the angle meant the killer was high. Prescott’s roll was a practiced move, and he knew that it had taken him much farther from the car than the killer would anticipate. The old sniper’s motto burned in his brain: “If you run, you’ll just die tired.” He had to get out of sight.
He came up from his shoulder roll already leaping forward, because the shooter would already have adjusted the elevation of his rifle for the next shot. Prescott dived at an angle to the left, and the shot he’d known was coming pounded into the sidewalk to his right, throwing chips and powdered concrete into the air. Prescott saw the open door of his office and scrambled into it as the next shot pierced the carpet at his feet. He moved to the left, and three more shots smacked the thick bullet-proof glass of the front window and ricocheted into the sidewalk.
He could see by the light of the empty-framed rear window that the office was a ruin. The desk was moved, the ceiling tiles were covering everything. He could see that the answering machine was on the ground, its cord severed. He heard an insistent beep. Could the telephone have survived? He looked at the phone jack and followed the cord a couple of feet before it disappeared under acoustic tile. He could not ignore the sound. He leapt across the open doorway to the most likely area, kicked a few tiles aside, and found it. He pushed down the button under the cradle, heard a dial tone, and punched 911. He spoke calmly and crisply as soon as he heard the click, cutting into the voice. “We have police officers under rifle fire at Cumberland Avenue and Maplestone Street. The sniper is up high about one block to the west, possibly on a roof. He is a white male, twenty-five to thirty years old, one hundred seventy-five pounds, dark brown hair.” He heard a female voice begin to say, “Who—” but he interrupted, trying to be sure all of it was said, if only to be preserved on the tape recording that kicked in on emergency lines. “It is essential that the units responding approach from the west, behind the sniper.”
“Yes, sir. What is your—”
He left the phone off the hook and stepped away quickly. He knew that the shooter was out there trying to change his angle enough to fire into the doorway. Prescott couldn’t close the steel door, because the first cops to arrive had battered it so much it had bent inward. He wasn’t sure whether the police officers outside were calling in contradictory messages on their radios. He couldn’t tell from their actions whether they knew that he was the only target.
He waited, looking at the ruined room, piecing together what had happened. The front wall and part of the floor had been peppered with holes. He looked more closely and saw a couple that were perfect outlines of short roofing nails, and a few that looked like jagged strips of scrap metal: a pipe bomb.
The killer had not come here, pounded in the back window, and tossed in a bomb. He had come in here to set up a booby trap, and gotten stuck. He had used his bomb to free himself. Prescott slowly overcame his shock. He had been surprised that the man could have found the place and coolly destroyed it so quickly. But he had not. The desk had not been blown into the safest corner of the room: it had been pushed there by the killer. He had used it for protection from the blast.
He thought about the man, and the hairs on the back of his neck began to rise. The man had fallen for the trap, just as Prescott had predicted. But he had not uselessly pounded on brick walls, or waited for Prescott with the gun he’d brought, or even sat in the corner and used that gun to blow his own brains out. He had placed the antipersonnel bomb he’d prepared at the only possible exit, the weakest part of the trap, maybe eight feet from his own head, and set it off. He was like a wolf caught in a trap that was willing to gnaw through its own leg to get away.
Prescott heard a sudden volley of shots, all in rapid succession, the popping sounds of handguns. He listened for the louder, sharper report of the rifle, but it did not come. One of the cops must have gotten optimistic and mistaken a shadow for the real thing. The wolf had already slipped off into the night.
16
After the first salvo, the shooting stopped, and the silence returned. Prescott sat with his back against the brick wall and waited. There would be a SWAT team searching the streets to the west, and then some kind of sweep of the neighborhood before the police would be willing to relinquish their state of readiness. Everything about these situations worked that way. It was oddly comfortable for a man used to fighting to be crouched behind a car with a gun in his hand, even when he knew that the car was not much protection from a high-velocity rifle round, and that a suspect with a good scope could pick out the place on his chin that he had nicked with his razor that morning. Readiness was something that cops found hard to give up. As long as they remained in a standoff, the opportunity was prolonged: there was still a chance to see the shooter and get him. The moment the bosses gave the all-clear signal, the chance was over. The man who had shattered the public tranquility and done his best to kill somebody had gotten away with it.
The end of the emergency was also the end of clarity. A man cornered while firing a gun at police officers was finished. But if he stopped and got rid of the gun before they saw him, he entered the realm of lengthy, unpromising investigations, painstaking accumulations of evidence, formal accusations, and snide counterattacks by defense lawyers. Prescott was sorry for the cops. They felt the way he did.
He had done his best to take advantage of his chances, but each time, the same thing had gone wrong: this killer had gotten to the trap before it was fully cocked and baited, and gotten out again. This time he had done it especially convincingly, and Prescott had found himself doing shoulder rolls on a concrete sidewalk to get himself out of the crosshairs. Now he seemed doomed to sit here in his own brick-and-mortar box waiting for first light to show at the window so the cops would feel safe enough to finish arresting him.
He had gone into this with a strange, almost unnatural feeling that he understood this man. He had looked at the sights that the killer had seen, put his feet on the spaces where the killer had stepped, and discovered that he could imagine the killer’s thoughts, maybe even think them. But tonight this killer had done the unexpected, and the unexpected was something unnerving. He had done what—given the predicament he was in and what he had to work with—Prescott would have done.
For the past twenty years or more, Prescott had hunted men. He had devised a great many deceptions and snares. Always, the purpose of them was to put Prescott and some killer in a place by themselves, where no external force could intervene.
It had been a mind-enlarging experience for some of them, a moment when they had suddenly realized that their most deeply held belief about themselves was completely wrong. Even mired in the self-hatred and guilt that had given them a certain attraction to risk, their desperation was not dependable. It had only worked in their favor while they were courting risk, playing with it, doing things that might put them into real danger but probably wouldn’t. When positive, verifiable danger arrived in the form of Roy Prescott, they found that their immunity to fear had involved a certain amount of self-deception.
Prescott was a man who would not give up, could not call for reinforcements, and would not stop coming. For him, defeat while he was still alive was not unthinkable merely because he had made a rule for himself that he wouldn’t allow it; it was unthinkable because it had not, literally, been thought. Each time he met one of these men, he had already determined that only one of them was going to be able to walk away. Tonight, Prescott was having his own moment of revelation. This killer was not as different from Prescott as the others had been. He was doing what Prescott would have done.
Suddenly Prescott stood up. The killer wasn’t gone. Prescott moved through the doorway quickly, striding along at his full height. He stepped around the building. He found the detective he had spoken to before, crouching beside a black-and-white patrol car, the microphone in his hand and his eyes on the tall trees on the far side of the next row of houses. When he saw Prescott, he looked as though he were watching a man in the process of stepping off a cliff. “Get down!”
“No need,” said Prescott. “He’s not up there anymore. He’s moved a couple of blocks down.”
“What are you talking about?”
Prescott allowed one of the other cops to lurch closer and pull him down behind the police car. He said patiently, “He’s not interested in bagging a cop tonight. He’s completely focused: the only person out here he can even see is me. He broke into my office carrying a bomb he was going to use to make a booby trap. He saw that he was locked into the office, so he used the bomb to blow off the bars on the window. Then he went out there to wait, because he knew that sooner or later, I would show up.”
“Interesting story,” said the detective. “So what?”
