope as clearly as if she were in daylight, and she would be blind. Even the physical discomfort Barraclough felt as he entered the next building made him more eager. The air was frigid. The brick walls offered shelter from the bitter wind, but there was a chill trapped in the big spaces, and the icy concrete seemed to send a shock up his shins at each step. The cold would be much harder on her because she was alone and afraid. At some point she was going to come to a door she couldn't open, and he would have her. It was possible he would have to keep her alive for a month or two while she gave him what she owed him. She was a hunter's dream: a woman who had made at least ten years of fugitives vanish. There must be dozens by now, most of them still hiding wherever she had put them. And what kind of person had enough money to pay for that kind of service? Drug dealers, money launderers, second-toughest gangsters, big-time embezzlers. She had taken Mary Perkins away from him, but she might easily have ten more like her. He grinned as he walked through the darkened building; no doubt about it, she was the girl of his dreams.