A noise behind me made me spin on my heel, my gun out, in time to see Smith crawling out the door. “Don’t move, Ted, or I’ll shoot your ass off.”
He froze, his upper body already out in the hall. I pulled out my handcuffs, dragged him back inside, and attached him to a water pipe running up the wall. “Stay there. I’ll be back.”
I returned to the window, being careful of the broken shards, and climbed out onto the wooden fire escape, leaning over the railing to see the alley below. Willy’s thin, pale face was staring up at me.
“You got him?” I shouted.
“Almost,” he answered calmly and then gestured with his arm as if directing traffic. “Come to Poppa, Don.”
I started down the rickety stairs through the opening in the landing and almost immediately saw our quarry poised on the next level between me and Willy below-gaunt, hollow-eyed, his ponytail almost reaching his waist.
I pointed my gun at him. “Stay where you are. We’re police officers.”
But he obviously knew I wouldn’t shoot unless he threatened me, and he had other things in mind than fighting. Instead, he jumped up onto the railing, positioned himself like a diver as I came off the stairs to stop him, and threw himself into the void, sailing over both Willy’s head and a sagging chain-link fence cutting the alleyway in two, and landing with a crash onto the roof of a parked car, blowing out its windshield in the process.
Willy stared helplessly through the fence. The man on the other side rolled off the roof, landed in the snow on the car’s far side, and scrambled to his feet to race down the alley for a clean getaway.
“Get the car, Willy,” I yelled as I continued down the fire escape as fast as I could, opting against the airborne route.
Instantly accepting his inability to climb the fence with just one arm, Willy took off in the other direction as I struggled with the wobbly chain link, landing in an untidy but intact pile on the same semi-destroyed car.
I still had our man in sight, his greasy hair swinging like a horse’s tail behind him. He was as scrawny as a scarecrow and, from the quick glance I’d gotten, seemed nearly as fit. If I managed not to lose him, I figured even I could wear him out. There was no way this clown would last too long on adrenaline alone. I hoped.
Unfortunately, his athletic prowess wasn’t put to the test. After rounding the corner at the alley’s mouth, I found myself staring at an empty sidewalk.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
I saw a man across the street, sitting on a bus stop bench, looking up from his reading, staring at a spot only thirty feet ahead of me, as if he’d just seen something interesting. It was all I needed. As the spectator returned to his newspaper, I jogged to the spot, found a door between two businesses, and waited until Willy drove into view a block away. I waved at him, pointed to the door, and entered.
I was in a lobby facing a broad set of stairs heading up to the second floor. Unlike the apartment building I’d just left, this place was quiet, odorless, and except for the fluorescent lighting humming overhead, seemingly abandoned.
I unholstered my gun again. Wisdom dictated waiting for backup. Experience suggested my quarry would take that time to disappear entirely.
I headed upstairs.
On the landing, I found four doors, all labeled, three with business names-a lawyer, a barber, and an accountant-and the last a rest room. Apparently, business was bad enough that either everyone had gone home or had simply died at their desks years back. I could hear no phones, no keyboard tapping, nothing except the lighting and the same muted mechanical murmur that all commercial buildings seem to exude, like a person’s breathing.
Logic suggested the bathroom. It was possible the guy went to a friend’s office or was behind one of those doors holding the occupants hostage, but more likely he’d holed up where he felt more at ease, around a bunch of toilets.
Unless he’d gone in there to use another window.
I decided not to take the chance. I approached the door, planning to open it from the knob side, so as not to be in its way when it swung back, when it suddenly did just that. The door hit my foot and threw me off balance, and the long-haired man came barreling out, slamming into me like a linebacker on his way back down the stairs. I went flying against the opposite wall, my gun clattering across the floor, and felt the wind get knocked out of me by the impact.
“Damn,” I swore, by now seriously angry. I staggered to my feet, lurched to the top of the stairs, ripped a fire extinguisher off its wall bracket, and threw it with all my strength at the man about halfway to the ground floor.
It caught him behind the knees and sent him sailing head first into the lobby, where he landed with a terrific crash.
I quickly retrieved my gun at the far end of the landing. When I reappeared on the stairs, however, Matthews was no longer alone. Standing over him, smiling, was Willy Kunkle, a pair of handcuffs in his hand.
“He still alive?” I asked him.
Willy chuckled and leaned over to apply the cuffs. “Not happily, but yeah. Are you?”
Chapter 5
Don Matthews eyed me warily from his hospital bed. “You gonna read me my rights?”
“I hate to tell you this, Don, after all you’ve been through, but we weren’t there to arrest you. We just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
He gingerly touched the bandage encircling his head, looking like a CliffsNotes version of Walter Skottick. “You’re shitting me. I should sue you guys.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You can try, after I bust you for unlawful flight, assault on a police officer, destruction of private property, and knowingly selling stolen property. The fat little weasel you were doing business with when we dropped by is talking his head off. With your record, that’ll all weigh more than you want to carry, believe me.”
He seemed to agree after a moment’s thought, because his next question was, “What did you want to ask me?”
“We’re looking for Marty Gagnon. You seen him?”
Matthews laughed in surprise and then winced with pain. “That’s what this was all about? Jesus. No, not in weeks.”
I looked at him for a long moment, as if contemplating his fate. “You know, Don, maybe I’ll drop the hammer on you, anyhow. The more I remember our little foot race, the more pissed off I get.”
His mouth fell open. “Oh, come on. I guess I came out worse than you did. Look at me, for Christ’s sake-you totaled me.”
“I can add to the damage. I’m the good guys, remember? What’s the problem anyway? Just give me an address and I’m out of your hair.”
He stared at me sullenly.
“Or,” I added, “I can start digging into your life history even deeper to find out why you’re holding back. You up to something with Marty you don’t want me to know about?”
Matthews made a disgusted face. “It’s a pride thing.”
I hid my amusement at this curiously honest admission. “At any price?”
“No,” he conceded, as if finally concluding a social obligation he hadn’t believed in from the start. When he resumed, his voice was more confiding. “Okay, this is straight. It’s all I know. Marty was feeling some heat-not you, somebody else-I don’t know who. But he figured he’d lay low for a while.”
“You know he’d just pulled a job?”
“At Tucker Peak? Yeah. He was going to show me some stuff, but we never got around to it. He didn’t call like he was supposed to.”
“Was the heat turned on after that job? It was only a couple of days ago.”
“I guess,” he conceded. “Whoever this was came down hard. Started rousting all Marty’s friends like he’d had a lot of practice.”
“You, too?” I asked, surprised.
“That’s why I ran when you came to my place. I was a little gun shy after the last visit.”