The club was more crowded that any of the other three they’d been in, but even before they spotted him, Jon knew that the big hairy guy wouldn’t be able to hide for long in this place. That was precisely because he was big and hairy—especially the latter—since it became apparent after a few moments of scanning the customers that this was a “pan-gender” club. Everyone there was as androgynous and sexless as they could possibly make themselves, except for the perp, who had taken a seat in a crowded area at a downstairs table in an attempt to hide his height and bulk. But he looked so unlike the constituency that they probably thought he was a cop himself, and started giving him a wide berth. It was only a matter of time before Jon and Halladay identified him by the expanding circle of space around him, and then he himself realized it was a bad hiding place and took off for a doorway nearby.
“Not the sharpest tool in the shed,” Halladay said with his patented smile, as they pushed their way down the stairs to go after him.
The doorway led into a large, unused industrial kitchen on the north side of the building, and after running halfway through it with their guns drawn again, the two cops could see a door standing open on the far side. They ran to it and through it into a short alley, at the end of which they could see people milling on the brightly lit Thirtieth Street.
“Wait,” Jon said, holding Halladay back from running down the alley. He turned back to the open door to the kitchen. “Why wouldn’t he close the door? He had time.”
Jon slowly moved to the left so his view extended farther into the kitchen, even as far as the doorway through which they had entered it from the club. Sure enough, as he watched, a silhouetted figure flashed into view from somewhere on the side of the kitchen and went back through the door into the club.
“Come on,” Jon said, and they both ran back through the kitchen, reaching the door in time to see Shinsky exiting the club through the side door that led into the next establishment. He was obviously sticking to his plan of trying to lose his pursuers in one of the long row of clubs. But there couldn’t be too many more on this block.
And as it turned out, the next establishment in the Row wasn’t actually a club. It was Jayne’s Day Care—an ironic name, given the endless night—and it provided a place for people to drop off their kids while they partied.
“Only in New York,” Jon muttered under his breath again, but he didn’t have much time to marvel at this, because he and Halladay stumbled into a scary standoff when they ran inside the day care’s main room, which was populated by a few inflatable slides and trampolines, and a lot of now-screaming kids being herded to the corners by staff members.
Shinsky had pushed his way through and grabbed a little girl as a hostage when the security guard at the door pulled a gun and told him to stop. When the two cops arrived, the killer and the guard were about twenty feet apart, both pointing their guns at each other. Shinsky held the preschooler effortlessly in front of his chest with his other hand. She was one of the few kids in the place that wasn’t screaming, possibly because she was in shock.
Now that there were three guns trained on him, the big man backed slowly toward the exit behind him, which according to a sign led into another club called The Jungle. Jon and Halladay moved forward at the same pace to where the stationary guard stood, and Jon motioned to him to remain there, noticing a Gotham Security patch on his uniform.
“Don’t come after me,” Shinsky shouted, “or I’ll kill her.”
He backed through the door and disappeared while the two cops continued to move slowly forward, but when they got close to the exit they stopped and looked at each other, unsure of what to do. Then a couple shots rang out from inside The Jungle, and that settled it. They rushed inside, fearful of seeing a little girl’s bloody body, but instead they saw an older man lying on the ground, clutching his wounded gut. He was dressed in a uniform that looked like a safari outfit, and it became obvious that Shinsky’s universal card wasn’t enough to get him into the club while holding a little girl hostage.
Speaking of the girl, she soon stepped out of the shadows nearby as other staff arrived to help the wounded man. A relieved Halladay told them to take care of her, and the two policemen proceeded with caution into the interior of the club. It was huge and elaborate inside, which made Jon think that it was likely the last club in the Row, because it would make sense that the end properties were reserved for big businesses like the Starlight and this one. All throughout the massive room there were large and small trees, which looked real to Jon, and UV lamps high up on the ceiling that seemed to confirm his guess. There were various food and drink stations made to look like grass huts, and even one in a tree house built into the upper branches of one of the bigger trees, with a wooden staircase that led to it spiraling around the trunk.
They progressed quickly but with caution on the path Shinsky had almost surely taken, judging by the ripples in the crowd, and Jon noticed that the owners of the club had truly spared no expense—or excess—to achieve the atmosphere they wanted. Jon passed a large tank with a Burmese python lounging next to a small pool and an even bigger cage with some brightly colored macaws sitting on perches and periodically letting out their unique screams.
He and Halladay had made fun of Shinsky’s intelligence, but neither of them realized how smart a move he’d made when they heard a couple more gunshots ahead of them. They thought he had shot another person, or maybe fired into the air to cause panic in the crowd and slow them down, but what he actually did was far more clever. He had shot the lock off a cage of monkeys and opened the door, letting the little animals out to terrorize the customers. By the time Jon and Halladay got to that part of the club, people were slamming into them to get away, and one screaming woman even had one of the critters attached to her shoulder, holding on to her hair and obviously enjoying the ride.
This was fairly effective in slowing down the cops in their pursuit, and Shinsky’s next trick was even more so. The shrieks of fear on the far west side of the big room, close to the exit, were even louder after three or four more shots rang out and everyone on that side of the club ran past the cops to get away from whatever had been released this time. Jon and Halladay rounded some bushes and now faced a dark, empty section of dance floor, the music still thrumming and the colored lights still flashing. On the far side of the floor was the biggest cage they had seen yet, with the words BAGHEERA THE BLACK PANTHER shining from a sign above it.
Jon soon realized that the dance floor was not really empty, because when certain lights flashed on it, a dark shadow with two bright eyes became visible. A big Indian leopard was moving toward them across the floor.
“This is a new one,” Halladay said.
“You go around to the left,” Jon said after briefly surveying the scene, “and I’ll go right. Hopefully it’s been fed recently and isn’t hungry, but worst case scenario… one of us might have to shoot it.”
“Worst case scenario is we lose our suspect,” Halladay said, and promptly put about five bullets into the panther.
Jon looked at him incredulously, but the big Scot just shrugged.
“Nooo!” yelled a safari-clad female employee who was arriving behind them and was probably a caretaker of the cat, because she ran to its side while Jon and Halladay ran past it toward the exit.
The door was an external one leading out to Tenth Avenue, and it wasn’t hard to spot Shinsky as he made his way rather clumsily through the crowd on the adjacent Twenty-Ninth Street, and then ran up the stairs leading to the High Line. The two cops didn’t have much time to wonder why he chose the elevated park rather than the city streets below it, where it would be easier to find a place to hide, because they were already running after him.