He got in and locked the doors, and he started the car and put it in gear. He eyed the mirror. The police had already filled the street two blocks away, but they hadn’t spotted him. They were streaming into the plaza of the apartment building. He heard more sirens, more vehicles getting closer.
Tabby squirmed violently in an attempt to get up, but he shoved her face down hard. As she screamed, he covered her mouth and pushed the sticky blade of the knife below her ear.
“Don’t move, and don’t say a word,” he barked. “If you talk, if you scream, this all ends right now.”
The warning made her lie still.
He thought, One way or another, this all ends right now.
Rudy spun the wheel, and the Saab squealed away.
“Tabby!” Frost shouted into the phone.
Her voice cut off as she began to speak, and all he heard was the pound of the rain, a car door slamming, and the overlapping wail of distant sirens. He shouted her name again, but when she didn’t answer, he threw his phone against the passenger door and drove even faster. He had never driven faster in his life.
The Suburban rocketed north down the long hill toward the marina. The street was narrow, crowded with parked cars. His siren carried him through the intersections, which were mostly deserted in the early hours of Sunday morning. Rain poured across the truck. His windshield wipers jerked back and forth in a futile attempt to keep the glass clear, and he had to lean forward to see the road. Even as morning broke, the bay was invisible. Duane’s condo was half a mile away.
Ahead of him, he saw headlights coming the opposite way, racing up the hill. The two vehicles were only two blocks apart when the southbound car made a sharp left turn, ignoring the stoplight. In the flash of his headlights, Frost saw a shine of red, and he had a quick mental image of Tabby outside Duane’s apartment building, about to get into a red Saab. He hit the brakes hard and turned right. He followed a parallel course one block south, flooring the accelerator, trying to get a jump on the car on the other street. He made a wide, screeching left and reached the intersection at Lombard at almost the same moment as the car he was chasing. It was a red Saab. And he glimpsed the face of the driver through the rain.
Rudy Cutter.
Just for a moment, he also saw a woman rear up in the passenger seat before Cutter pushed her down. The woman had a swirl of red hair. It was Tabby, and she was alive.
The Saab spun away, its right-side wheels jerking off the ground before dropping heavily back down. The car jolted north toward the bay, kicking up spray like a fountain. Frost followed on his bumper. The street was wider here, and they had to swerve to avoid the early morning buses. Apartment buildings lined both sides of the street. Block by block, the bay got closer.
He radioed in a call for backup.
Seconds later, both vehicles screamed through the last intersection at Marina Boulevard, where the road ended at the water. They were on a flat, open stretch of road bordered by the marina’s green park, with the Golden Gate Bridge and the East Bay hills coming into view under the low clouds. Cutter sped right, and Frost brought up the Suburban immediately next to him. They raced side by side as the street curved eastward, and he could see bouncing white and red lights as cars ahead and behind them spilled to the curb to get out of their way.
The red-roofed piers of Fort Mason loomed on their left. As they neared the intersection at Buchanan, two more squad cars converged from the south and east, and together, they forced Cutter off the boulevard into an empty parking lot leading to the old fort. Frost lost a few seconds as the Suburban lurched into a clumsy turn. The water was on his left. Dozens of boats bobbed like toys in the fierce wind.
Cutter had a hundred-yard lead as he steered the Saab past the gatehouse at the fort’s entrance, but he was running out of pavement. Beyond the barracks and piers, the road dead-ended at the bay. As Frost wheeled past the gatehouse himself, with the two police cars close behind him, he spotted the Saab disappearing between the fort’s last dormitory building and a steep hillside lined with cypress trees. He pointed the Suburban across the empty parking lot and headed the same way.
As he passed the last of the fort’s white brick buildings, he reached the final stretch of road at the water. Old railroad tracks ran across the pavement. A high retaining wall rose immediately to his right. Ahead of him, a long pier jutted into the bay. Where concrete pylons marked the end of the road, he saw the red Saab, its engine still running, its two front doors wide open.
The car was empty. Cutter was gone. So was Tabby.
46
The rain swept like gunfire over the bay.
The wind made it hard to stand as Frost got out of the Suburban with his pistol in his hand. Two police cars pulled up behind him. The long, painted wall of a renovated pavilion, lined with dumpsters, stretched out over the water. On his right, the fort’s old firehouse building blocked his view of the path beside the bay.
Frost gestured for one of the cops to follow the pier. He led the way with the other cop to the trail overlooking the green water. He could see the island and the prison buildings of Alcatraz a mile and a half away across the white-capped surface of the bay. Gulls lined the rusted fence along the water and hunkered down against the storm. The paved trail led behind the firehouse and then ended at the steep, forested parkland that hugged the shore.
He didn’t see Cutter or Tabby, but he heard a woman’s voice from somewhere inside the trees.
One word. His name.
“Frost!”
He bolted along the waterfront. The other cop was at least ten years older than he was, and Frost easily outdistanced him. He pushed through a gap in the fence where the trail ended and found himself among dense trees. The damp ground fell away to the rocks at the water and climbed the hillside on a slippery bed of mud and pine needles. There was nowhere to go but up, and he could hear them above him, already near the top of the slope. He shoved his gun back in his holster and assaulted the hill. The wet earth fought him, and he struggled upward for nearly thirty feet until the cliff finally leveled off at a wide, paved bicycle path. From up here, the bay spread out like a postcard, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
Two sets of muddy footprints showed him the way. They headed downhill where the path cut like a terrace along the hillside. He ran, and the trees gave way, opening up the vista below him.
There they were, nearly at the base of the trail. A long pier curved like a crescent moon into the bay, creating a circular cove and beach just beyond Fisherman’s Wharf. Tabby looked over her shoulder and saw him. She screamed for him again, but Cutter grabbed her by the neck and dragged her forward as she squirmed in his grasp. He had a knife in his hand.
Frost charged downhill after them. He could hear sirens wailing from the city, getting closer, roaring in from Van Ness and from the Wharf. Cutter was trapped, with nowhere to go, but trapped men had nothing to lose. Cutter looked back at Frost through the rain, and then he pulled Tabby down the crescent pier over the bay.
It was a one-way trip, ending at the water. There was no coming back. They both knew it.
Frost reached the pier seconds later. Cutter and Tabby struggled down the middle of the wide concrete platform fifty yards ahead of him. Behind him, the lights of squad cars flashed in the gray morning. He ran after Cutter, with the wind shoving him forward and rain falling across his face in waves. The pier stretched for a quarter mile, but Cutter couldn’t go fast with Tabby in his grasp, and Frost closed the gap.