He wasn’t that fast. I took the steps down three at a time, my knees crying in protest. Then I dashed past swings and unidentifiable play equipment at a hard run. My lungs ached against the cold air, but I was gaining on him.
“Sheriff’s deputy!” I yelled. “Stop! I am armed!”
I could make out a man in dark clothing and some kind of a baseball cap. He ran down the sidewalk, paused, then took off again running west toward Seventh Avenue. I put on the jets and got to within 100 yards of him when a pair of headlights shot up out of the earth and a horn screamed an angry klaxon.
He disappeared down the freeway onramp.
I went after him.
Suddenly we were in the tunnel. Interstate 10, the Papago Freeway, the mainline between Jacksonville, Florida, and Santa Monica, California, running like an underground river of metal and headlights. It smelled like catalytic converters and leaky oil and confined concrete. I made a fool’s calculation and cut across the ramp just as a city garbage truck came through at battle speed. Then I reached the shoulder, hard against the tunnel wall, with nothing but a white line between me and the automotive age, going 80 miles an hour. The roar of engines and wheels was constant and deafening, even at this time of morning. To this white noise was added frantic honking at the fools running down the freeway. But I could see. The tunnel lights cast a strange arctic daylight. Car headlights shot past like comets from hell.
“We’re in the freeway,” I shouted into the phone. “Moving eastbound in the westbound lanes.” The little digital display glowed happily back: “No service available.”
I ran gingerly along the oily concrete as cars rocketed past. I lost sight of O’Keefe. Then I had him: bounding across the traffic lanes like a desperate squirrel.
Screeching tires cut above the noise, and suddenly there was a cascade of snaps and concussions, the odd sounds of metal and composite materials striking substantial objects at high speed. I looked toward the oncoming lanes and saw two cars collide trying to avoid the crazed man running toward them. Car parts abandoned ship and flew wildly into the thickening air. Metal scraped on the pavement, releasing showers of orange sparks too close to gas tanks. The two cars were spinning together, not slowly, and they were headed right for me.
I jammed my feet into place and forced my mental transmission into emergency reverse. It was maybe ten feet in the opposite direction to a little setback in the concrete wall, but it might as well have been 1,000 miles. My stomach filled with panic and bile. There was another sickening screee! booff! kind of sound as a third vehicle smashed into them from the rear. I didn’t turn back to see. There wasn’t time. The wall finally gave up a precious corner. I dived into it and prayed.
Chapter Ten
I was forty-three years old and in the principal’s office. We all were. Me, Lindsey, Kimbrough, half a dozen Phoenix cops, and the school security guard who had opened the place so we had somewhere to sit. It was 4:45 A.M. on Thursday.
“Dave went to school here, and now he’s the sheriff,” Lindsey said to the security guard. “They ought to have a Dave Mapstone Day.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, trying to understand.
“Sheriff, if I may speak frankly,” Kimbrough said.
“Yes, yes.” I waved my hand at him. I was sitting bent over in a too-small plastic chair, suddenly wishing I could sleep for about a hundred years.
“Sir,” Kimbrough said, “with all due respect.”
Lindsey said, “Just say it. I bet I agree with it.”
He let loose: “What the fuck”-this last word was shouted-“was that little stunt about!?” He added quietly, “Sheriff.”
He wheeled on Lindsey. “And you! You were supposed to keep him from doing something pretty much just like this!”
“Sorry,” she said. “He’s headstrong. I like that, sometimes.”
“Jesus!” he said. “It’s like you have Peralta’s recklessness without, without…”
He let it hang, and a grizzled Phoenix captain said, “His balls.”
Kimbrough raised up and said, “Fuck you. Where were your people when we needed them? Where were those silly-ass bicycle patrols? The suspect just walks down Interstate 10 and gets away, while Phoenix PD is at Krispy Kreme.”
Kimbrough turned back to me. “How did he even get your number?”
“It’s listed,” I said, feeling ever more foolish.
“Who’s going to write this report?” a younger city cop demanded, realistically.
God, my head and knees hurt. Maybe I’d end up like one of those old people who has total knee replacement with some very expensive composite material, kind of like the stuff flying off those cars in the tunnel, and yet your knees still hurt like hell.
I looked around the room. A jurisdictional goat-fuck, I heard Peralta’s voice say. Yes, my friend, and you would know just how to take charge. Just the right amount of politicking, and just the right amount of hard-ass. Well, if I knew those things I’d have tenure at a major university history department.
I said quietly, “It’s not O’Keefe.” Everybody stopped talking and looked at me.
“O’Keefe didn’t shoot Peralta.”
“Oh, bullshit,” the Phoenix captain said under his breath.
“He just tried to shoot you, too!” Kimbrough said. “And from the way you describe the shot, I wouldn’t be surprised if ballistics finds this is the same gun that shot Peralta.”
I shook my head. “He’s not our guy.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kimbrough said. “Leo O’Keefe was an accessory in the worst assault on Maricopa County deputies in history. Leo O’Keefe is a convicted murderer. Now, he’s an escapee. We have a threatening note, sent by him, found on the body of a former deputy, who was also involved in that Guadalupe incident. And now he’s tried to take a whack at you, Mapstone-you, the deputy who arrested him and signed his booking record. The guy is two decades of trouble. He’s a monster.”
I had to admit told that way it sounded airtight. Leo O’Keefe, broken out of the big house and come to settle the big score with the sheriff’s office. But I also knew the ways of law enforcement bureaucracies. Leo was our only theory in a high-profile shooting. Without Leo, we were screwed.
I said, “It wasn’t a threatening note. It was his name on a piece of paper. Tonight, Leo didn’t seem to know who I was, beyond the guy on the television from the press conference yesterday. That doesn’t sound like somebody who’s been carrying a hit list stamped on his heart since 1979. He said he didn’t shoot Peralta.”
Lindsey said, “Dave, can you really believe what he said on the phone? Did he actually say he didn’t shoot Peralta?”
“It’s not just that,” I said. “It’s Nixon. He didn’t know about Nixon turning up dead.”
“What…?” Kimbrough started.
It was true. We had held back the information of Dean Nixon’s murder from the media. In yesterday’s press briefing on the hunt for Peralta’s killer, we didn’t even mention Nixon.
For one thing, it was a piece of critical information that would hold down the number of needy nutcases who might come in and confess in O’Keefe’s place. If Nixon’s murder were tied to the shooting of Peralta, then the real killer would know that information. And holding it back would have kept the suspect off balance, if he thought we hadn’t discovered Nixon’s body yet-if the two shootings were connected. Plus, cops just liked to hoard information.
But O’Keefe didn’t know that Dean Nixon was dead.
“He asked me if I had talked to Dean Nixon. As in, present tense.”
Kimbrough pursed his lips, said nothing.
“Maybe he was just messing with you,” said another city cop. She was sipping on some coffee in Styrofoam cups that had appeared from the security guard. I waved one away.