Jac looked towards the end of the road. Eighty or so yards. Touch and go whether he’d make it to the end by then? Jac’s legs felt weak, his chest cramped and aching. He wasn’t going to be able to keep up the same pace much longer.
Sudden change in the tone of the sirens. It sounded like they were turning, starting to head his way. Jac pumped harder, pushing himself. The sirens drifted away for a second as they headed back up to the top of the adjacent road, then turned, starting to move closer again.
Jac pushed every muscle to the limit, felt them screaming for release. Sixty… fifty-five yards from the end by the time he heard the sirens spilling out openly as they came alongside the road. Jac glanced back to make sure, saw the spinning glare.
But they seemed to hang there for a second, as if unsure whether he was in the road, and Jac kept tight in by the front fences so that he wasn’t too obvious as the flashlight swayed from side to side, probing. The flashlight finally picked him up, and they turned into the road — but by then he’d gained another dozen yards or so.
Jac pushed even harder, but the more he demanded from every muscle and sinew, the more they seemed to ache and shudder, beg for meltdown into welcome release. It felt like he’d hardly be able to make it ten yards, let alone forty… thirty-five… thirty…
The sirens pressing in closer, filling the air. Jac glanced back as the first set of headlamps reached him: sixty-five, seventy yards behind. Still almost twenty yards to the barrier.
Oh God. God. The sirens deafening, seeming to fill every space in Jac’s head as the squad cars bore down, as if they were about to run him over as the barrier loomed ahead.
But they had to slow down, the front car screeching broadside as Jac reached the barrier and leapt it.
‘Stop…. Stop!’
A frozen second as Jac glanced back from the few yards of waste ground before the highway edge, already checking for gaps in the traffic to dart across. Car door swung wide, a patrolman tensed in aiming stance, his figure part-silhouette in the spinning glare of the roof lights.
Yet Jac saw hesitation too in the patrolman’s eyes, worried that any stray shot would hit the traffic passing behind; and as Jac saw a small gap in the traffic, he turned and ran through the first clear lane, brief pause for a four-wheeler passing in the far lane, then on, jumping the central barrier — Jac only half paying attention to another shout of ‘Stop!’ More desperate now, but less audible with the traffic noise in between.
And so Jac was startled, falling back a step, when a shot sounded — only realizing that it was a warning shot as he looked back and saw the patrolman lowering his gun from the air to point straight at him.
A moment’s nervous Mexican standoff, Jac praying that he wouldn’t risk a shot with the traffic passing in between — though maybe he would if there was a long, clear break — but then a large truck flashed between them, breaking the spell.
Jac darted into the next lane, letting one car pass, but then had to pause for a second, feigning like a matador as the next car approached faster than he’d timed, another car alongside in the fast lane swinging wide of Jac at the last second, blaring its horn.
Jac scurried across the last lane and leapt the side barrier. Rows of concrete and steel stanchions ahead, supporting the motorway above. Heavier shadows between them.
Jac weaved between the stanchions, trying to make best use of the shadows to lose himself as quickly as possible from view, glancing in between at the patrolmen across the highway: the one who’d fired was peering hard, trying to follow where he’d gone, his partner now on the radio, the second car pulling away, possibly to swing onto the highway further along.
Jac hoped by then he’d be long gone. Another busy four-laner thirty yards away, a ramp to one side swinging up to one of the highways above, another ramp on the far side of the stanchions. A choice of escape routes for once.
But in that moment, above the dull drone and swish of traffic from above, Jac thought he could hear other sirens: three or four, maybe more. He looked around frantically, caught a glimpse of two squad cars in the distance on the highway he’d just crossed, heading fast his way. But the directions of the sirens on the tangle of roads above were harder to place.
Jac ran for the closest ramp; he needed to get out of sight quickly from the highway behind.
More sirens. It sounded as if half the city’s police were hunting him down. Jac had given up on judging direction; they seemed to swirl and echo from all around as he started up the ramp.
Another sound also reached him then, a shudder running through him as he paused mid-step to make sure: the rapid thud-thud of a helicopter winging through the night sky. Jac looked up, but couldn’t see its lights yet; whether because of the clouds, the partial cover of the overhead highway, or it was still too far away, he wasn’t sure.
But he knew with certainty that it would be upon him any second. Jac’s eyes darted desperately: if he continued up the ramp, he’d be more visible from above, but if he headed back down, the two police cars bearing down on the highway behind would see him.
Sweat beads massed on his forehead, mixing with the raindrops, chest heaving as he gasped like a dying frog into the night air. He felt completely worn, exhausted, the sirens echoing and spinning in his head making him feel dizzy, unsteady; his legs trembling so hard that they felt about to buckle at any second. It would have been so easy, welcome surrender, just to lift his hands to the helicopter searchlight or first police car to arrive — he couldn’t go on much further in any case — but instead, as the lights of a car heading up the ramp hit him, he lifted one hand to that, trying to flag it down. It went past.
Sirens moving closer, one on the highway above now sounding no more than fifty yards away. Jac flagged more frantically. A camper van and a car not far behind went past too, the car beeping as Jac took a step in front of it.
Jac could now see the helicopter searchlight as it broke through the clouds: about sixty yards to his right, moving methodically forward with tight sweeps. And the closest siren above now sounded only twenty yards away.
It started raining more heavily then, and Jac mouthed one last silent prayer into the sodden, misty night air as the scream of the sirens and the thud-thud of the helicopter closed in all around him, becoming all-consuming. And as the next two cars on the ramp also swept past him without stopping — the beam of the helicopter searchlight now circling in to within thirty yards — Jac felt any remaining hope slip away.
31
May, 1992.
At first, Adelay Roche wasn’t too concerned about the direction of the police investigation. The account of a robbery gone wrong seemed to have been accepted, the crime-scene evidence supported that, and so Lieutenant Coyne was trawling for suspects almost exclusively in that area: house robbers with violent past form.
But every now and then there’d be a quick aside, a question thrown in out of the blue amongst the standard question line — as if slipped in like that the lieutenant thought he might not notice — that made Roche start to worry that Coyne was having increasing doubts about the robbery-gone-wrong theory. Was starting to fish closer to home.
The eye-witness had thankfully been distant enough to not be too precise; though perhaps if they got Nel-M in a line-up, it would be a different matter. And over that final shot to the head Roche had vented more than a few choice words at Nel-M.
Roche was convinced it was the one detail that didn’t sit comfortably with Coyne. And if he kept digging, he might unearth more inconsistencies, things he wasn’t happy with.